Two common misconceptions about Buddhism are that its main goal is a state of final nirvana—or forever escaping the sufferings of birth, life, and death—and that its primary teaching is on emptiness and impermanence. Taking those aspects as Buddhism’s primary interest, it’s understandable why some might consider the tradition unappealing, empty of a heart and soul, or resulting in a nihilist disengagement from life through escapism or spiritual bypassing. A popular slogan that captures this misunderstanding from a nonpractitioner’s lens is, “I’m in my Zen place,” meaning that one is detached and unconcerned about a situation and its outcomes.

Yet Buddhist texts are filled with parables and verses that invite us to look deeply into our heart-mind and work to better ourselves. As the principle text of Nichiren Buddhism, the Lotus Sutra and the parables found within use structures similar to those of other philosophical and religious traditions, what Joseph Campbell termed the “monomyth,” known as the hero’s journey. From the earliest of religious texts and epic poetry to the fiction of today, stories about a hero who goes on an adventure, overcomes adversity, and returns home changed, abound. In his introduction to the revised edition of Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, author Phil Cousineau writes, “the monomyth is in effect a meta myth, a philosophical reading of the unity of mankind’s spiritual history, the story behind the story.” Taken together, the seven parables of the Lotus Sutra weave together universal themes through stories of the Buddha’s use of skillful means, which come to represent meta myths about our common, collective human experience.

Last month, we looked at the Parable of the Burning House, learning that the burning house was a metaphor for ourselves, others, and our environment and the vast range of awful suffering every living being is subject to until they take the great white oxcart, or the One Vehicle of Mahayana teaching. This month, we explore the Lotus Sutra’s second parable from Chapter Four, The Wealthy Man and His Poor Son. This is the longest parable in the Lotus Sutra, taking up almost the entire chapter. I believe the authors of the Lotus Sutra devoted an entire chapter to this story because the messages of this parable are so important for us to live a happy, peaceful life, free from suffering.

The chapter’s title, “Faith and Understanding,” gives us insight into the context of the parable. Nichiren Buddhists consider faith to be a verb, expressed in the first two characters of the Odaimoku (Sacred Title) “Namu.” We do not consider faith as a blind belief but as a complete trust and confidence in the dynamic, holistic, process-flow nature of the universe (eternal Buddha) based on our own direct experience, which arises from our daily chanting meditation practice. When you read the word “faith,” think “practice.” Every time you sit and chant, it is an act and expression of faith.

There are similarities between the parable of the Wealthy Man and His Poor Son and the biblical parable of The Prodigal Son from the New Testament. Both speak to separation, struggle, and return. However, a notable difference between the two parables is the different ways the sons return and reconcile with their fathers. In the parable from the New Testament, the son—having squandered all of his wealth—is immediately welcomed and embraced by his father. In the parable from the Lotus Sutra, the son fears his dad’s retribution, and reconciliation can happen only after the father uses his skillful means to employ the son, with successively higher positions, working for him until his true identity is revealed. As we discussed in the introduction to this series, the Lotus Sutra was first discovered in the 1st century BCE in the city of Kashgar—an important city on the Silk Road between China, India, and the Middle East, where there was a great mixing of ideas, influencing the evolution of religion in both the East and West.

The Parable of the Wealthy Man and His Poor Son dives deeply into the second noble truth: suffering has a cause. We learn that the cause of our suffering is even deeper than the surface level understanding of what suffering is caused by—craving has a cause too. The parable suggests that the suffering from craving is caused by our poor self-perception and low self-esteem, which then fuels the three poisons of greed, hate, and ignorance, resulting in unwholesome behaviors.

The Parable of the Wealthy Man and His Poor Son tells the story of a boy who runs away from home and doesn’t return for fifty years. The father recognizes the poor son, but the son doesn’t recognize his father. The father sends a messenger to bring the son to him, but the son again runs away, mistakenly thinking he is going to be accused of a crime and killed. The father then sends two more messengers, who dress poorly to hire the son to clean and care for the father’s large stables. The son agrees and goes to work cleaning the manure in the stables for over twenty years before the father gradually promotes him, finally putting him in charge of his storehouses and wealth and referring to him as “son.” On his deathbed, the father reveals that he is in fact his real son. The son then takes his rightful place.

The traditional understanding of this parable is that the Buddha uses various skillful means to gradually lead us toward awakening, as the rich man does with his son. The Buddha knows you can’t force or make anyone do anything. The wealthy man is the Buddha, while the poor son represents ordinary people who wander around in spiritual poverty, unaware of their buddhanature.

This parable, like the Burning House, frames the Buddha as a loving, compassionate parent who is always thinking about his children. The Buddha says in the closing verses of Chapter Sixteen, “I am ever thinking, ‘How can I cause living beings to embark upon the unsurpassable way and quickly accomplish embodiment as buddhas?’”

But what does this parable invite us to contemplate about ourselves? To this point, I often refer to a technique one of my teachers shared with me to help me understand the sutras and the parables—pay attention to who is talking for context. In this parable, Kashyapa, Subhuti, Maudgalyayana, and Katyayana are talking, with the Buddha and the entire assembly listening.

Kashyapa is regarded as the foremost disciple in both ascetic practices and meditative absorption. As we read in the parables, the importance of practice is a key message; as in the Parable of the Burning House, where one must “walk through the door,” or in The Parable of the Wealthy Man and His Poor Son, where one must “stop running away.” As the main orator, Kashyapa is doing most of the talking in this parable, emphasizing that practice (faith) is paramount.

Another speaker, Subhuti, is regarded as the foremost disciple in understanding and compassion. Through the lens of Subhuti, seekers are encouraged to see through the provisional veils that cloud our thinking and view ourselves more clearly.

Maudgalyayana is regarded as the foremost among the Buddha’s disciples in his use of supernatural powers, which in the context of The Parable of the Wealthy Man and His Poor Son might mean the power to change our mind state or our negative self-perceptions.

And finally, Katyayana is regarded as foremost in teaching or expanding on and explaining brief statements made by the Buddha. We are reminded that teaching is one of the best ways to internalize and learn for ourselves, and as bodhisattvas we must seek awakening for ourselves and for others.

Taken together, this parable shares with us that practice, understanding, imagination, and teaching are the foundations for us to understand, embrace, and enjoy our lives.

There is also an esoteric encoding in this arrangement: four teachers equal the four foundations of mindfulness (body, feeling, mind, and phenomena) and come in two pairs: faith and understanding (practice and study; concentration and insight; and shamatha and vipassana). Being mindful depends on both these two qualities being in balance, like the two wings of a bird, or the two wheels of a cart.

As a great champion of the Lotus Sutra comprising the highest truth of Buddhist teachings, Nichiren Daishonin found several messages encoded within the story’s basic archetype. Daishonin explained that the verse “Who left his father and ran away,” from The Parable of the Wealthy Man and His Poor Son, is filled with double meanings: “Left” meaning withdrawing from the Eternal Buddha (dharmakaya), “ran” meaning shrouding oneself in ignorance, and “away” meaning being unhealthily attached to the five desires of the provisional realms of birth and death (samsara). Running away is another way to look at the second noble truth: suffering has a cause; we suffer when we run away.

Why did the young son run away in the first place? This parable never explains why. Good parables leave specific details unsaid, inviting the reader to use their own imagination to decide why. Perhaps it’s just because children are by nature rebellious? Perhaps it is just a part of growing up and constructing a healthy, functional ego, so that one can operate in the world. Did the son run away because he was traumatized so severely he shut down? Did the son run away because he was afraid of something real or perceived? Or perhaps running away is just our mind’s natural state until it is reconciled with our innate buddhanature. 

The running manifests itself in several different images throughout the parable. We all have our own stables where we toil shoveling manure. Endlessly repeating the same cycles of reactivity, regret, and doubt. The question this parable is inviting us to contemplate is, “why do we run away?”

Our poor perception of ourselves, our low self-esteem, our awful self-stories, and the self-talk we endlessly subject ourselves to dictate our experiences, both internally and externally. We make life choices based on our self-perception. Low self-esteem is a terrible and cruel fetter to healing, transformation, and awakening. Running away from ourselves causes alienation, from ourselves and from others, with each step moving us further and further from ourselves, others, and the world around us. As Canadian author and meditation teacher Jeff Warren once said, “Life can seem like an endless game of tug-of-war. But all we must do is drop the rope.”

A koan for contemplating this truth is, “If you want to let go of the self, you must first embrace yourself.” Our feelings, emotions, and experiences—good, bad, or neutral—are genuine and a part of who we are. We won’t grow, transform, and awaken by running away from them; it is by embracing who we are that we awaken. There is a core teaching in Nichiren Buddhism called “Our Defilements are (the same as) Awakening.” This is written on every Mandala Gohonzon Nichiren Daishonin, painted as the Wisdom King Aizen Myoo, symbolizing that understanding is the most powerful guard of the dharma.

Another encouraging message layered within this parable is that the Buddha admits that he too makes mistakes. This is so important for us to understand. The Buddha isn’t perfect. He is just a human being, subject to all the same frailties and vulnerabilities as everyone else. He has regrets. He is born, grows old, gets sick, and dies. His first reaction to seeing his son after years apart is to “instantly [order] his attendants to chase after him and bring him back,” causing the poor son to cry out in alarm and fall to the ground in terror. This parable compassionately shares with us that the Buddha has regrets and makes mistakes even when applying skillful means. The Buddha has feelings and emotions that affect him and cause him to make mistakes, and yet, he is then agile and flexible enough in mind to try again, this time successfully rescuing his son. This parable compassionately reminds us that mistakes are how we learn.

The mythos of the Buddha that arose over the last 2,500 years, while beautiful and inspiring, can sometimes be a disservice, for it can cause us to neglect to see the Buddha as a human being. Instead, we see the Buddha as some transcendent being, a near godlike figure, a supernatural being able to levitate, walk on water, walk through the earth, perfect in all ways, clairvoyant, able to see the past, present, and future. These great myths can infantilize us, making it harder for us to awaken. We might compare ourselves to these myths and conclude, “Look at me! There is no way I can be like that!” In our ignorance and alienation, we mistakenly perceive that there is a gap between ourselves and the Buddha. This is due to the mistaken dualism of an “I” and an “Other.”

What The Parable of the Wealthy Man and His Poor Son offers us is an encouragement not to objectify the Buddha. If we persist in seeing Buddhahood as some ideal or perfect state, from which there is no retrogression, we simultaneously strengthen the negative self perception that we can never be like the Buddha and awaken in this lifetime. It is in fact the Buddha’s very humanness that assures us that we too can become buddhas.

Every time we choose to sit, we make a very real choice to stop running. Sometimes, the journey can feel overwhelming and hopeless. Like we’re just moving a pile of manure from one stall in the stable to another. But the truth is that every time we stop and sit, we change and transform. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Sometimes in inconspicuous ways, unseen by you, and sometimes in conspicuous ways, seen by yourself and those around you.

A final message we find in this parable is we all need structure and support. The father gave his son a safe place to live, a job that provided meaning and purpose for his life, and a community to live in. This parable reinforces the importance of sangha and community. As the Buddha told Ananda, “Good friends are the whole of the religious life.” We’re reminded that community can appear in many shapes and forms, family, work, hobbies, temples, clubs, sports, and more: community is connection.

Our faith is expressed through our practice. Our practice is our time to remind ourselves we are worthy, we have buddhanature, we are safe at home right now in this moment. Each and every day, our practice is a gift to ourselves. A positive affirmation that we can do this. When we sit with this trust and confidence, our buddhanature naturally reveals itself within us. Nikkyo Niwano, the founder of the Nichiren lay organization Rissho Kosei Kai, wrote in Buddhism for Today, “We should always tell ourselves, ‘I can become a buddha too; I am united with the Universe.’”

The Parable of the Wealthy Man and His Poor Son takes us on a journey through the entire arc of the son’s life, from being a youth and running away, to settling down and maturing into his full awakening—a jewel in the net of Indra. The son healed, got well, transformed, and became whole. He returned to the embrace of his family, who were always willing to take him back in. 

We can do it too. We can stop running.

♦

Translation from The Threefold Lotus Sutra, A Modern Translation for Contemporary Readers. Translated by Michio Shinozaki, Brook A. Ziporyn, and David C. Earhart. Published by Kosei Publishing, 2019.

The Parable of The Wealthy Man and His Poor Son, in verse:

“On this day,
We heard the Buddha’s voice teaching,
And are ecstatic with joy,
Having gained something extraordinary.
The Buddha has proclaimed
That we shravakas will become buddhas
And that we will receive what we never sought,
His clusters of peerless jewels.
We are like that child,
Immature and unknowing,
Who left his father and ran away
To a faraway land,
Wandering about in many countries
For over fifty years.
His father, filled with sorrow,
Searched for him in all directions.
Wearied with his search,
He settled in a certain city.
There he built a house,
Where he enjoyed the pleasures of the five senses.
That estate was enormously wealthy.
It had quantities of gold, silver,
Mother of pearl, agates,
Pearls, lapis lazuli,
Elephants, horses, oxen, goats,
Carts, palanquins, and carriages.
Its field hands, servants,
And other people were great in number.
His profitable commerce
Extended to other countries.
His traders and customers
Were everywhere to be found.
A thousand million people
Surrounded and honored him.
He constantly enjoyed
The favor of royals.
All ministers and prominent families
Held him in high esteem.
For all of these reasons
He had many callers.
His wealth was so abundant
That his power and influence were great.
As he grew older and weaker,
He grieved all the more over his son.
Morning and night he thought to himself,
‘The time of my death is approaching,
And since my foolish son left me
Over fifty years ago,
What shall I do
With all of these things in my storehouses?’
At that time, the poor son
Was going from city to city
And country to country
In search of food and clothing.
Sometimes he could get hold of them,
And sometimes he could not.
He was famished, weak, gaunt,
And covered with scabs and sores.
Wandering about here and there,
He happened to come to the city in which his father lived.
Taking odd jobs as he drifted around,
He at last reached his father’s house.
At that very hour the elder
Had spread a large jeweled canopy
Inside his doorway
And was sitting on a lion seat
Surrounded by attendants,
Everyone at his service.
Some were calculating
His gold, silver, and other treasures,
And some were noting and recording
His income and expenses.
The poor son, seeing his father
So gloriously exalted and dignified,
Thought, ‘He must be a king
Or someone equal to a king.’
Alarmed and fearful, he wondered,
‘Why did I come here?’
And he thought to himself,
‘If I linger here, I may be seized
And pressed into forced labor.’
As soon as he thought so,
He quickly ran away
Toward some poor hamlet
Where he could humbly inquire after work.
At that time, the elder
On the lion seat
Caught sight of his son in the distance
And in silent recognition,
Instantly ordered his attendants
To chase after him and bring him back.
The poor son cried out in alarm
And fell to the ground in terror, thinking,
‘These men have caught me.
I am going to be killed!
Why, for food and clothing,
Did I come to this place?’
The elder knew that his son,
Being foolish and of low stature,
Would not believe what he said
Or believe that he was his father,
And so he quickly devised some skillful means.
He sent some men
Who were one eyed, short, or squat,
Unimposing in appearance,
To go to the son and tell him,
‘You will be hired to work at
Clearing away dung and filth
And will be given double wages.’
Hearing this, the poor son
Rejoiced and went with them
To work at clearing away dung and filth
And cleaning the rooms of the stables.
Through a window, the elder
Always observed his son.
Seeing that he was foolish
To be content with such humble tasks,
The elder then
Put on a tattered, dirty garment,
Picked up a dung scoop,
And went to where his son was working.
Thus using skillful means to get close to his son,
He bid him to work diligently, saying,
‘Your wages will be increased,
And you will be given oil for your feet,
Your fill of food and drink
 And thick warm mats.’
Then he sharply scolded him, saying,
‘Get on with your work!’
At another time, he said gently,
‘You are like a son to me.’
In his wisdom, the elder
Gradually allowed him free access to the house,
And after twenty years had passed,
Put him in charge of the household affairs.
He showed him his gold and silver,
His crystals and pearls,
And made him aware
Of all of his transactions.
But still the son lived outside the house,
Lodging in a hovel.
Looking upon himself as poor and unworthy,
He thought, ‘These things are not mine.’
The father, seeing that his son’s mind
Had gradually broadened and matured,
Intended to leave him his fortune.
Gathering together relatives,
Royals, ministers of state,
Kshatriyas, and householders,
He announced to this great assembly,
‘This is my son,
Who left me and ran away
Fifty years ago.
Since I saw my son again,
Twenty years have passed.
Long ago in a certain city
This son was lost to me.
I went around searching for him,
Eventually ending up here.
Everything I have,
Including my buildings and servants,
I hereby bequeath to him.
He is free to use them as he pleases.’
The son thought of his former poverty
And lowly disposition,
And how he had now received from his father
Such great and rare treasures,
Along with houses and buildings,
And all of his wealth.
To attain something so unexpected
Filled him with great joy.
So is it also with the Buddha,
Who knows that we delighted in lesser things.
He never told us, ‘You will become buddhas.’
Instead he said that
We had attained the undefiled state,
Reached perfection in the lesser vehicle,
And had become his shravaka disciples.
The Buddha commanded us to
Teach that those who practice
The supreme Way
Will become buddhas.
We accepted the Buddha’s instruction,
And for the sake of transforming great bodhisattvas,
We employed examples from the past,
A variety of parables,
As well as words and terms,
To teach the unsurpassable Way.
Children of the Buddha
Heard the teaching from us,
Pondered it day and night,
Practiced it with unflagging zeal,
And then received their assurance
From the buddhas that ‘In a future lifetime,
You will become buddhas.’
Only for the sake of transforming bodhisattvas
Did we expound the truth,
That is, the teaching
All buddhas keep in their innermost treasury.
And yet for our own sake,
We never did explain its true essence.
We were just like the poor son
Who, having grown close to his father
And coming to know his possessions,
Still had no mind to make them his own.
Although we explained
The treasury of the Buddha’s teachings,
We did not aspire to it ourselves,
Being just like the son.
We considered it sufficient
To extinguish the passions inside ourselves.
Having accomplished this one matter,
We thought there was nothing more to do.
When we had heard about
The purification of buddha lands,
And the teaching and transforming of living beings,
They held no attraction for us.
Why was this?
We focused on all things
Being tranquil and empty,
Without origination or cessation,
Neither great nor small,
Undefiled and unconditioned.
Since such was our thinking,
We never conceived of joy.
Throughout the long night,
We had no cravings for or attachments to
The wisdom of the Buddha
And did not aspire to it.
Moreover, we believed that we had reached
The ultimate realization of the Dharma.
Having throughout the long night
Practiced the teaching of emptiness,
We were free from the suffering and distress
Of the threefold world
And dwelled in the final bodily state
Of the nirvana with remainder.
Having been taught and transformed by the Buddha,
Our accomplishment of the
Way was not in vain.
Therefore we supposed
We had repaid the kindness of the Buddha.
For the sake
Of the children of the Buddha,
We explained the teachings for bodhisattvas,
By which they could seek the Buddha Way,
But we ourselves never aspired
To this teaching.
Our leader and teacher left us alone
Because he had insight into our minds.
He did not start off by encouraging us
With revelations of the true benefits to be had.
The wealthy elder, Knowing his son’s inferior disposition,
Employed the power of skillful means
To gently mold and temper his son’s mind.
Then he bequeathed to him
His entire fortune.
So is it also with the Buddha
In his manifestation of rare wonders.
He knows that some people delight in lesser teachings,
And therefore employs the power of his skillful means
To temper and prepare their minds.
Then he teaches them great wisdom.
Today we have attained
Something extraordinary.
What we did not seek
Has now come to us by itself,
Just as that poor son
Obtained immeasurable treasures.
Now, World-Honored One,
We have gained the
Way and its fruit
And attained the pure eye
Thanks to the undefiled Dharma.
Throughout the long night,
We kept the Buddha’s pure precepts,
And today, for the first time,
Gained their fruit and reward.
In the midst of the teachings of the Dharma King,
We long practiced brahma deeds.
Now we have attained the undefiled,
Peerless great fruit.
We are now
True shravakas, ‘voice hearers,’
For we will cause all beings
To hear the voice of the Buddha Way.
Now we are True arhats, ‘worthy of offerings,’
For everywhere, in all worlds,
We will be worthy of receiving offerings from
Heavenly beings, humans, Maras, and Brahmas.
The World-Honored One, in his great kindness,
Shows us something so rare.
Out of heartfelt sympathy, he teaches and transforms,
And brings us such benefits.
Even over immeasurable millions of kalpas,
Who could repay such kindness?
Even if we were to offer our hands and feet,
Pay homage with heads bowed,
And make all kinds of offerings,
We still could not repay it.
We would bear him on our heads
Or carry him on our shoulders,
Revering him with all our hearts
Throughout kalpas numerous as the sands of the Ganges.
We would offer him the finest delicacies,
Countless numbers of jeweled garments,
All kinds of beddings,
And every sort of liquid medicine.
We would use ox-head sandalwood
And all kinds of rare jewels
To erect stupas and monuments,
And carpet their grounds with jeweled garments.
Yet even if, with all such things as these,
We were to pay him homage
Throughout kalpas innumerable as the sands of the Ganges,
We still could not repay it.
The buddhas possess so very rare,
Infinite and boundless,
Inconceivably Great transcendent powers.
Being undefiled and unconditioned,
These kings of the Dharma
Are able to be patient
With those of inferior abilities,
And appropriately teach ordinary people
Who have many attachments.
The buddhas enjoy
Complete freedom in the Dharma.
They know the various desires, pleasures,
Aspirations, and strengths
Of all living beings
And, according to their capacities,
Use innumerable parables
To teach them the Dharma.
Focusing on the roots of 
living beings planted in past lifetimes, 
They discern which have matured
And which have not.
After gaining clear understanding
Through these various calculations and considerations,
They take the One Vehicle Way and,
Whenever appropriate,
Teach it as three.”

The post Reflecting on Faith and Understanding in the Wealthy Man and His Poor Son appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The parables of the Lotus Sutra form the bedrock of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and practice. Yet followers read these parables not for what the Buddha says about the dharma but for what the dharma says about us.

Reading the Parable of the Burning House takes time, patience, and resolve because for many, its contents can seem disturbing. Drs. Donald Lopez and Jacqueline Stone write in their book, Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side, that the Burning House is “…the most disquieting…” parable of the entire Sutra. 

And yet its themes remain as relevant today as they did in the time of the Buddha. With the ubiquity of electronic devices and social media, mass hysteria and psychosis feel to be at an all-time high. Reading the parable in a modern context, it is easy to see parallels between the Buddha’s time and our own. For me, a line from a song by the popular late ‘90s band Harvey Danger comes to mind: “I’m not sick, but I’m not well.”

The Burning House parable offers an awe-inspiring tale of personal transformation and healing, freedom from fear, relief from suffering, and confidence that awakening can happen when we open our heart-mind. Another sentiment comes to mind, this time a partial line from a song by Cheap Trick: it’ll happen “if you let it.”

The Burning House is a retelling of the four noble truths. There is suffering in life, there is a cause, there is an end, and yet there is a way out if we walk through the door ourselves. At the heart of this parable is the Buddha telling us, just as he does in the third noble truth, that there is an end to suffering. All we must do is “walk through the door.” It begins with setting our intention that we want to change and experience a better life.

The Parable of the Burning House is being told by Shakyamuni Buddha to Shariputra in “A Parable,” Chapter Three of the Lotus Sutra. In this parable, a rich man’s decaying and demon–filled mansion catches on fire. His many children are playing inside with their favorite toys, so to get them to come out of the burning house, the rich man promises them even better treasures: goat carts, deer carts, and oxcarts. When they come out running and are free of danger, they are each given something even better: a great white oxcart.

The rich father represents the Buddha, and the children are the people of the world. The three kinds of carts represent the three vehicles the Buddha taught as skillful means:

1. Voice-hearer—arhat (comprehending the four noble truths)
2. Privately awakened one—pratyekabuddha (understanding the twelvefold chain of dependent origination)
3. Bodhisattva (the practice of the six perfections)

The great white oxcart represents the One Vehicle. The One Vehicle is the complete and whole Mahayana teaching, and no one is excluded, not even arhats or privately awakened ones, and awakening is swift, not requiring innumerable eons of practice in order for anyone to attain Buddhahood.

Chapter Three offers these verses:

There is no safety in the threefold world.

It is just like the burning house

Full of all kinds of sufferings, 

And is truly to be feared.

Ever present are the distresses

Of birth, aging, illness, and death.

These are fires

That burn unceasingly.

The conventional interpretation of the Burning House is that it’s a story of how the Buddha uses skillful means to teach his disciples: “by guiding you with my skillful means, I have caused you to be born into my dharma,” and “there are no other vehicles outside of the Buddha’s skillful means.” The Buddha’s skillful means, or One Vehicle, is the ultimate practice for liberation, and as thus, it becomes apparent that the three vehicles or paths of practice of voice-hearer, privately awakened ones, and bodhisattvas are not the final way but that the One Vehicle subsumes and illuminates them all. However, the One Vehicle does not invalidate them. Instead, it recontextualizes them as different expressions of that same One Vehicle. Each has value and merit when viewed from the whole.

This conventional interpretation is certainly true but doesn’t really tell us much, as every parable is describing the Buddha’s various uses of skillful means. The Lotus Sutra has a whole chapter on it, Chapter Two, “Skillful Means.”

So we need to look deeper to begin to understand this incredible parable and what it offers us. The Burning House is a metaphor for our lives and the world we live in. The Burning House is both a look inside our minds and the phenomena of the world we live in.

The Buddha is telling Shariputra that there is a deeper reality to experience, that the goal is not escaping this life: “I previously said that you had attained extinguishment. But that was only the end of birth and death and not the real extinguishment.”

Everyone is in fact already a bodhisattva in the process of becoming a buddha. The Lotus Sutra is considered the teaching of equality because it makes no distinctions between practitioners. There aren’t different classes of practitioners: monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen; or voice-hearers, privately awakened ones, and bodhisattvas. 

We learn early in the parable that the Buddha is in the burning house with us. The Buddha, buddhanature, and Buddhahood are always present in the burning house, or our lives and environment. Pre–Lotus Sutra teachings inform us that all phenomena arise from the mind. Yet the Lotus Sutra is teaching us that mind and phenomena are “two but not two.” 

The parables present us with a range of ghastly images. These images are all metaphors for the ten worlds, or realms: hell, hunger, animality, demons, humans, gods, voice-hearers, privately awakened ones, bodhisattvas, and buddhas. These are all states of being, states of mind, various thoughts and emotions. As awful as these images sound when reading through the texts, simply consider how our negative self-talk and self-esteem affects our life’s conditions and how we interact with others. Doesn’t it feel like you are eating yourself alive when you have endless regrets, recrimination, and doubt? We will explore this idea of self-esteem in detail in the next installment on the Parable of the Wealthy Man and Poor Son, from Chapter Four, “Faith and Understanding.”

Because the Buddha is in the burning house with us, along with all ten realms, we learn that buddhanature is more than a potential or something one gains after eons of practice. We are shown that all phenomena of mind and body, all various thoughts and emotions, all forms of self and environment, all beings sentient and insentient, and all states of dependent origination are integrated in a single thought moment. The Burning House describes the mutually inclusive relationship of the ultimate truth and the phenomenological truth. Every possibility and probability of life is included in the Burning House.

The Buddha could save us, but he doesn’t. He agonizes over this. He despairs. He isn’t sure what to do. This is important. We might be inclined to gloss over this. The Buddha is opening himself up, being incredibly vulnerable. He is sharing his inner thoughts and emotions with us, letting us know these thoughts and emotions are normal, that everyone has them, even the Buddha; this reminds us that the Buddha isn’t a god, he is still human, subject to all the same ups and downs as we are. This shows great compassion.

Anyone who is a parent knows how hard it is to let their children fail when they are learning to do things on their own. The Buddha knows that if he intervened directly and saved his children, he would create a culture of dependency and control. He models for us that a teacher and parent’s role is to point the way, open the door, and offer a supportive hand when times get tough—to facilitate someone’s own personal direct experience.

The Burning House offers that we are all in the house together. We are not alone. The fear of separation begins with our first breath and cutting the umbilical cord. Our fear of being alone causes trauma, anxiety, and fear, leading to competition, discrimination, ignorance, jealousy, aggression, and war—just like the demons and animals squabbling and eating each other in the house.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” –Blaise Pascal’s Pensées

In his life’s posthumous magnum opus, the Pensées, French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal offers a wonderful insight into our aversion to self-awareness and responsibility. Bizarrely, we will endlessly distract ourselves with an innumerable manner of insignificant things and entertainment rather than face our primal fear from birth of being alone and disconnected. Psychologists have put this assertion to the test a few times. In one experiment, roughly half of a group disliked sitting quietly so much that they chose to receive an electric shock to get out of the room and exit the experiment early. Pain was preferable to insight! Our fear eats us alive, causing us to avoid that which can actually heal us. This idea about fear actually plays a central role in Chapter 16 of the Lotus Sutra, the Parable of the Good Doctor, which this series will be covering in the future. We’re so sick, we prefer the burning house. We’re so afraid and averse to ourselves that we’d rather experience the external pain of electrocution than the internal pain of our own self-reflection.

Please don’t view this parable as suggesting some form of spiritual bypassing, that we can just meditate our way out of ignorance, hatred, and greed. It also isn’t suggesting a line of magical thinking—“just sit” or “just chant.” Growing up, maturing, and especially coming into awakening takes hard work. Yet the parable is saying there is an end to suffering, and all it involves is walking through the door but that you must do the work for yourself. The fourth noble truth.

In Nichiren Buddhism, there is a concept called Bonno Soku Bodai, “Our Defilements are Awakening.” This means that only by deeply understanding and fully embracing our defilements can we awaken and become whole. Not by rejecting the various ten realms but by seeing them, recognizing them, accepting them, reflecting on them, observing how and when they originate.

Rarely can this be done on one’s own through simple self-reflection and meditation. This is why the Buddha said that the whole of a practitioner’s life must also include admirable friends. We need good friends, good teachers, even good therapists.

The parable leaves us with hope and a promise. Every time we sit on the cushion to meditate, we are stepping through the doorway of the burning house. As all great meditation teachers offer, “simply begin again.” Awakening is possible, freedom from suffering is possible. All you have to do is let it. It happens in an instant, in this very moment, in this very life, even inside the burning house.

♦

Translation from The Threefold Lotus Sutra: A Modern Translation for Contemporary Readers. Translated by Michio Shinozaki, Brook A. Ziporyn and David C. Earhart. Published by Kosei Publishing, 2019

The Parable of the Burning House, in verse, the oldest section of the Lotus Sutra:

“Suppose there was an elder 
Who had a large house.
This house was very old,
Decayed and dilapidated.
The lofty halls were on the verge of collapse,
The pillars were rotting at their bases,
The beams were leaning and the rafters toppling,
And the foundation and steps were caving in.
The walls were ruined and cracked,
With plaster crumbling away.
The eaves were slanting and slipping,
And the thatched roof was in disarray.
The fences were broken and twisted,
And garbage and filth lay in piles everywhere.
Some five hundred people
Were living inside it.
Kites, owls, hawks, eagles,
Crows, magpies, pigeons, doves,
Lizards, snakes, vipers, scorpions,
Centipedes, millipedes,
Geckos, galley worms,
Weasels, raccoon dogs, rats, and mice,
And every other sort of vermin
Scurried about in every direction.
There were places stinking with excrement and urine,
Overflowing with filth,
Upon which dung beetles and worms
Swarmed together.
Foxes, wolves, and jackals
Bit and trampled each other,
Ripping apart the bodies of the dead,
Scattering bone and tissue.
Following them came packs of dogs
That fought with each other, snatching, and grabbing.
Gaunt with hunger, they skulked about,
Roving in search of food,
Fighting and scuffling,
Snarling and growling.
Such were the terrifying and degraded conditions
Into which that house had fallen.
All around and everywhere
Were goblins and ogres,
Yakshas and evil demons,
Who devoured human flesh
And all sorts of poisonous insects.
Vicious birds and beasts
Hatched and suckled their broods,
Each hiding and protecting its own.
Yakshas competed with each other
In seizing and devouring them.
When they had eaten their fill,
Their evil minds became inflamed,
And the sound of their combat
Was horrific in the extreme.
Kumbhanda demons,
Crouching on clumps of dirt,
Sometimes sprang up
A foot or two off the ground,
Floating about to and fro
And giving full rein to their sport.
They seized dogs by two legs,
Beating them into silence,
Pinning down their necks with their feet,
And torturing them for their own amusement.
Also there were demons,
Their bodies quite tall,
Naked and gaunt,
Always dwelling there,
Who emitted loud, dreadful sounds,
Bellowing for food.
Moreover, there were demons
With throats as narrow as needles,
And yet still other demons
With heads like the head of an ox.
Some ate human flesh,
Others devoured dogs.
Their hair was unkempt and tangled,
They were cruel, ferocious, and fiendish.
Driven by hunger and thirst,
They raced about crying and screaming.
Yakshas and hungry spirits,
Vicious birds and beasts,
Hungrily charged in all directions,
Peering through the windows.
Such were its perils,
Immeasurably terrifying.
This old, dilapidated house
Belonged to a man
Who had stepped out
But a short while ago,
When the house
Suddenly caught fire
On all four sides at once.
As the flames reached full blaze,
Ridgepoles, rafters, beams, and pillars
Trembled, split, snapped, and broke apart,
Falling with explosive sounds.
Walls and partitions crumbled.
Many spirit demons
Bellowed and cried loudly.
Hawks, eagles, and other birds of prey,
Kumbhanda and other demons,
Circled about in panic and fear,
Powerless to escape.
Ferocious beasts and poisonous insects
Took cover in their dens and holes.
Pishachaka demons,
Also dwelling therein,
Were so meager in blessings and virtues
That when hemmed in by the flames,
They savagely turned upon one another,
Devouring each other’s flesh and blood.
The larger of the ferocious beasts
Vied to devour the corpses
Of the jackals and their kind
That had succumbed earlier.
Acrid smoke billowed forth,
Filling the house on every side.
The centipedes and millipedes
And all the various venomous snakes,
Scorched by the heat,
Fought to flee from their holes.
Kumbhanda demons
Scooped them up and ate them.
Hungry spirits,
Their heads ablaze,
Famished, parched, and tormented by heat,
Rushed about in confusion and anguish.
Such was the state of that house,
Horrific in the extreme.
Beset by poisons, dangers, and conflagrations,
Its perils were many, not just one.
At that very time,
the master of the house
Was standing outside the doorway
And heard someone say,
‘A little while ago, all of your children
Were playing together
And went inside this house.
In their youthful ignorance,
They are absorbed in their games.’
Alarmed to hear this, the elder
Rushed into the burning house,
Intent on saving them
From being burned.
He told his children
Of its many dangers, saying,
‘There are evil demons and poisonous insects,
And the fire is spreading.
Suffering upon suffering
Endlessly comes, one after another.
Venomous snakes, lizards, and vipers,
All kinds of yakshas
And Kumbhanda demons, jackals, foxes, and dogs,
Hawks, eagles, kites, and owls,
And all sorts of centipedes,
Crazed by hunger and thirst,
Are truly to be feared.
The sufferings here are already hard to deal with,
How much more so in the midst of this raging fire.’
Because the children understood nothing of these dangers,
Even though they heard their father’s admonition,
They did not stop playing,
Being so absorbed in their amusements.
Thereupon the elder
Had this thought:
‘My children, being like this,
Increase my distress and dismay.
In this house, at present,
There is not a single thing to enjoy,
Yet all of my children,
Engrossed in their play,
Ignore my instructions
And will be injured by the fire.’
He therefore considered
Devising some skillful means
And said to his children,
‘I have many kinds
Of rare toys for you.
There are fine carts, splendidly jeweled,
Including goat carts, deer carts,
And great oxcarts,
Right now, outside the door.
All of you, come out,
For I have made these carts
Especially for you.
Take whichever you like
And play with it as you please.’
As soon as the children heard him tell
Of such carts as these,
They raced one another
To scramble outside,
Quickly reaching the open ground,
Away from the sufferings and dangers.
The elder, seeing that his children
Had escaped from the burning house
And were settled in the square,
Sat upon his lion seat
And congratulated himself, saying,
‘Now I am relieved and rejoice.
How difficult it is
To raise children such as these.
Ignorant, immature, and foolish,
They went inside this dangerous house
Crawling with poisonous worms
And ferocious goblins.
A huge fire with fierce flames
Broke out on all four sides at once,
But these children
Were engrossed in their play.
Now I have rescued them
And caused them to avoid harm.
My friends, this is why I am now relieved and rejoicing.’
Then the children, 
Knowing he was comfortably seated, 
All came before their father 
And said to him, 
‘Please give us 
The three kinds of jeweled carts 
You promised us by saying, 
“If you children come out,
 I will give you three kinds of carts 
And you can choose whichever you like.” 
Now is the time 
To give them to us, please.’
The elder is very wealthy 
And has storehouses 
Full of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, 
Mother of pearl, and agates. 
He has made great carts 
With all kinds of precious things. 
They were magnificently adorned and splendidly decorated, 
With railings running around them, 
Hung with bells on every side, 
Strung with golden cords, 
And with nets of pearls 
Stretched across the top. 
Strings of golden flowers 
Were hanging down around them. 
Colorful tapestries and various decorations 
Surrounded and enwrapped them. 
Atop their cushions, 
Made of soft silk and gauze, 
Were spread 
Wondrously exquisite felts 
Worth thousands of millions, 
Immaculate and brilliantly white. 
There were great white oxen, 
Stout, robust, and strong, 
Of finest form and physique,
To pull the jeweled carts,
And numerous attendants
To accompany and guard them.
These splendid carts
Were given to all the children equally.
Then the children,
Ecstatic with joy,
Riding in these jeweled carts,
Roamed in every direction,
Playing joyfully
Just as they wished, without hindrance.”

The post Taking a Modern Look at the Burning House appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Introduction

This web series on the Lotus Sutra’s seven parables invites the reader to contemplate these parables through their own inter-personal experience, rather than stating another dogmatic, literal truth.

Religious texts are often viewed as moldy old tomes disconnected from current times and considered meaningless and irrelevant. The jewels of their insights are lost in their obscure archaic language from ancient cultures, vastly different from what we’re used to in today’s 21st century. When they are presented as the literal truth and exact words of their prophet, founder, or god-head, they are even less relevant and accessible. It’s easy to understand why many turn away from these great works of written art, considering them meaningless and irrelevant.

Truly great religious and philosophical works use mythopoetic storytelling and parables to explore complex feelings, emotions, thoughts, and ideas that defy intellectual understanding. This form of storytelling invites the reader to pursue their own experience and relationship with these ideas as a means of self-understanding and awakening.

This web series will share these parables as a portal into one’s own personal and direct experience with the sublime, wondrous, and mysterious nature of the universe. It will invite readers to ask themselves, “What does this work say to me? How does it inspire me to live my life in a wholesome, wise, compassionate manner? How can I find meaning and purpose in my life?”

The Buddha said many times that nirvana can’t be comprehended or grasped, and that our sixth sense organ, the discriminating consciousness, can be a fetter to awakening. The Buddha taught the Four Reliances in both the Vimalakirti Sutra and the Mahaparinirvana Sutra: 

“Rely on the Dharma, not upon the person; 
Rely on the meaning, not upon the words; 
Rely on wisdom, not upon discriminative consciousness; 
Rely on the definitive meaning, not upon the provisional meaning.” 

This web series shares the Lotus Sutra’s parables using this time-honored interpersonal, introspective, and contemplative approach, inviting the reader to open their heart/mind to a deeper personal experience through direct experience of the sublime by reading the parable—a mythopoetic story—and then sitting or chanting with it in calm abiding insight, diving deep into the metaphor, making it one’s own, and then rising back to the provisional with a whole new perspective.

Reading is one of the Five Practices the Buddha taught in the Lotus Sutra:

embrace,
read,
recite,
share,
copy.

Reading these parables is like viewing a multifaceted jewel. What you see depends on how you are holding the jewel, where you are looking into it, what you are feeling at that moment, and what the lighting is when looking. A near infinite number of views is possible, and they are constantly changing. Each contemplative meditative journey can and will be different, offering insights that change and vary according to one’s mental state and situation. This interpersonal exploration is a constantly unfolding and enlightening process flow of experience. 

Instead of being another moldy old tome, these parables can be a friend and companion—a continual source of insight and inspiration, like a compass needle that always points north, regardless of the mountains, plains, and rivers on a map.

Background of the Lotus Sutra

The Lotus Sutra is one of the world’s great religious texts. It is a Mahayana sutra first discovered in the 1st Century BCE in the city of Kashgar, located within the Kushan Empire, a region in Central Asia, now China. Kashgar is one of the westernmost cities of China, located near China’s border with Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Kashgar was a strategically important city on the Silk Road between China, the Middle East, and Europe for over 2,000 years. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. There is solid evidence that the Lotus Sutra, like all Mahayana sutras, was deeply influenced by the convergence of ideas and philosophies from the mixing of cultures and ideas, East and West.

The Lotus Sutra’s original Sanskrit name is Saddharma Pundarika Sutra. Chinese (妙法蓮華經): Miàofǎ Liánhuá jīng, Japanese: Myoho Renge Kyo, and English: Sutra of the Lotus Flower of the Wondrous Dharma. 

The most common version today is based on Kumarajiva’s Chinese translation from the Sanskrit, completed in 406 CE. The Lotus Sutra was compiled in three sections: Chapters 2–9 during the ~1st Century BCE; Chapters 1, 10–22 (except for 12) ~100 CE; and Chapters 12, 23–28 150 CE. That’s a span of 250 years!

Some question the legitimacy and progeny of the Lotus Sutra as writings of others rather than Shakyamuni Buddha. Others claim it is the ultimate words of the Buddha. This series will not address this ancient debate. Frankly, we must be honest with ourselves that we will never know. I personally believe that engaging in such religious polemics is a fetter and barrier to awakening and to be avoided. I believe that everything the Buddha taught was skillful means intended to invite the practitioner to have a direct experience with reality themselves.

The beauty of Buddhism is that because the Buddha was able to awaken to the true nature of reality and become “enlightened,” then we too can awaken and share the same experience. Logically then, because Buddhism works for all people equally, then everyone’s awakened experience is an authentic, true, and real expression and manifestation of the true nature of reality. It then doesn’t matter who or when someone actually spoke these words or wrote them down. Whether or not the Buddha spoke the exact words in the Pali Canon or Mahayana sutras is irrelevant. Buddhism is a living, breathing, continually evolving flow of the dharma, all the suttas, sutras, and commentaries are crowd-sourced from the collective wisdom of generations of men and women who dove deep into meditation and brought back their experiences and then wrote them down so others can share in the experience. 

The Lotus Sutra’s two great contributions to the collective works of Buddhism are, 1) Prediction of Buddhahood for practitioners of the Two Vehicles (arhats and pratyekabuddhas), evil people, non-believers, women and animals, and 2) the life of a buddha has no beginning and no ending. 

The Lotus Sutra is so encouraging because it states emphatically that everyone will become a buddha without exception, and the life of a buddha is timeless and boundless, manifesting continuously outside of space time. This is a profoundly more positive, inclusive, and holistic way of expressing emptiness.

This web series will present the Lotus Sutra’s seven famous (and two not-so-famous) parables in a modern context. It will explore their meaning from an inter-personal, introspective, and contemplative point of view, rather than the traditional doctrinal dogmatic one. For instance, the parable of the wealthy father and poor son shares two themes, 1) one’s self-perception and image create limitations and barriers to living a wholesome meaningful life of purpose, and 2) the very compassionate and tender way it shows us that no one is perfect, that even the Buddha was a human being and made mistakes when he taught.

The nine parables this web series will present are:

1. Burning House – Chapter Three
2. Wealthy Father and Poor Son – Chapter Four
3. Medicinal Herbs (Rain of the Dharma) – Chapter Five
4. Magic City – Chapter Seven
5. Jewel in the Robe – Chapter Eight
6. Precious Pearl in the Topknot – Chapter Fourteen
7. Physician – Chapter Sixteen
8. Potter – Chapter Five
9. Digging a well – Chapter Ten Preacher of the Dharma

See you next month when we dive into the Burning House!

The post The Parables of the Lotus Sutra: An Introspective Contemplative Approach appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

There is an old expression that says “you can’t get there from here,” meaning you can’t get somewhere if you don’t know where you’re starting from. You need to know two things to go anywhere: where you are now and where you are going.

Nichiren taught that our defilements lead to awakening. This idea was so central to his ministry that it frames the daimoku, the title of the Lotus Sutra, Namu Myohorengekyo—on every mandala he ever inscribed.

The defilements (Sanskrit: kleshas) are mental states that disturb the mind and give rise to unwholesome actions. They arise from the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion, and are a natural part of life. Klesha can also be translated as “affliction.”

Some think Buddhism’s goal is to eliminate defilements because they function to obscure our buddhanature, but the Lotus Sutra, which is the basis for Nichiren Buddhism, states that there is no difference between our defilements and awakening. Though they seem to be opposites, they are simply different sides of the way things are. Awakening is not the eradication of defilements but a state in which we are fully aware of all aspects of our lives, good and bad. The Lotus Sutra refutes the doctrine that the purpose of our practice is to transcend life, to escape samsara, to “reach” nirvana, thereby confirming Buddhism as a positive, life-affirming religion; one whose objective is liberation through engagement.

As Robert Frost wrote, “the best way out is always through”—in other words, we learn from dealing with the difficult things. Defilements then become the motivation to seek awakening, the fuel to spur us to practice with confidence and trust in the universal process-flow of buddhanature. Rather than seeking to get rid of our defilements, all our characteristics and qualities become the focus of our meditation practice. We accept ourselves fully as we are, good points and bad points included, without rejecting anything in order to go someplace other than where we are right now.

Awakening is not the eradication of defilements but a state in which we are fully aware of all aspects of our lives, good and bad.

The Lotus Sutra states that “even without extinguishing their defilements or denying their desires [people] can purify all their senses and eradicate all of their misdeeds.” It also teaches us that awakening does not lie in subjugating delusions one by one in order to attain enlightenment. Chapter 16 of the Lotus Sutra tells us that “ordinary mortals, just as they are, are buddhas. . . . We burn the firewood of defilements and behold the fire of enlightened wisdom before our eyes.”

Our destination is our vow to do good, to do no harm, and to seek awakening for ourselves and others. Our starting point is accepting and embracing all of our qualities, good, bad, and neutral. We won’t arrive at our destination by denying or suppressing anything—that never works. Things always pop up again and again, usually in the most unpleasant ways and at the most unfortunate times.

The Lotus Sutra says, “Good people should enter the abode of the Tathagata.”  This abode is the four brahmaviharas: lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. We hold everything in and around us, even the most embarrassing and terrible things about ourselves, even our defilements, with the same lovingkindness and compassion that a parent would have for their crying child.

We begin our journey of awakening by observing all our characteristics, patterns, and behaviors just as they are. We accept that we are not perfect and, frankly, may never be perfect. But we try our best. And when we fail, we notice it, accept it with a smile, and without self-criticism simply begin again, and again, and again. We can get there from here.

The post You Can Get There From Here appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Nichiren Buddhism is one of the most widely practiced traditions in Japan, yet you’d be hard-pressed to find a concise overview of the school—its history, its core beliefs, and its many offshoots. While there are plenty of books and articles about its founder, Nichiren (1222–1282), and Soka Gakkai, one of its more visible forms in the West, there is little covering the long history of this very influential Buddhist tradition. When I reached out to experts in Buddhist studies for answers, the response was always the same: “I don’t know about that. It’s too big a topic! Ask Jackie Stone.”

Princeton Emerita Professor Jacqueline Stone is a leading scholar on Nichiren Buddhism. She wasn’t surprised that I had come up all but empty-handed in my search, noting that despite its importance in Japan and in North America, Nichiren has been given relatively scant attention by Western academics. That has always struck her as a major gap in Buddhist studies.

Exploring Buddhism’s long history can enrich and at times even transform how one relates to one’s own practice. Understanding better how a particular religious tradition has developed over time tells us much, not only about that one tradition but also about tradition itself. As Professor Stone says below: “Religious practitioners continually negotiate between faithfulness to their received tradition, the perceived demands of their own historical moment, and their personal concerns. Some aspects of the tradition are retained as normative; others are reinterpreted, downplayed, or set aside and sometimes new, diverse elements are incorporated. Often this process goes on unconsciously, but it’s valuable and important for anyone involved in religion, whether as a practitioner or a scholar, to be aware of this.”

—Frederick M. Ranallo-Higgins, Associate Editor

Let’s start from the beginning. Can you describe Nichiren and his teachings? What were some of the trends that may have influenced him? I like your question because it recognizes that Nichiren was grounded in trends of his own time. Nichiren was a serious Buddhist thinker. He was trained in the Tendai tradition and versed in classical Tendai teachings, a school of Buddhism introduced from China by Saicho in the early 9th century. In the Tendai school, the Lotus Sutra represents the complete, integrated truth of the Buddha’s teaching, while all other teachings are regarded as provisional. Tendai developed its own stream of Esoteric Buddhism, and Nichiren’s use of the daimoku, the title of the Lotus Sutra, Namu Myohorengekyo, and his mandala, the gohonzon, are all rooted in esoteric practices. Nichiren drew on a long tradition that saw the entirety of the Lotus Sutra—and indeed, the entirety of Buddhism—as encompassed within its title. He did not invent the practice of chanting the daimoku. Although not widespread, it is attested before his time. However, he was the one who gave it a significant doctrinal foundation. For Nichiren, the daimoku was the crystallization of the eternal Shakyamuni Buddha’s merits and wisdom, and he taught that in chanting it, one manifests the buddha realm in one’s present reality.

“For Nichiren, the daimoku was the crystallization of the eternal Shakyamuni Buddha’s merits and wisdom.”

He also draws on the medieval Japanese Tendai thought of his time. These Tendai exegetes were also steeped in esoteric teachings but had begun to reassert the supremacy of the Lotus Sutra. Nichiren embraced that. His claim that Buddhahood is to be realized in this world, in this body, by ordinary people, owes in part to medieval Tendai.

Nichiren’s thought was also shaped by his opposition to the exclusive nembutsu movement of the 12th-century Pure Land teacher Honen. Honen taught that the sole path to salvation is to abandon all other practices and chant the name of the Buddha Amida, the nembutsu, relying on Amida’s promise of rebirth in his Pure Land. Nichiren often debated Honen’s followers in Kamakura. I suspect those early encounters with Pure Land followers helped shape his exclusive devotion to the Lotus Sutra. Like his Pure Land opponents, Nichiren advocated the chanting of a single phrase, grounded in faith and accessible to all, but his underlying doctrinal basis differs radically.

Is it accurate to characterize Nichiren as a “reformer,” as many do? The depiction of Nichiren and other Kamakura-period Buddhist leaders as “reformers” is a product of the Meiji period (1868–1912) and later. In the early 20th century, some scholars likened those new Buddhist movements to the Protestant Reformation. This owes a great deal to the secularizing efforts of the modern Japanese state and to the importation of a Western definition of “religion” as a matter of private personal experience. Scholars have now largely abandoned the comparison, but the “reformer” label persists.

Nichiren himself does not use the language of reform. Later in life, he wrote, “I am neither the founder of a school nor a latter-day follower of any existing school.” In his mature self-understanding, he saw himself as the teacher for the final dharma age, or mappo, the age when the Buddha’s teachings become obscured and enlightenment is difficult to achieve. I believe he envisioned himself as the bearer of a Buddhism that would supersede existing forms.

We can learn about Nichiren’s self-understanding in his identification with two figures from the Lotus Sutra. One is Bodhisattva Superior Conduct, leader of a vast throng of bodhisattvas nobler in appearance than the Buddha himself. In the sutra, Superior Conduct receives Shakyamuni Buddha’s mandate to propagate the sutra in an evil future age after his nirvana. Nichiren refers to himself as a forerunner of Bodhisattva Superior Conduct, but his later dharma heirs explicitly identify him with this bodhisattva. Some lineages even regard Nichiren as a buddha—in fact, as the original buddha—but that was not something Nichiren himself ever claimed.

Nichiren also likened himself to the humbler figure of Bodhisattva Never Despising, whose sole practice was to bow to everyone he met as a future buddha. According to the Lotus Sutra, Never Despising was met with hatred and contempt, but because he persisted in his efforts, he eradicated the karma of his past deeds and eventually became the Buddha Shakyamuni. Nichiren wrote that he was an ordinary person who had not eradicated even the slightest bit of delusion, but like Never Despising, he had been invested with a sacred responsibility by his commitment to the Lotus Sutra.

The opinions of people in the town of Kamakura about Nichiren were probably divided. He was twice arrested and exiled for openly criticizing the government and other Buddhist leaders through his style of assertive proselytizing. Some, however, found his message compelling. We should remember that Nichiren was not famous in his own lifetime. At a rough estimate, he had only some few hundred followers. Aristocrats in Kyoto, the capital, never heard of Nichiren while he was alive. It was after his death that his followers spread his teaching throughout the country.

The death of a founder often presents major challenges. Did Nichiren’s followers face any difficulties after his death? Yes, there was a schism not too many years after Nichiren’s death. Nichiren had appointed six major disciples to lead his following after his death. Nichiren specified that no rank order should exist among them. Within less than a decade after his death, a break occurred between one disciple, Byakuren Ajari Nikko, and the others. The story that has come down to us is one of friction between Nikko, a strict purist, and others who had a more accommodating attitude toward matters of orthopraxy.

Nikko’s successors became known as the Fuji school, which remained a minor lineage until the 20th century. Its best-known representative today is Nichiren Shoshu—that branch of Nichiren Buddhism with which Soka Gakkai was formerly affiliated. Those who’ve encountered Nichiren Buddhism outside Japan are most likely to have done so through some branch of Nikko’s lineages.

I looked for information on Nichiren Buddhism from the 14th through 19th century but found very little. What were some of the key developments during that time? This is a huge question, and you’re right; this period has been understudied, although there is a growing body of excellent research in Japanese that is shedding new light on this period.

Nichiren’s teaching spread throughout the country and became a fully fledged school, known as the Hokkeshu or the Lotus sect, and branched into multiple lineages and temple networks. While it spread among all social classes, it gained support especially from the rising merchant class in the cities of Kyoto and Sakai, which were contributing to a new and thriving urban culture. Many of the leading artists and craftsmen of the late medieval and early modern times were Hokkeshu devotees.

At its height, the Hokkeshu had at least 21 temples in the southern part of Kyoto, more than there are today. That area was called the Daimoku District, because the chanting of the daimoku could be heard everywhere. During periods of civil warfare, temples became virtual fortresses, and the shared faith of the followers enabled their solidarity. During a time of conflict in the 1530s, the Hokkeshu virtually governed Kyoto for four years.

In the late 16th century, powerful warlords seeking to unify the country began to break the independent power of Buddhist institutions. That process was completed under the new Tokugawa shogunate during the 17th century. Buddhist temples were subsumed within the state bureaucracy, and families had to register with a Buddhist temple. Records of temple families were used for the census and other forms of population oversight.

During the early modern period (1603–1868), it was no longer possible to engage in Nichiren’s practice of assertive proselytizing. It was, however, a time of ritual and scholastic development for Buddhism generally. Sectarian identities also solidified. New Nichiren biographies were published, several of them in vernacular Japanese, and even illustrated, aiming at a lay readership.

One important development within the early modern Nichiren sect was the burgeoning of lay associations. Some were under clerical leadership, but others were organized independently and headed by laypeople. These groups promoted such activities as pilgrimage to sacred sites, festivals marking important dates in Nichiren’s life, and the traveling display of images, mandalas, and other sacred objects held by noted Nichiren temples. Some groups studied Nichiren’s writings and began to risk harsh government sanctions to revive Nichiren’s practice of assertive proselytizing. These associations can be seen as the predecessors of the Nichiren Buddhist lay movements that arose during the late 19th and 20th centuries.

The Meiji period had a profound impact on Japanese Buddhism. How did Nichiren Buddhists respond to advancing modernity? It’s important to remember that the country’s leaders felt under immense pressure to quickly transform Japan into a modern nation, in order to resist Western hegemony and to be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with developed countries on the world stage. At this time, Buddhism lost state support and came under criticism as a superstitious relic of the past. It had to prove its relevance to an emerging modern nation.

In response, Buddhist sects launched efforts at internal reform, education, social welfare, and intersectarian cooperation. Buddhist clerics went abroad for study, and sectarian educational centers—which later became private Buddhist universities—were established. We see a dramatic growth in lay Buddhist movements, adjacent to or independent of traditional temple structures. At the same time, the study of Buddhism as an academic discipline was established on the Western model. Experts on Buddhist texts, thought, and history were no longer necessarily priests, and lay secular scholarship on Buddhism began to flourish.

Of course, these changes involved Nichiren Buddhism as well. Many Asian Buddhists promoted spiritual cultivation that centered on the private, internal spiritual experience. In Japan, such movements can be seen as having arisen partially in response to the new official understanding of religion as a personal realm, independent of public affairs. Thus some religious groups emphasized personal cultivation. Nichiren Buddhism followed suit, but its philosophical grounding was different from that of, say, Zen or Pure Land schools and resisted redefinition as purely private or interior. For example, a new, largely lay-centered movement known as Nichirenism arose that interpreted Nichiren’s teachings in light of practical social realities and the demands of modern nation-building.

Nichirenism was considered a form of self-cultivation, as was chanting the daimoku, but its adherents also saw self-cultivation as extending outward to uplift society and the nation. Nichiren’s teaching affirms the phenomenal world as the locus for realizing Buddhahood, and he taught that the spread of faith in the Lotus Sutra would transform this world into a buddha land. For centuries, that had remained a vague, future goal. For Nichirenism adherents, it acquired an immediacy, even a millenarian thrust. Through their efforts, it was going to happen soon. Some even saw the expansion of the Japanese empire as the vehicle by which the Lotus Sutra would spread worldwide.

Nichirenism had an immense impact on postwar lay Nichiren Buddhist movements—not in terms of their ideology, but in terms of their dynamism, organizational structure, innovative use of media, and proselytizing style.

What are some of the key characteristics of Nichiren Buddhism as it is being transmitted to the West? I would not want to generalize too much, as even in the West, Nichiren Buddhism comprises a range of groups. Of the lay movements, Soka Gakkai is the largest and best known, but the older temple lineages are also represented. One common emphasis is on chanting as a source of both self-insight and the wisdom and courage to act effectively in the world. Some Nichiren Buddhist groups participate in explicit forms of social engagement.

There’s an underlying assumption that Buddhist practice has the power to resolve practical problems, and one practices Buddhism not only for one’s own inner enlightenment but also to transform one’s external reality. Nichiren taught that in chanting the daimoku, one accesses the buddha realm, that dimension where self opens up to interpenetrate and pervade all others; thus, one’s own daimoku touches others’ lives as well. Nichiren Buddhists are therefore committed to a social aspect of Buddhist practice—to Nichiren’s conviction that the spread of faith in the Lotus Sutra will bring about a better and more just world.

For contemporary Nichiren practitioners, the key questions they face are likely going to be how to apply Nichiren’s teaching in daily life and how to propagate it effectively in a time and cultural environment very different from Nichiren’s. Those questions go beyond what scholarship can answer.

For Western Buddhists drawn to meditation, Nichiren Buddhism can be seen as worldly, not as “real” Buddhism. For many Nichiren Buddhists, the Lotus Sutra is the only way to salvation. Do these two views contribute to a mutual misunderstanding? That’s possible. The notion that silent, seated meditation represents the essence of Buddhist practice can sometimes be found within the Buddhist tradition. But it has gained tremendous impetus from modern, and particularly Western, factors. These go back to an early 19th-century European quest for the “human buddha,” which was informed by both European Enlightenment values and the anticlerical, antiritualist bias of Protestant Christianity.

The reification of seated meditation—“mindfulness”—as a core essence of Buddhism has enabled its separation from the contexts in which it was historically embedded—ritual practice, precept observance, and monastic life. This has been reinforced by the appropriation of mindfulness techniques for therapeutic use. Today, some college and university instructors have students do basic meditation in class, and no one seems to object. It’s very hard to imagine the same thing happening with chanting.

“Let’s be clear: daily chanting is a discipline of personal cultivation.”

Because meditation is silent, unlike chanting, it’s easier to conceive of it as timeless and universal, not culturally bound. This often leads to a misplaced privileging of origins: people assume they’re going back to an original authentic practice, what Gautama practiced under the Bodhi tree. That assumption ignores the history of how meditation itself has changed and developed over the centuries. Some meditation traditions have been lost and revived from texts. Several forms of mindfulness meditation popular today were developed by Asian teachers in the 19th and 20th centuries, often streamlined for lay practitioners.

I was thinking about this while driving down here this morning. When practice becomes solely a matter of meditation, and what you’re doing is all about deconstructing bad mental habits, inhabiting the moment, and being aware of one’s impulses, it’s very therapeutic and useful. But it bypasses the idea of the dharma having power that can be tapped into through ritual. That there’s transformative power to be gained from such practices as reciting texts and venerating relics, which modern redefinitions have often marginalized. That’s been a part of Buddhism as far back as I know.

So the emphasis may contribute to misunderstandings about chanting, the most important practice in Nichiren Buddhism. I think so. There is a widespread lack of understanding about vocal forms of Buddhist practice, in general. Let’s be clear: daily chanting is a discipline of personal cultivation. Across Asia, sutra recitation and mantra chanting are venerated traditions with solid doctrinal support. There’s a saying, “the voice does the Buddha’s work.” Chanting involves body, mouth, and mind in praise of the dharma. In the esoteric tradition, mantras are the Buddha’s speech and are vehicles for realizing union with the Buddha. For Nichiren, chanting the daimoku contains the merits of all good practices: meditative insight, inner stability, joy and gratitude in the dharma, benefits for oneself and others, and the realization of buddhahood in this lifetime.

Soka Gakkai’s early emphasis on chanting for this-worldly benefits may also have contributed to some misunderstanding. When Josei Toda (1900–1958) revived Soka Gakkai after the Second World War, his followers were chiefly unskilled laborers in search of work. Their education had been interrupted by the war, and they were then left behind in the nation’s postwar reconstruction. Often, they were poor, ill, lacking adequate food, and living in cramped quarters. Toda gave them pride in their mission as contemporary bodhisattvas and stressed the power of chanting to improve their worldly circumstances. To affluent North Americans, however, that emphasis sometimes seemed materialistic and contrary to Buddhist teachings of restraining desire.

On the Nichiren Buddhist side, the exclusive truth claim has often been asserted dogmatically without adequate understanding of its historical context and doctrinal underpinnings. Nichiren famously said that the dharma should be propagated in a manner appropriate to the time and place. For Nichiren, teachings other than the Lotus Sutra had led to enlightenment in prior ages but no longer suited the capacity of persons in the present, final dharma age: in this era, only the Lotus Sutra could guarantee enlightenment for all. He saw the Lotus Sutra as being displaced and obscured by the spread of Esoteric Buddhism, Pure Land teachings, Zen, and so forth. And this for him was the root cause of suffering in Japan: famine, epidemics, and the Mongol threat. So he aggressively asserted the supremacy of the Lotus Sutra. But he also said that, even in the final dharma age, one should use a more moderate approach in those countries whose evil stems from ignorance of the dharma.

I think—at least I hope—that with greater understanding of the history of one’s own tradition, it becomes harder to be casually dismissive of others.

When Western Buddhists discuss “traditional” and “modern” Buddhism, they often consider themselves the makers of modern Buddhism. As you stated, didn’t Asian Buddhist reformations in the 19th century and reform-minded missionary Buddhists who transmitted Buddhist teachings to the West have a large role in creating modern Buddhism? In many cases, I would have to agree.

Change is the norm for religious traditions; otherwise, they won’t survive. At each juncture, some aspects of the received tradition will speak more compellingly than others. Religious practitioners continually negotiate between faithfulness to their received tradition, the perceived demands of their own historical moment, and their personal concerns. Some aspects of the tradition are retained as normative; others are reinterpreted, downplayed, or set aside; and sometimes new, diverse elements are incorporated. Often this process goes on unconsciously, but it’s valuable and important for anyone involved in religion, whether as a practitioner or a scholar, to be aware of this. Because then it’s possible to see in what direction it is going, what’s being lost, what’s being gained, what’s changed.

“Change is the norm for religious traditions; otherwise, they won’t survive.”

Religious change is an ongoing process. It’s also worth noting that the “traditional” and the “modern” are not givens but mutually dependent categories. That is, they have meaning only in their relation to each other. What is essential and what is “outmoded tradition” are always defined in relation to the viewer’s perspective in the present, and it won’t necessarily be the same for all Buddhists.

All that said, what we call modernity was indeed an extraordinarily transformative moment for Buddhism worldwide. Those who study so-called “Buddhist modernism” point to broadly shared characteristics: a grounding in the history of colonialism, imperialism, and resistance; a de-emphasis on ritual and the priesthood; strong lay orientation; a jettisoning of mythic and cosmological elements, or their reinterpretation in psychological terms; appropriations of science as a legitimating discourse; and a this-worldly orientation including emphasis on social justice, often accompanied by social or even political involvement. This was a global sea change in Buddhism in which Asian teachers played a huge role. When Buddhism was introduced to the West, it was already well under way.

Chanting the Daimoku

The following passage from the apocryphal medieval Tendai text Shuzenji-ketsu provides a contemporaneous example of the importance of chanting the daimoku, although it isn’t clear if Nichiren was influenced by this text. It also connects the practice to Zhiyi (538–597 CE), the fourth patriarch of Chinese Tiantai Buddhism.

You should make pictures of images representing the ten realms and enshrine them in ten places. Facing each image, you should, one hundred times, bow with your body, chant Namu Myoho-renge-kyo with your mouth, and contemplate with your mind. When you face the image of hell, contemplate that its fierce flames are themselves precisely emptiness, precisely provisional existence, and precisely the middle, and so on for all the images. When you face the image of the Buddha, contemplate its essence being precisely the threefold truth. You should carry out this practice for one time period in the morning and one time period in the evening. The Great Teacher Zhiyi secretly conferred this Dharma essential for the beings of dull faculties in the last age. If one wishes to escape from birth and death and attain bodhi, then first he should employ this practice. –Shuzenji-ketsu, trans. Jacqueline Stone

The post Knowing Nichiren appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

According to scholar Bernard Faure, the life story of the Buddha is one of the great myths of modern times. Yet many Western scholars tend to neglect the rich mythological and ritual elements of the Buddha’s biography, opting instead to present a simplified, linear narrative. Faure, a professor of Japanese religion at Columbia University, believes that focusing exclusively on historical accounts of the Buddha’s life “strips the story of all its juice.” In his new book, The Thousand and One Lives of the Buddha, Faure presents some of his favorite myths about the Buddha’s life, including the fantastical stories surrounding his birth and his legendary face-off with the demon king Mara. In the process, Faure traces how the Buddha’s biography has been constructed and retold across cultures, from early Buddhist texts to contemporary art forms of manga, Japanese graphic novels, and science fiction.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Faure spoke with Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, about what these myths and stories can teach us about the creativity of the Buddhist tradition. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, and then listen to the full episode.

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James Shaheen: Where does the emphasis on the actual or historical existence of the Buddha and piecing together his story come from? 

Bernard Faure: Well, of course, any religion needs a founder. But as [French anthropologist Claude] Lévi-Strauss once said, often, this founder is a virtual focus. For example, when you see an image reflected in the water, you seem to believe that the source of this image comes from the place that you see inside the water, but it actually comes from a different place. In that sense, the Buddha is a virtual focus, a virtual source. Nevertheless, it is real in that sense. Saying it’s virtual doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there. First, on the origin side, people need a founder. They need to somehow believe that there was someone there at the beginning of things. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a historical figure, but often that’s the case. Then, as Western discourse developed in the 17th, 18th, and 19th century, this tendency to historicism and the historical method became really the dominant form of study in the field of humanities, philology, and history. So it became the dominant paradigm, the idea that through the study of text, you could get back to the author behind the text and therefore to the historical figure who founded this movement. That was a kind of natural development in a sense. There was a reaction in the 19th century, of course, and scholar Donald S. Lopez, Jr. and others have written about this. This was a reaction against Christianity and religion perceived as really an obscurantist movement. Now we had a religion that supposedly had a founder who looked very reasonable, was not walking on water, was not doing all the crazy things that we’re used to, so a religion with a philosopher as a founder, that was very attractive to 19th-century scholars for understandable reasons. But in doing so, they threw out the baby with the bathwater, if I might say.

We seem to value literal truth or scientific truth over mythical truths. Obviously, we need both. But in this case, your emphasis has been on the myth of the Buddha because, like you say, that’s where the juice is. Is that fair to say? It’s a reaction against what I see as the pendulum that has really swung to the other extreme. Historical study is really important. I’m not denying that. I’m a historian myself. But history is not historicism. Historicism is a tendency to really deny anything that is not purely material or physical, anything that cannot be proved or solved by documents, and the idea that somehow the more authentic documents should be the simplest ones because if something is very simple, it means it didn’t have time to get elaborated and developed and so on, so we might be closest to the origin. And this is to forget that actually, very often, stories are going to be embellished with legends and other things through time. But sometimes just the opposite happens. This is exactly what’s happening now with historicism and also with modern Buddhism. We want to simplify the story to make it fit our agenda or our desire. So stories can go both ways. They can become more complex or more simple. To think that because you have simple texts and this simple text will be, let’s say, the Pali, and that will be therefore much closer to the original Buddha, that’s a very strong presupposition.

How would you describe your approach to the life of the Buddha? My approach is that I like stories. I study religion—Japanese religion, Chinese religion, Buddhism in East Asia—and religion is mostly stories. Sometimes these stories are not so great; sometimes they are really fascinating. There is a sheer pleasure in reading these stories. Reading the life of Buddha is a great experience, and I don’t want to somehow deprive readers of that pleasure. If scholars are doing that, then I think that’s a problem.

“The first way to do that is to get nonjudgmental and take these stories at face value.”

In the book, you explore how depictions of the Buddha have evolved and expanded into new art forms like manga and science fiction. Can you say more about these art forms? It may be a little iconoclastic from some people’s point of view, but once you admit that the life of the Buddha is a kind of story, there is no reason to privilege some stories over others. This is my main point in my critique of historicism: the idea that if we’re trying to get back to the real Buddha, then we have to get to the earliest texts, the simplest texts, and therefore we have to look in India. But if we admit that the Buddha’s life is essentially a story, then other stories in other places and cultures might be just as interesting, and the stories of the Buddha in Southeast Asia, China, Japan, or Korea might tell us just as much.

If we continue that line of thought, why limit ourselves to Buddhist texts? Buddhists were always inventing stories. But imagination is not the privilege of Buddhists. Everyone can imagine stories, and if there are values conveyed by such stories, then the stories are good. For example, even manga, like Japanese manga writer Tezuka Osamu’s Buddha series, can give you a sense of compassion and the real values of Buddhism. To me, that is much more interesting than a very dry scholarly account of the life of the Buddha as historical reality because the literary genres of manga and science fiction can convey ideas, values, and principles that are at the heart of Buddhism. There’s no reason to shun them because they are not the orthodox, authentified stories of the Buddhist tradition itself.

Throughout the book, you resist easy interpretations or reductions to simple morals, and you ask if it is possible to avoid reductionism and instead preserve the strangeness of the Buddha’s life story. Can you say more about how you came to savor these stories? First, I don’t think it’s possible to avoid all reductionism. I don’t claim to be an objective scholar who finally comes up with the truth about the life of the Buddha. But I do like to read a good story. Buddhism has a lot of good stories to tell. Many of the stories that scholars typically put forward I don’t find as interesting. They have a moralistic tone, and the Buddha often ends up being so boringly didactic. But sometimes you find there’s something else going on in these stories, and you don’t know why they attract you.

The Lotus Sutra is a good example. At face value, the stories can seem ridiculous: a stupa comes out of the earth like a rocket, and the door opens and there’s a buddha waiting in it. Another buddha gets in it, and then the two buddhas take off together for outer space. Is this some kind of science fiction story? But for some reason, these stories work, and they have worked for centuries. That’s enough for me. As a historian, I want to understand what made people find this interesting. Now, because we have become so rational and Westernized, we have a hard time understanding that. The first step toward some kind of awakening would be to try to understand what people in the past have already seen in these stories. The first way to do that is to get nonjudgmental and take these stories at face value.

The post Uncovering the Mythical Buddha appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The noble words “compassion” and “wisdom” appear everywhere in Buddhist teaching, and they offer us an attractive way of imagining our future selves. We know that when we cultivate our minds, wisdom and compassion will be the result, exactly as they were for the Buddha. Yet this thinking overlooks a key detail. In the days leading up to his enlightenment, Prince Siddhartha would probably have seemed unattractive, even frightening—and the very opposite of noble. Filthy, starving, and alone, he had allowed himself to become completely and abjectly helpless. And here’s the detail that we may overlook: only this condition made it possible for Siddhartha to wake up. Only the experience of helplessness could take him beyond the limits of the self.

Core features of the dharma point to helplessness as the transcendent experience, not as a moral failure, a cause for shame, or a condition to be overcome through heroic feats of self-discipline. I’ll even go so far as to argue here that Buddhism sacralizes helplessness as the place where wisdom and compassion both arise. Not until events escaping their control bring people face-to-face with their helplessness will they discover that they belong to something larger than themselves: an “unlimited body,” in the Lotus Sutra’s words. To find the Buddha’s wisdom is to recognize this shared body as what we really are, while compassion arises when our sense of helplessness moves us to action in the world.

Even though we try to keep it out of view, we encounter helplessness everywhere we turn at each stage of life. As children we rely on our parents’ care, and once we start school we depend on the guidance of our teachers. No matter when our education stops or how many diplomas we hang on the wall, we’ll need other people’s help when we’re looking for a job, scouting out decent childcare, or investigating places to retire. Eventually we’ll have to get an assist crossing the street or rising from a chair. And now, over 16 grueling months, we’ve faced helplessness on a global scale, whether or not we lost our jobs, had to view our mother’s funeral on Zoom, or found a landlord’s padlock on our door.

Yet if you’ve grown up in the United States, you know how people can respond to helplessness—sometimes with sympathy, true enough, but often with anger, disbelief, and, on occasion, even open contempt. I’m sure that many of us fell speechless as we watched the clips of then-candidate Donald Trump belittle a reporter with a disability while a packed stadium cheered him on. Yet Trump was just acting from a cultural script that we may resist but can’t easily ignore. The mass-culture heroes of our time, in the Marvel universe or otherwise, might have their moments of sensitivity and humanizing vacillation, but most of them remain postmodern avatars of long-ago rugged individuals, riding out of town, headed for the hills, or disappearing into history as the smoke of battle clears away.

Their legacy has left us completely unprepared for the complex challenges now described as “existential” because they will decide our common fate. “All in this together” can no longer just apply to the people in your neighborhood or town, for as the panorama keeps widening to take in the entire planet, you and I recede until we seem to disappear among eight billion other human beings. Even the so-called World Wide Web often has a distancing effect, making the centers of authority feel more remote than ever. But here the dharma has a special role to play, because it discovered long ago that the experience of helplessness isn’t the problem we suppose it to be: rather, it’s our hidden common ground and the best hope for the future.

We need, though, to acknowledge from the start that Buddhists themselves have often suppressed this element of their tradition. The World Honored One’s awakening, after all, represents to his followers the pivot point of human history and the supreme achievement of sentient beings. Enjoying a state to which even gods aspire, the Buddha appears to personify everything that anyone might describe as charisma and power. His very name, Siddhartha, which can translate as “He Who Hits the Mark” or “The One Who Gets It Done,” was chosen for him by no less than a king, his father. According to the legend, and to drive the point home, a seer foretold that Siddhartha would become, if not the Buddha of the current age, then the logical second best, a planetary “wheel-turning monarch.” And, as befits a singular event of unsurpassed auspiciousness, the birth of the World Honored One was witnessed by the highest society—as high as the heavens, to be clear; or so we learn from a treasured biography of the One Who Liberates, the Lalitavistara Sutra:

Śakra, Brahmā, the Guardians of the World,
And many other gods stand joyously at [the Buddha’s mother’s side]
Adoring [her] with outstretched arms;
And the Lion of Men, his vows [made previously in Tusita Heaven] fulfilled
Emerges from the right side of his mother
Like a golden mountain;
The Guide of the World emerges in a brilliant light.
—trans. Gwendolyn Bays

While the sala trees burst into bloom, the infant Buddha plants his tiny feet on the surface of the earth. Then, taking seven steps, he declares, “I am the Leader of the World / I am the Guide of the World.”

The Lalitavistara is revered as the dharmic counterpart of the Gospel truth, yet the story makes it hard to imagine how the “Leader of the World” could have experienced anything like the helplessness we’ve known, not just in the COVID emergency but at many moments in recent years. It’s certainly true that once he’s grown, the Buddha leaves the palace and adopts the life of a wandering mendicant, begging for his food, sleeping rough, and clothed in whatever he can salvage from garbage dumps or funeral grounds. Pursuing liberation, he descends from high to low and from worldly power to debility. Indeed, he doesn’t undergo his awakening until his search carries him to the edge of death—helplessness at its most extreme. And we’re told that he might very well have died had he not received a meal of rice and milk from a village girl moved to compassion at the sight of so miserable a derelict, bare-boned, dirty, bleary-eyed. Only then, with his strength renewed, does he resume his vigil and break through.

Yet the sutra never permits us to forget that the Buddha—whom it names the “Conqueror”— remains coolly in control and self-assured. Not for a moment does he go through the wracking uncertainties that haunt us at night, when we worry about how to pay the bills, rescue Grandma from the nursing home, or make up the kids’ lost year of school. Even Mara, the tempter, stands no chance of success launching terrors and seductions to derail the imperturbable prince. To us, the future Buddha may look down and out, but he’s backstopped by cosmic guarantees. The sutra’s Siddhartha already knows that he’s destined to become the One Who Liberates, and he knows, as well, that his challenges actually conspire to ensure his success.

But the disappearance of cosmic guarantees is an essential feature of our lives. While I will attest from my own experience that meditation can take you to a place where, metaphorically, the heavens and the earth meet in your own body, I have to add “metaphorically” because that’s just not our reality now. Some may say that the gods have fled or that enchantment has vanished, while others blame science and secularity, but these explanations assume a deficit where we may also see an enormous gain. If we’ve lost confidence in a heaven looking down on Siddhartha while he sleeps, we’ve also become, in a thousand different ways, more aware of our terrestrial connectedness, along with its liberating possibilities. And in place of the cosmic guarantees that the Buddha in the sutra enjoys, we now have the opportunity to understand helplessness itself as a path to transcendence. It won’t be the transcendence of life’s contingencies, as though we could exist on another plane or shed our humanity, but transcendence through them.

We’re both limited and limitless, isolated and connected in a way the Lalitavistara ignores because its authors want to settle our minds by resolving the tension. In effect, they say to us, “Even if the Buddha’s serenity seems far away from you right now, it’s here and always will be.” This reminder may have the therapeutic effect of helping us forget our afflictions long enough to reach a place of genuine calm. Yet although we can appreciate the sutra’s approach as a form of skillful means, today it might have the very opposite result, making the Buddha’s wisdom appear more remote than ever. There is, though, an alternative to the Lalitavisatara’s strategy: instead of regarding our regret, loss, and abjection as illusions like those conjured up by the demon Mara, we could understand them instead as nothing other than the path. And in that case, our practice will assume a new form we may not yet recognize: accepting everything that happens to us as an opportunity for awakening—and, indeed, as awakening itself.

And this, I would say, is the practice taught by another sutra that enjoys a central place in Mahayana tradition—the Lotus, praised by the great Zhiyi, 6th-century founder of the Chinese Tiantai school, as the last and crowning achievement of the Buddha’s long teaching career. Scholars today have debunked this claim, not only because the sutra first appeared six or seven hundred years after the Buddha died but also because other sutras were composed in the centuries following the Lotus. And yet every time that I’ve returned to it when I’m in the throes of crisis, I’m persuaded once again that Zhiyi must be right in some higher sense. I’d argue that the Lotus Sutra manages to synthesize a deeply moving and humane honesty about the painful situation of the self with the Mahayana view that everything is interconnected. We only feel troubled by our helplessness, the Lotus maintains, because we haven’t become aware of our role in a greater drama.

To that drama the Lotus takes us almost right away, after it has set the scene and introduced the cast of characters. Standing before a throng of followers, the Buddha explains that he has come to reveal a teaching without precedent. In the past, people understood awakening as a special state far removed from the consciousness of women and men caught up in the whirl of everyday affairs. But now he announces a new dispensation. “All of you,” he declares, “will be able to achieve the Buddha way.” And this “all of you” includes everyone: those who won’t rise early to meditate because they don’t like getting out of bed, those lurking in the dark alleys of vice, and even those engaged in the worst of evil deeds. The Buddha affirms that he’ll see them through irrespective of their abilities, their karmic debts, and even their indifference to their own salvation.

The sutra also relates that some in the audience who have made every sacrifice—senior monks, nuns, and laypeople—simply can’t believe their ears. The new dispensation enrages them because it gives the first prize away to all contestants indiscriminately. But beyond that, it completely overturns their view of awakening as a personal accomplishment setting them apart from common ignorance. Because they’ve cordoned off their own minds, they’ve achieved an imperturbability that resembles the Buddha’s. But true enlightenment would let everything in— everything and everyone. Shaking their heads with an emphatic “No,” they rise together and depart.

Yet that’s not how everyone responds, especially, in a shocking turnaround, the bodhisattva Shariputra. Revered from the dharma’s early days as the most accomplished of the Buddha’s followers, he by rights should have been the first to leave. Instead, he can’t contain his happiness after he receives the news—and for a reason no one would suspect. He discloses his long struggle with a secret guilt arising from his failure to live up to Buddha’s high mark. He has observed each precept impeccably and even reached the stage that qualifies as “unsurpassed enlightenment.” Yet his attainment still feels incomplete, and he confesses to “doubts” and “regrets” that cause him to “to spend whole days and nights” in a vicious circle of self-blaming:

Having already freed myself of fault,
Hearing this, I am [now] also free from anxiety.
Whether in a mountain valley
Or under the trees in a forest,
Whether sitting or walking around,
I always thought about this matter
And blamed myself completely, thinking:
Why have I cheated myself so?
—trans. Gene Reeves

Whether or not we aspire to complete enlightenment or even imagine it is possible, every one of us harbors some regrets like those Shariputra voices here, and that’s why it may help to understand the nature of the promise the Buddha makes to him. The Buddha doesn’t say, as readers might expect, “Cheer up, Shariputra, you’re already there!” or “Awakening is just a breath away!” Instead, he affirms the very opposite: “Shariputra, in a future life, after innumerable, unlimited, and inconceivable eons, when you have served some ten million billion buddhas, maintained the true dharma, and perfected the way of bodhisattva practice, you will be able to become a buddha whose name is Flower Light Tathagata.” Complete enlightenment, in other words, lies a long way off.

At first we might find it hard to appreciate why this information would send a dejected Shariputra into ecstasies of joy, but the Buddha asks him, in effect, to stop thinking so obsessively about his personal defects and turn to the encompassing vastness. And if Shariputra shifts perspective this way, the Buddha feels confident that he’ll perceive there has never been such a thing as “individual enlightenment.” Enlightenment isn’t something you and I can earn like a black belt in karate or a Best Film Award; it’s a process, always unfolding everywhere, that involves us all. As the Lotus tries to show, the whole universe is working toward awakening, although its progress can be hard to discern because of the enormous scale and sweep of time required for all sentient beings to plug in—“innumerable, unlimited, and inconceivable eons.” But it’s going to happen, the Buddha maintains. Awakening is so intrinsic to consciousness that even our worst failures and misdeeds point us in the right direction. Sooner or later we’ll all figure it out, like Phil the weatherman in Groundhog Day, but multiplied by millions on millions.

Still, the obvious question raised by this reasoning, given the massive disproportion between the sutra’s portrait of a boundless universe and our little lives stuck in first gear, is how we could ever tell whether this might be true. If we can’t detect in some concrete way the grand motion of the cosmos across time and space, then the sutra is effectively as useless as we feel on our darkest days. Indeed, for many decades this was the view of the Japanese Zen master Hakuin, who more or less dismissed the Lotus as a pack of lies. But then, one evening as he sat on the meditation mat, the chirping of a cricket shifted his point of view and he had his Great Awakening. Now Hakuin understood that we rarely notice our connectedness because it’s absolutely everywhere, like the water invisible to fish since they never leave it. Yet we feel the connection at those moments when the universe, as it changes course, makes us bend to the pressure of its weight. We could describe this pressure as “helplessness,” and we often do. But we could also call it “an embrace,” the world encircling us in its arms and whispering, “Relax, you’re home.” Helplessness is just connection misunderstood. We only feel disconnected when we focus on the one embraced so narrowly that we forget the embracer.

On the other hand, there’s something very, very wrong with telling a person who just lost her job, has gotten deathly ill, or now sleeps in her car, “The universe is sending you big love.” The aspect of connectedness we shouldn’t overlook is that if we’re all really one, we can’t treat others people’s suffering solely as their responsibility. While the Lotus consoles us with assurances about our future buddhahood, it also puts us on the hook for the sad condition of the world today and everybody in it. That’s why the bodhisattva Guanyin, “Universal Regarder of the Cries of the World,” arrives at a culminating moment in the text. And when she does, the sutra tell us this:

If someone faced with immediate attack calls the name of [the Universal Regarder], the swords and the clubs of the attackers will instantly break into pieces and they will be freed from the danger. . . .
If any living beings are afflicted with a great deal of lust, let them keep in mind and revere [the Regarder] and they will be freed from their desire. If they have a great deal of anger and rage, [it will be the same]. . . .

Even if a woman wants to have a son and she worships and makes offerings to [the Regarder], she will bear a son blessed with merit, virtue, and wisdom. If she wants a daughter, she will bear [a female child] . . . who had long before planted roots of virtue and will come to be cherished and respected by all.
—trans. Reeves

Taken at face value, these claims aren’t true—unless you accept the possibility that the Regarder is who you are, as part of the “unlimited body” of all things. And in that case, you’re the only one who can make good on the bodhisattva’s words by offering the necessary help. Your efforts may fail, they may get rebuffed, or they could have unintended results, but by acting, all of us participate in the entire world’s enlightenment. Still, when we help others we don’t overcome our own fundamental helplessness. Instead, we see in the light of day that the giver is the one who most needs help, while those who accept what we offer them allow the Regarder in ourselves to emerge. Only the receiver can liberate us from our isolation.

Once we feel a rush of sympathy in response to others’ suffering and then take action to set things right, we may congratulate ourselves without understanding the deeper truth. Noble thoughts and emotions that we perceive as the best evidence of our initiative actually arise from a hidden place entirely beyond our control. We no more choose to act compassionately than we can consciously decide how we’ll feel 15 hours from now. I simply feel, I simply see, and compassion simply arrives, a gift from my buddhanature. I act, but I don’t initiate; I’m part of the effect but not the cause. True, when we meet the Regarder in ourselves, it can feel at first as though we’ve left behind for good the unfulfilled and needy Shariputra:

Listen to the actions of the Cry Regarder
How well [she] responds in every region [of the world],
[Her] great vow is deep as the sea
Unfathomable even within eons.
Serving many hundreds of billions of buddhas.

But only the Shariputra in ourselves will allow the Regarder to appear. Knowing that he won’t achieve buddhahood for a million lifetimes more, Shariputra has the patience to embrace every opportunity, large or small, as his bodhisattva work. And that means returning once again to the old self-doubts and uncertainties, now understood as aspects of the path.

Even though your head may start to spin when you try to think this matter through, the experience of disconnection, too, manifests our connectedness. One of my Zen teacher’s many teachers, the Kyoto School philosopher Shin’ichi Hisamatsu (1889–1980), used to illustrate this principle with a koan that I believe he composed in the years following World War II, as his country tried to extricate itself from a totalitarian disaster: “When you can do nothing, what will you do?” It’s a koan, though, that we’ll never quite resolve, because both parts of the statement express a reality that neither one can cancel out.

We’re always limited in countless ways by what Buddhist teaching represents as “causes and conditions” in the “three worlds of time.” Given these limitations, we’ll understandably dream of leaving our little lives behind by merging with that “unlimited body.” Then, as we might imagine, we can mobilize the power of the universe on our own behalf—the Buddhist equivalent, I suppose, of speaking for God. The Japanese viewed themselves in just this light when they invaded China, and so have Americans whenever they’ve believed in their Manifest Destiny. But such transformations from “man” into “God” are actually impossible, because the two have never been separate: we can’t become what we already are. Our helplessness is simply the universe itself when it’s acting small.

Pursuing liberation in our next life is also a way of being fully present now.

And so, tomorrow morning, at the sound of the alarm, we’ll jump into the shower and race for the train, coats flapping in the wind and socks slipping down. If the Zen master Pang Yun could see, he’d affirm that we’re radiating “supernatural power” when we “chop wood and carry water” in this modern urban way. But that makes it all sound too easy. Not the oneness, but the friction produced by great and small colliding—that’s what gradually enables us to purify “body, mind, and word,” cleaning up our karma in the process and becoming clearer.
As we do so, the Buddha promises, the Pure Land will reveal itself:

When the living witness the end of an eon,
When everything is consumed in a great fire,
This land of mine remains safe and tranquil,
Always filled with human and heavenly beings.

Its gardens and groves, halls and pavilions,
Are adorned with all kinds of gems.
Jeweled trees are full of flowers and fruit,
And living beings freely enjoy themselves.

As far as I’m concerned, these two stanzas say it all: the universe consumed by the kalpa fire and the Pure Land exist at the same time. I’ll admit that this claim seems to contradict the more familiar notion of the Pure Land as the realm of the Buddha of Infinite Light, Amitabha or Amida. According to the familiar view, we can go to Amitabha’s paradise only after we’ve left this life behind, and only then can we attain the enlightenment withheld from us by our circumstances here. But Zhiyi insists that both accounts are true: pursuing liberation in our next life is also a way of being fully present now.

I agree because I’ve come to think that the Pure Land—as symbol and experience—isn’t quite the same as our timeless, formless Buddha-mind. Nor is it our ordinary consciousness in the realm of change, where the burning never stops. Instead, the Pure Land lies at the interface between the crazy roller coaster of events and the stillness we sometimes reach. Our helplessness becomes transcendental, then, at those moments when nirvana appears right in the midst of samsara. Suddenly we find ourselves in the perfect Land where “living beings . . . enjoy themselves.” And even when we don’t, we’re almost there.

The post Helpless, Not Hopeless appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The first time I heard the chant “Namu-myoho-renge-kyo” was at a meeting of Japanese and Japanese American Buddhists in Amarillo, Texas. Although this was 50 years ago, I can still vividly recall entering a room filled with people facing a small altar, the resonant sound of their chanting, and the piney smell of burning incense. I felt enveloped in the warmth and welcome of the gathering. It felt like home.

This was my introduction to Nichiren Buddhism, and to this day I continue to claim a deep and abiding faith in the teachings of Nichiren Shonin (1222–1282) and in their source, the Lotus Sutra. There are more than thirty schools of Nichiren Buddhism, and for all their differences, they are all characterized by reliance on the Lotus Sutra as taught by Nichiren Shonin and by the practice of chanting the Odaimoku, “the great sacred title” of the sutra. Today, even as a priest and an elder in the sangha, I still experience that same sense of warmth I felt so long ago. Buddhism has been for me a journey of fresh discoveries, one I believe will continue until my death, and perhaps beyond.

For Nichiren Buddhists, faith is a necessary element of the spiritual path. Faith, practice, and study are the essential building blocks for the development of a fully realized life. These form the foundation for a full-fledged engagement with the dharma. Intellectual knowledge is not necessarily required at the outset. It does, however, become increasingly important and valuable as one proceeds. Many Buddhist practitioners in the West are inclined to view Buddhism more as a philosophy than a religion, and so they regard faith with some suspicion. To me, it does not matter what we call our way of approaching the dharma; what matters is that we each find an efficacious practice that supports our lives. When that happens, we tend to develop faith in the possibilities and the reliability of whatever our practice is. For Nichiren Buddhists, practice is built on faith, and faith can only be sustained through actual practice.

Nichiren Shonin was a monk of the Tendai school of Buddhism in Japan in the 13th century, the Kamakura era. This was viewed by most Buddhists of that time and place as the onset of mappo, the millennia-long age of degeneracy of the buddhadharma. Nichiren felt that the times demanded a renewed emphasis on the Lotus Sutra, including a practice that could make its teachings available to monastics and laity alike, no matter what their status was. After years of intensive practice, study, and exploration, Nichiren found what he felt was the key to practice for his time and for the times to come. He determined that the simplicity of chanting the Odaimoku was a way for anyone to bring fundamental spiritual change to their life. This practice was a way of planting seeds of awakening in the lives of those who undertook it. Entering the path to Buddhahood required nothing beyond the simple act of chanting.

In the Odaimoku, the word namu means “devotion to” or “respect for.” Myoho-renge-kyo is the Japanese pronunciation of the ancient Chinese characters for the Lotus Sutra. Myo means “wonderful, mysterious,” as well as “to open” or “to be reborn,” and ho means the dharma, or law, taught by the Buddha. Renge means “lotus flower,” which, because it produces flower and seed at the same time, is indicative of the simultaneity of cause and effect. The lotus plant also grows in muddy swamps while producing a flower that is untouched by the dirt, indicating that our lives are formed out of the “mud” of the world of suffering and delusion, or samsara. Kyo means “sutra,” a teaching of the Buddha. The Odaimoku thus means “devotion and respect for the Sutra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Dharma.”

Nichiren Shonin shared the teachings of the sutra through the simple practice of chanting the Odaimoku. This is in keeping with his assertion that the entire meaning and purpose of the sutra was to be found in its title and therefore one need only to chant the title to achieve buddhahood. He was not the first to espouse this practice; he was however, the first to recommend it widely. He once said,

The spirit of our five- or six-foot body appears on our face. The spirit of our one-foot face also appears in our eyes. It is the same with “Namu-myoho-renge-kyo.” A single letter of the 69,384 characters in twenty-eight chapters in eight volumes of the Lotus Sutra is the same as all the characters. This is of vital importance in all matters. The essence of the Lotus Sutra is the Odaimoku, “Namu-myoho- renge-kyo.” When you chant it twice, it is the same as reciting the sutra twice, so 100, 1,000, or 10,000 times of chanting is equal to 100 recitations, 1,000 recitations, or 10,000 recitations. Those who chant the Odaimoku constantly are the people who constantly read the Lotus Sutra.

The Lotus Sutra was compiled in India beginning in the first century BCE and traveled along the Silk Road to China, where it became arguably the most influential Buddhist scripture; it is often referred to as the “king of sutras.” In a 2006 interview in Tricycle, the Buddhist scholar Jacqueline Stone spoke about why the Lotus Sutra came to be held with such reverence:

The text [of the Lotus Sutra] suggests that not only is this the final teaching of Shakyamuni Buddha, or the historical Buddha, it is the final teaching given by all buddhas before they enter nirvana. It is, in other words, the final word on Buddhism. … The scripture is equated with the Buddha’s body, and so to hold the sutra is to hold the very body of the Buddha. We can’t know the intentions of the sutra’s compilers, but one could read this as saying that the sutra is not about the dharma, it is the dharma—that is, it is the embodiment of ultimate truth. Certainly this is one way it has been seen historically, at least in East Asia.

The sutra is said to be the “one vehicle” (Sanskrit, ekayana), the teaching that includes yet goes beyond all other Buddhist teachings. It teaches the timeless nature of the Buddha, asserting that all buddhas in all realms and times are manifestations of the Eternal Buddha. The sutra claims that through its teachings all beings can eventually reach full buddhahood. Toward this end, the sutra establishes the five ways of practice for sharing the dharma: receive and keep the sutra, read the sutra, recite the sutra, copy the sutra, and expound the sutra.

For Nichiren Buddhists, faith can only be sustained through actual practice.

In my experience, Nichiren Shonin’s teachings on the Lotus Sutra provide a sanctuary and a refuge in which we can stretch and challenge ourselves and awaken to Buddha’s wisdom. While chanting the Odaimoku we develop the kind of faith that is a vehicle for bringing us home to our true selves.

Many convert Buddhists wonder why we Nichiren Buddhists focus on chanting instead of silent meditation. Some might challenge our practice as being antithetical to how the Buddha originally practiced. Certainly, stories about the Buddha’s awakening tell of his practice of silent sitting meditation. But we might also consider the manner of transmission of the Buddha’s teachings, in which communal chanting was essential.

In the time of the Buddha, knowledge was transmitted through the spoken word. It was not until long after the Buddha’s death that the dharma was written down and written texts were made available. The idea of oral transmission is one of the critical elements of chanting practice. Chanting supports one’s ability to learn and understand the meaning of the teachings. For Nichiren Buddhists, chanting is at once an offering and a way to enter into a one-on-one conversation with the Buddha. This personal conversation can be done in any condition in which one finds oneself: in grief, in rage, in joy, in laughter, in tears. Somehow, reverent dialogue with the Buddha brings a feeling of profound acceptance and comfort as well as knowledge and insight about one’s life and practice.

There are several ways Nichiren practitioners traditionally approach chanting: as ritual, as meditation, as learning, and as connection to the three treasures.

A beginner’s practice may consist simply of chanting the Odaimoku, typically for about 10 minutes or more. This is known as shodaigyo, or “chanting practice.” One might simply chant, or one might include ritual forms, silent meditation, prayers, and the transfer of merit. The important point, though, is to begin a disciplined practice by chanting twice a day, morning and evening.

It is helpful to establish a sacred space by setting up an altar. The altar might include an object of focus or veneration, such as a statue of the Buddha, and offerings such as flowers, water, incense, and candles. Keeping the altar clean, orderly, and fresh is itself part of the ritual of practice. Although these ritual elements are not necessary for entering the dharma, such small routines contribute to establishing a sacred space distinct from mundane concerns and affairs.

Over time, one might include, in addition to the Odaimoku, the practice of chanting chapters of the Lotus Sutra. This can be done in one’s native language or in shindoku, which is the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters. The Odaimoku is an example of shindoku. Shindoku is often referred to as the language of faith, and it is commonly practiced by various schools of Japanese Buddhism, such as Zen and Pure Land.

Chanting as meditation occurs when one’s mind is fully engaged with the chant’s sound and rhythm. One must be fully present to chant properly. The full engagement of body and mind brings one into deep meditation. Conversely, if one is distracted, one will fall out of the rhythm and harmony. It becomes immediately obvious when this happens, and so chanting becomes a key to mastering one’s mind, rather than being mastered by it, and a method of polishing one’s life. When one chants with integration of body and mind, one enters into a deep connection with one’s buddhanature.

Chanting is also about learning, bodily and mentally. Chanting creates a deep interaction with the teachings. It is said that chanting in shindoku inscribes the Lotus Sutra in one’s life. This is a way of bypassing the conceptual mind, since it doesn’t require understanding the words at that level. Alternatively, chanting in one’s native language provides a way of engaging with the sutra intellectually. In this manner, one becomes intimately involved with the Buddha’s teachings, learning to directly apply them in a personal and immediate manner. What’s more, chanting in one’s native language can become a stream of consciousness, in which understanding merges with the kind of feelings connected to the shindoku practice. Whether in shindoku or in one’s own language, through chanting we are engaging with the sutra and the sutra is engaging with us. This mutual engagement is a means of transmitting the dharma to each other and to ourselves.

Chanting establishes one’s connection to the three treasures—the Buddha, dharma, and sangha. This connection is the essence of Buddhist life. By engaging and unifying all the senses, focused chanting allows one to go within and awaken to the dharma and one’s buddhanature. Chanting in a group is a principal element in sangha building, allowing individuals to connect with others in one united voice. We call this experience itai doshin, “different in body, one in mind.” Chanting together in shindoku allows disparate individuals from different cultures to transcend language barriers and come together with openness and harmony.

All of this sounds great in theory, but what does it mean practically? I tend to think of the Odaimoku as working like a kind of natural law, much like gravity. Whether we believe in gravity or not, it still operates, as it does whether or not we grasp the physics to explain it. For me, chanting the Odaimoku generates a response in my life that I personally do not completely understand. Over the years, though, I have developed a deep certainty about the practice. I know the sound of my chanting permeates my entire life. I have come to believe that the Odaimoku, largely in response to one’s sincerity of effort, “hears” what is deep within one’s life. I have observed its effects in the lives of many individuals with varying issues, all of whom managed to change their lives through fully engaged practice.

My personal experience—and that of many others—of following this simple practice has been quite profound. I cannot recall when I realized how much my own thinking had changed as a result of the practice, but without my even seeking those changes, they happened. I found that, as Nichiren Shonin once said, “If you truly believe in the Lotus Sutra, you will be rewarded and protected by the buddhas.” When I encounter difficulty in my daily life, I have learned that, by chanting, I can find my way through. I have found in Buddhist practice a way to answer questions of ethics, character development, and standards of behavior. This is not magic. These answers arise within my own life. I have come to realize and accept that I don’t need to fight with myself to grow personally.

Following the five ways of practice has provided a solid basis for my spiritual path. To receive and keep the Lotus Sutra means to follow the teachings in the sutra, making them the foundation of my life. Reading the sutra reveals the basics of Buddhist thought, such as the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the twelve-linked chain of causation, and so forth. Reading also provides a kind of road map for living. I find this especially in the latter portions of the sutra, where the activities of bodhisattvas are described. Reciting the sutra is the practice of chanting the Odaimoku as well as the text. This requires developing the ability to still the mind and allow the syllables to flow out into space. Whether one understands the words or not, the sutra thus becomes inscribed in one’s life and is transmitted to others. To expound the sutra means to share it. For me, this has come to entail taking it into my life and living the teachings as best I can. It means sharing the teachings by sharing my life, trying to embody the dharma.

Embodying the dharma is, of course, one of the most difficult aspects of practice. It requires one to take responsibility working for the benefit of others. I think of this as a practice for grownups. But we must begin simply, at the beginning. The simple practice of chanting the Odaimoku provides just such a place to start. Following the five ways of practice takes us along the path. I believe this path leads us to realizing the deepest happiness in life. Over time, by embodying the teachings, by sharing the Lotus Sutra as our life, we come to realize the Lotus Sutra as our sanctuary and refuge. As home.

The post Chanting as the Whole of Life appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Nichiren Shonin taught that the essence of the Lotus Sutra is found by developing faith through chanting what’s called the daimoku (or the odaimoku), the sutra’s sacred title. Myokei Caine-Barrett, the first woman and the first Westerner to hold the position of bishop in the Nichiren Order of North America, leads us through daimoku practice.

Myokei Caine-Barrett, Shonin is the first woman and the first Westerner to hold the position of bishop in the Nichiren Order of North America. She is the resident priest of the Myoken-ji Temple in Houston, Texas.

The post Living the Lotus Sutra appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Known as the “King of Sutras,” the Lotus Sutra is one of the most influential texts in East Asian Buddhism. As the scriptural basis for the Tendai tradition, the dominant form of Buddhism in medieval Japan, it strongly influenced the newly developing schools of the time, including Nichiren, Pure Land, and Zen Buddhism. Centuries later, the teachings in the Lotus are likewise foundational to those schools’ counterparts in the West, something contemporary practitioners are often unaware of.

First recorded in first-century BCE India, the Lotus continued to evolve over the next three centuries. It came to be understood by its adherents as the Buddha’s final teaching, and, as the “one vehicle” (Skt., ekayana), it claimed to include, and supersede, all earlier teachings. The Lotus’s core tenets, such as the notion that enlightenment is available to all and its emphasis on earlier teachings as skillful means, came to characterize Mahayana Buddhism in East Asia.

With its extravagant and cryptic narratives, the Lotus is a text many readers may find daunting, but that needn’t be the case any longer. In Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side: A Guide to the Lotus Sutra, scholars Jacqueline Stone and Donald Lopez Jr. make this sacred text accessible with a chapter-by-chapter guide, covering the scripture’s origins, its evolution, and its defining influence on later schools.

Named after an iconic scene from the sutra in which two buddhas—a radical statement on the plurality of buddhahood—sit together within a jeweled stupa, the book traces the Lotus Sutra’s many iterations, with special emphasis on one of its most famous interpreters and proponents, the Japanese Buddhist priest Nichiren (1222–1282 BCE).

Lopez and Stone expand their exegesis to a broader discussion of how religions evolve to accommodate their adherents’ contemporary realities. I sat down to speak with Lopez and Stone about Two Buddhas in a podcast interview last fall.

Lopez, the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan, and Stone, who recently retired from her position as Professor of Japanese Religions at Princeton University, are together two of the foremost scholars of Buddhist studies.

—James Shaheen

***

Why should, say, a Zen practitioner read the Lotus Sutra?

Jacqueline Stone: My own bias is that practice is only going to be enhanced by doctrinal and historical understanding. But apart from that, the Lotus Sutra has been one of the most influential Buddhist texts in East Asia.

How so?

The Tendai (Chinese, Tiantai) tradition [widely revered in China, Korea, and Japan], through its embrace of the Lotus, shaped Pure Land, Zen, and Nichiren approaches to practice. The Lotus Sutra’s claims that all teachings are encompassed in one vehicle, that the truth realized by the Buddha is inherent in all things, and that buddhahood is open to all have influenced Buddhist thinking across denominations.

In the broader East Asian religious culture, the metaphors and parables in the Lotus Sutra—such as the three carts and the burning house, the gem and the robe, and the story of the great physician—are important to Buddhist art and literature. These images are represented again and again, reworked into tales, poetry, and drama. And the two buddhas seated side by side inside a stupa floating in the air—from which we took the title of our book—appear often in East Asian Buddhist painting and sculpture. I think that whatever one’s particular persuasion—whether a Zen practitioner, a Pure Land devotee, or a follower of Nichiren—they will learn more about their own tradition from exposure to this text.

How are the parables used to teach in the text?

Donald Lopez: The Lotus is most famous in the West for its teaching of the one vehicle, which is portrayed in several of the sutra’s parables, most notably in the parable of the burning house.

The children of a wealthy father are playing in a large house when a fire breaks out. The children are so engrossed in their games that they pay no attention to their father’s pleas to get out. It’s a bad fire. There isn’t time for him to go in and take them out one by one. He tells them, if you come out, I have some carts for you. There’s a cart that’s drawn by a deer, a cart that’s drawn by a sheep, and a cart that’s drawn by an ox. That gets the children’s attention and they all come out, but they find just one cart drawn by a large white ox. Nonetheless, they’re overjoyed to have this beautifully adorned vehicle, much grander than any their father had originally promised.

The Lotus Sutra has been one of the most influential Buddhist texts in East Asia.

And so the Buddha says: I’m the father, all sentient beings are my children, and in order to get them to flee the conflagration of samsara, the realm of rebirth, I tell them that there are three vehicles to salvation. One is the vehicle of the shravaka, or the disciple; one is the vehicle of the pratyekabuddha, or the solitary enlightened one; and one is the vehicle of the bodhisattva. But in fact, there’s just one: the one great vehicle, the buddhayana, the Buddha vehicle; or ekayana, the single vehicle that takes all beings to buddhahood.

This is the most famous parable among many in the Lotus Sutra because it teaches that there really is just one vehicle, and that everyone is going to become a bodhisattva and then a buddha instead of an arhat, the goal of what scholars call “mainstream Buddhism,” represented today by the Theravada. 

The Lotus Sutra doesn’t deny that the Buddha taught the four noble truths, the eightfold path, and so on. All those things are accepted. The previous tradition is not rejected at all; it’s simply reinterpreted.

After recounting the parable of the burning house, the Buddha asks his disciple Shariputra a question: Did the father lie when he told the children that there were three vehicles? Was that a falsehood? And Shariputra says: No, because he wanted to save the lives of his beloved children. He used this expedient device to get them out.

Can you say more about that term, “expedient device”?

JS: “Expedient device” or “skillful means”—there are multiple translations. This is the idea that the Buddha has the wisdom to assess the capacity of the people he’s addressing and express himself in a way that they can understand. And so in a way we could say that all the Buddha’s teachings are expedient means because they were addressed to specific people at specific moments and they worked for those people at that time. The Lotus Sutra makes this claim. But underneath all of those teachings, it says, there’s a unified aim: Ultimately they are leading people toward a single goal—that of buddhahood itself.

So there’s a polemical strategy here, right?

JS: Definitely. This is Mahayana Buddhism, which was positioning itself against the Buddhist mainstream. And so we have here a tremendous re-visioning of the entire received tradition. 

What do you mean when you use the term “mainstream” Buddhism? 

DL: What we are trying to name is the tradition of Buddhism before the Mahayana began, which was probably several centuries after the Buddha’s death. We now know with some certainty that the Mahayana, despite its great fame in East Asia, remained a minority tradition throughout its long history in India. Everything else we just call the “mainstream.” These mainstream schools, of which there were many, tended to reject the Mahayana sutras, saying that they were not the word of the Buddha. They maintained the nirvana of the arhat as the ideal. This is not to say that they did not speak of the bodhisattva. Rather, they saw the bodhisattva as the rare figure who foregoes the path of the arhat to follow the longer bodhisattva path. The Lotus says that the nirvana of the arhat does not ultimately exist and that all beings can become bodhisattvas and thus buddhas.

JS: The Lotus Sutra extols the bodhisattva path as a path that everyone should follow in order to become a buddha. The compilers—Mahayana practitioners—faced the very difficult task of explaining why the Buddha himself didn’t teach that, then, instead of offering the path of the arhat that leads to personal nirvana, the extinction of desire, and the stopping of the wheel of rebirth. 

The Lotus Sutra’s answer, again, is that the Buddha preached to different people according to their capacity, but underlying those diverse teachings was his final intention: to lead everyone to the single goal of buddhahood. 

Why don’t we take that a little bit further: What does the Lotus Sutra do to legitimize itself or to give itself authority?

JS: The Lotus positions itself as the Buddha’s supreme teaching. And it does that in many ways. First of all, it’s presented as the Buddha’s final teaching. He’s about to enter nirvana, and so he preaches the sutra.

In the opening chapter, there’s a scene where the Buddha emerges from meditation and flowers fall from the sky and the earth shakes. The bodhisattva Maitreya, who is supposed to be the next buddha and therefore should be extremely wise, doesn’t know what’s going on, so he asks the more experienced bodhisattva Manjushri what’s happening. Manjushri recalls a scene from unfathomable kalpas [eons] ago, in the age of another buddha. Shortly before that buddha entered nirvana, the same signs appeared, and immediately afterward he preached the Sutra of the Lotus Blossom of the Wonderful Dharma.That’s what Shakyamuni is now going to do.

So the Lotus positions itself as both the final teaching and one that’s older than anything recorded in the Buddhist tradition. And most interestingly, it repeatedly refers to itself in the course of the text. It’s an actor in its own script, if you will. 

So how was this idea—that the Lotus was his final teaching—received? 

DL: There were many in India who rejected the claim that the Mahayana sutras were the word of the Buddha. Great scholars like Nagarjuna, Bhaviveka, and Shantideva wrote defenses of the Mahayana over the course of centuries, so we know that the criticism never went away.

But the Lotus Sutra also legitimizes itself in other ways. Of course, the mainstream criticism would be: If the Buddha taught this, why do we have no record of it being taught? If the Buddha taught this, why is it not in the Tripitika, the previously accepted canon?

There are ways of legitimizing that don’t rest on the historical question of was this or was this not preached by the Buddha.

As the Buddha is about to preach the Lotus Sutra, he says, “I’m now going to begin teaching. I’m going to teach you something I’ve never taught before. I’m going to reveal the true teaching.” Five thousand monks and nuns get up and walk out. The Buddha doesn’t stop them.

The sutra is therefore saying that five thousand monks and nuns didn’t hear him preach it and therefore they don’t know about it. For the sutra’s champions, this passage provided a reason why so many claimed that the Lotus was not taught by the Buddha; they were among those who walked out when he began to teach it. 

That’s pretty clever. In your new book, Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side, we’re looking at two different things: the sutra as it has come down to us from the time of its composition, some three or four hundred years after the Buddha, and then the centuries of interpretation that followed. So if I read the Lotus Sutra, I’m not going to pick up what Nichiren [1222–1282 CE] extrapolated from it hundreds of years after its composition. 

JS: Right. That was precisely one of the reasons for doing the book. On the one hand, it is a chapter-by- chapter guide to the Lotus Sutra—a text that speaks in mythic imagery rather than discursively, so it’s very hard to read cold, without background explanation. At the same time, we conceived of this as a study in religious interpretation—how people reimagine or refigure their traditions in response to changing circumstances. Part of the book, then, looks at the way that Nichiren, roughly a thousand years later at the extreme opposite end of Asia, took the Lotus Sutra and the long tradition of its interpretation and reworked them to fit the needs of his time. We conceived of the book as an introduction to this problem of how religions stay alive and readjust to changing circumstances. 

In the modern era, we face exposure to all sorts of different beliefs, and there is no really good reason for deciding that one’s own is superior to anyone else’s. But we still have to find value in the foundational texts. As you discussed, in Pali Buddhism, or Theravada, that meaning seems to rest on the claim that the teachings were the words of the Buddha. Yet like Nichiren, we have to come back to some texts and interpret them in ways that are relevant to our time. Is that right?

And further, all religious texts try to make a claim to authenticity, and they have various ways of doing it. But if we acknowledge the role that interpretation has played historically in the teaching of not only the Lotus but really all Buddhists texts, and that we’re not looking at them as the actual words of the Buddha, how do we then read them in a fruitful way? How do I understand its historical context and at the same time find great spiritual value in it?

JS: This is not a new issue. I think, for example, about Japan in the early 20th century when Buddhist leaders there had their first encounters with European Buddhist Studies. At the time, the Pali canon was thought by Western researchers to be closest to the direct preaching of the historical Buddha. We now know that the matter is much more complex, but at that time, the Mahayana was often considered a later, degenerate form. Japanese Buddhist scholars, many of whom were also Buddhist priests, had to find a way to reclaim the Mahayana, their own tradition, and they did this by saying, OK, maybe the Mahayana teachings weren’t the direct words of the historical person, Shakyamuni. But if we take seriously the idea that all people have buddhanature and access to buddha wisdom, there is no reason why new forms of that message can’t appear in order to inspire people and answer the needs of the present. It’s an argument based on what’s deep and compelling philosophically rather than on historical origins. There are ways of legitimizing that don’t rest on the historical question of was this or was this not preached by the Buddha.

What I tell my students is that any practitioner-believer, someone involved in a tradition—whether consciously or not—is involved in a process of “hermeneutical triangulation,” as we might call it. They are continually having to negotiate between the received tradition and the social, political, and historical circumstances in which they live. At any moment, some parts of the received tradition are going to speak more powerfully, more cogently, than others. Other elements that perhaps were important in the past may now become marginalized; still others may be interpreted in novel ways. Practitioners are continually involved in this process. The more conscious one is of engaging in it, the more effective new adaptations of tradition are likely to be. 

DL: Before we began the book and perhaps even more strongly after we finished it, Jackie and I both felt that one’s appreciation of the Lotus Sutra is enhanced by understanding the circumstances of its composition. Rather than thinking of it as a transcendent truth that an unknown buddha taught billions of years ago and that all the buddhas teach over and over again through time, we might think of it instead as the product of a creative yet beleaguered community of Buddhist monks and nuns in India who knew doctrine very well, monks and nuns who were visionaries able to compose a text that from every perspective is a religious and literary masterpiece. We see the Lotus as a text that is able to take the tradition and reinterpret it for its devotees’ own time in a way that welcomes all sentient beings onto the great vehicle to buddhahood, a text that has passages whose beauty will make you weep. Speaking for myself, that in many ways is more inspiring than to think of it simply as the words of a distant transcendent being. 

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