Does the development of the doctrine of upāya create a strategic opening that safeguards the internal diversity of Buddhism, or does this doctrine instead work toward an ideological closure that secures deliberative authority for a single vision of Buddhism? Contemporary scholars researching the Lotus Sūtra tend to disagree about the text’s intentions on this point. Tsukamoto Keishō, for example, argues that in the Lotus Sūtra, “the practice of the three vehicles was not rejected” because the text’s ecumenical spirit “allow[ed] various sets of values to exist.”[1] However, the integrative pluralism of the Lotus Sūtra has not gone unquestioned by other contemporary scholars, who point out that the text’s inclusivism masks a powerful normalizing judgment about the practice of Buddhism. Jamie Hubbard locates in the Lotus Sūtra a “pragmatic or utilitarian strategy”[2] with the hegemonic capacity for knowledge-ordering; this strategy, which Hubbard calls “exclusivist inclusivism,”[3] does not operate in spite of the accommodative aspirations of the sūtra (as represented by the doctrine of upāya) but rather because of those very aspirations, for “like other forms of inclusivism, the Buddhist argument for tolerance is virtually always articulated with the underlying purpose of legitimizing one’s own position as the authoritative position from which differences are unified and reconciled.”[4]
Hubbard is correct to point out the way the interface of power and knowledge is crystalized in text of the Lotus Sūtra, though it is my feeling that he overlooks the potential for new readings of the text to emerge in different social contexts. Therefore, in the following paragraphs I turn to engage the reception of the Lotus Sūtra in premodern China. My interest is primarily in locating the intellectual and social trends that together allowed this text to achieve lasting power and authority—something the text never achieved in its original context in India—and the way this new context opened the Lotus Sūtra to new readings and uses that Hubbard’s analysis does not anticipate.
On the early development of East Asian Buddhism, it is important to note that the Lotus Sūtra was not the first or one of only a few Buddhist scriptures available to Chinese practitioners of Buddhism. On the contrary, Stephen F. Teiser and Jacqueline I. Stone remark that the plethora of texts being introduced to China created an alarming interpretational issue: “As translation and study proceeded, it became obvious that not only the teachings but even the goals set forth in various Buddhist scriptures were sometimes at variance, or even contradictory. Yet for Chinese Buddhist exegetes of premodern times, all sūtras represented the Buddha’s preaching.”[5] The inconsistency of the texts, coupled with the fact that they were so often attributed to the same source, necessitated the development of some taxonomical scheme that would allow its readers to make sense of the frustrating multiplicity of Buddhist texts without being wholly knowledgeable of the extent of polemical discourse in Indian Buddhism.
This led to the formation of the discursive practice panjiao. According to Liu Ming-Wood, panjiao constitutes an epistemological discipline that is “concerned with distinguishing and integrating various systems of Buddhist ideas, various forms of Buddhist religious cultivation and various strata of Buddhist texts, with the view of highlighting their distinctive characteristics as well as reconciling their apparent disparities.”[6] As such, though the discipline did lead to the prizing of some texts over others, one should not conceive of panjiao as concerned with constructing a doctrinal hierarchy in the Western, theological sense; rather, panjiao is a discipline that seeks to elucidate the structural relationships among an influx of Buddhist scriptures that seemed to have no self-organizing pattern.
With this framework in mind, it is easy to see why the Lotus Sūtra’s doctrine of “expedient means” would have been a powerful epistemological tool for Buddhists in China. In the context of Chinese Buddhism, “expedient means” did not represent a preliminary articulation of a shift in Buddhist practice that aimed to secure deliberative authority for the nascent Mahāyāna movement but rather became the guiding hermeneutic for panjiao schemata constructed by several important Buddhist schools. Perhaps the most important school to take the Lotus Sūtra as its primary scripture is the Tiantai School, which was founded by Zhiyi. While it would be impossible in the space of this short essay to encapsulate the entire process of the sūtra’s ascendency or do justice to the many dynamic interchanges that occurred, I would like to summarize briefly Zhiyi’s usage of the text in his classificatory project to give one example of how the adoption of the Lotus Sūtra took place in Chinese intellectual history.
Zhiyi developed the insights of Huiguan (n.d.), a disciple of Kumārajiva who is recognized for establishing a panjiao that allowed sūtras to be relationally ordered according to the “two teachings and five periods.”[7] In Huiguan’s scheme, the two bodies of teaching (“sudden” and “gradual”) are divided among the “five periods” of the Buddha’s ministry, in which the Lotus Sūtra fits in the fourth period, “whose characteristic is to unite the three vehicles [which were first taught as distinct teachings] and demonstrate their convergence on the one ultimate goal of ‘Buddhahood.’”[8] In an important modification of Huiguan’s scheme, Zhiyi shifts the Lotus Sūtra to the fifth period, delivered just before the Buddha entered nirvana, which places this sūtra as the fullest, most important disclosure of the dharma.[9] Thus, the Lotus Sūtra occupies a singular position in Zhiyi’s doctrinal structure: all other sūtras are defined by their relationship and proximity to this sūtra, and, in terms of practice, all other sūtras are subordinate to it.
In conclusion, two summary observations can be made regarding the Lotus Sūtra’s role in the discipline panjiao. First, by contributing to Chinese discourse the doctrine of expedient means as the foundational element of the Buddha’s teaching, the sūtra made the process of establishing structural and chronological relationships among multiple Buddhist scriptures much easier. Second, and as a result of the first point, the Lotus Sūtra came to be prized as a particularly significant and singular text by several Buddhist schools, which must have contributed to its popularization in China and continued transmission into other East Asian countries. More broadly than this, this essay has discussed the discursive-rhetorical formation of the Lotus Sūtra and argued that the doctrine of “expedient means” functioned variously as a polemical tool in its original context of intra-Buddhist discourse and as an epistemological tool in its adoptive context in East Asia. In doing so, I hope I have elucidated the way structures of power and knowledge dominate Buddhist discursive practice and the way the interpretations of texts necessarily vary based on social and intellectual context.
Notes
[1] Source Elements of the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Integration of Religion, Thought, and Culture (Tokyo: Kosei, 2007), 264.
[2] “Buddhist-Buddhist Dialogue? The ‘Lotus Sutra’ and the Polemic of Accommodation,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 15 (1995), 119.
[3] Ibid., 129.
[4] Ibid., 120.
[5] Stephen F. Teiser and Jacqueline I. Stone, “Interpreting the Lotus Sūtra,” in Readings of the Lotus Sūtra, Stephen F. Teiser and Jacqueline I. Stone (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 33.
[6] Liu Ming-Wood, “The ‘Lotus Sūtra’ and ‘Garland Sūtra’ According to the T’ien-t’ai and Hua-yen Schools in Chinese Buddhism,” T’oung Pao 74.1 (1988), 52.
[7] Ibid., 53.
[8] Ibid., 54.
[9] Ibid., 60-61.
