Donald Lopez & Jacqueline Stone - How To Read The Lotus Sutra

So much in the Lotus Sutra — the teaching of the one vehicle, the Buddha’s use of skillful means, and the revolutionary idea that there can be more than one buddha in the world at a time — has become fundamental and foundational material for Mahayana Buddhism. But why is this sutra so difficult to understand? Professors Jacqueline Stone and Donald Lopez, Jr. have written a chapter-by-chapter guide to the Lotus Sutra, a highly readable commentary that flips between ancient India and medieval Japan. In this interview, James Shaheen talks to the two professors about their work.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Tricycle Talks.

I'm James Shaheen,

Editor and publisher of Tricycle the Buddhist Review.

The first time I read the Lotus Sutra,

I struggled to get through it.

Like many others,

I was turned off by the over-the-top scenes of thousands of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas,

Ornate metaphors and confusing parables.

It's difficult to wrap one's head around,

Let alone follow.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks,

We shed some light on this ancient Buddhist text.

I spoke with two of today's foremost scholars of Buddhism,

Jacqueline Stone and Donald Lopez Jr.

Together,

They have written a chapter-by-chapter guide to the Lotus Sutra that makes this seemingly arcane text accessible to today's practitioner.

Lopez is the Arthur E.

Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan.

As a translator and historian,

His seminal work has helped shape the modern study of Buddhism.

Jacqueline Stone recently retired from her position as Professor of Japanese Religions at Princeton University.

She is one of the most prominent scholars in the study of Buddhism in East Asia,

Where the Lotus Sutra has had the most influence.

Their new book,

Two Buddhas Seated Side-by-Side,

A Guide to the Lotus Sutra,

Is a highly readable commentary that flips between third-century India,

When the Sutra was written,

And 13th-century Japan,

When it took on a new meaning and inspired the renegade Buddhist priest Nichiren to found a new school.

Jackie and Dawn,

Thank you for joining us.

Our pleasure.

Thank you for having us.

Okay,

I'd like to start with just the basics so our listeners get a little bit of a background of what we're talking about.

First,

This very simple question,

What is the Lotus Sutra and when was it written and maybe who wrote it?

Well,

The Lotus Sutra is a Mahayana Sutra.

Its name in Sanskrit is Sadharma Pundarika,

The white lotus of the true Dharma.

Scholars believe that it was composed probably beginning maybe in the first century before the common era,

Starting around 100 to 50 BCE,

And it evolved over 300 years.

So the final version that we have probably was concluded sometime around 220 of the common era.

It's very difficult for us to date texts in India.

And so what we often do is to try to look at when it was first translated into Chinese because we know it was done by then.

And the first translation was in 286.

And so that's the date.

So it began to be composed about 400 years after the Buddha's death.

Okay,

And so although it was first composed in India,

It really found its home and its influence largely in East Asia.

Is that correct?

That's correct.

In China,

Sutras were gradually introduced.

They were brought in at random by monks coming over the Silk Road.

And people began to read these texts and realize that they all have different viewpoints.

But they were presumably the teachings of one man,

The historical Buddhist Shakyamuni.

So there was a presumption that there must be some underlying principle that would tie all of these disparate teachings together.

And people found that in the Lotus Sutra.

So that was one reason for its tremendous popularity.

Okay,

Well,

This isn't a trick question,

But I know it's a difficult one.

What did it teach or what didn't it teach?

Well,

I think it's most famous in the West for its teaching of the one vehicle.

And this is most famously portrayed in the parable of the burning house.

So a wealthy father,

Who seemed to be a widower,

Has a beautiful house,

Which is in fact in some disrepair inside.

His children are playing in the house when a fire breaks out.

And the children are so engrossed in their games that they pay no attention to their father's screams to get out of the burning house.

It's a bad fire.

He knows that he can't get them out individually because there's not time.

So he calls out and says,

I have three carts for you.

There's a cart that's drawn by a deer,

A cart that's drawn by a goat,

And a cart that's drawn by an ox.

That gets the children's attention.

They all come out.

And there's just one beautiful cart drawn by a beautiful white ox.

And they're happy.

They're overjoyed to have this beautifully adorned vehicle.

So that's the story.

And so the Buddha says,

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 Sravaka or the disciple.

One is the vehicle of the Pratyekabuddha or the individually enlightened one.

And one is the vehicle of the Bodhisattva.

But in fact,

There's just one.

It's just the one great vehicle,

The Buddha-yana,

The Buddha vehicle,

The Ekayana,

The single vehicle that takes all beings to enlightenment.

So that's the famous among the several parables in the Lotus Sutra.

This is the most famous because it teaches that there really is just one vehicle.

Everybody's going to become a Bodhisattva and then a Buddha.

So there's also a little bit of a polemical strategy here,

Right?

I mean,

It's an explanation as to why the Buddha would have taught something that's not necessarily true or superior.

Is that right?

Definitely.

This is a Mahayana Sutra.

The Mahayana is positioning itself against the mainstream.

And so we have here a tremendous revisioning of the entire received tradition.

And the Mahayana is the Lotus Sutra in particular is extolling the Bodhisattva path,

Not just as something that Buddhas tread in order to become Buddhas,

But a path that everyone should perhaps follow to become a Buddha.

And so they're faced with a very difficult task of explaining,

Well,

If that's the case,

Why didn't the Buddha himself teach that instead of offering the path leading to personal nirvana and the extinction of desire and the stopping of the wheel of rebirth?

And so the answer of the Lotus Sutra is that he preaches to different people according to their capacity.

But underlying that is this intention to lead everyone to this single goal of Buddhahood.

And of course,

The Lotus Sutra doesn't actually contain the phrase Buddha nature.

That's a later development.

But the idea that anyone can become a Buddha is really one of the key teachings.

We have there the parable of the gem in the robe,

Also very famous.

Did I go over that one?

Yeah,

Sure.

That would be great.

So a traveler is about to set out on a journey.

He's visiting at a friend's house.

They have a farewell meal and consume quite a bit to drink.

The traveler becomes drunk,

Falls asleep,

And his friend wishing to provide for him takes this precious jewel and sews it into the hem of his robe.

But this traveler has no idea that he possesses this treasure.

So he goes on and he wanders for years and becomes poor and destitute and is reduced to a very miserable state and encounters his friend again,

Who says,

Why did this happen to you?

I gave you this priceless jewel.

And he checks in his robe and yes,

It's there.

So the idea that we possess the treasure of Buddhahood,

Even if we don't realize it,

Is another central teaching.

That's great.

I just want to go back for a moment and talk about what it was that the Lotus Sutra was really responding to.

You referred to mainstream Buddhism a few times.

Could you just first let us know what you mean when you use the term mainstream Buddhism?

So we have these terms that we see all the time,

Mahayana and Hinayana,

For example.

Hinayana is a really pejorative term.

It's a real put down.

We translate it rather gently as the the lesser vehicle,

The individual vehicle,

But it means the low vehicle,

The base vehicle.

And so it's a term that's never used by those who follow that form of Buddhism.

And so what we really are trying to name is what was the tradition of Buddhism before the Mahayana began,

Which probably began again several centuries after the Buddha's death.

And we now know,

I think,

With some certainty that the Mahayana,

Despite its great fame in East Asia,

Remained a minority tradition throughout its long history in India.

And so everything else we just call the mainstream and the Mahayana is something that is that veered off from that.

So it's not simply the Buddhism that we now see,

The Theravada tradition of Southeast Asia.

There were many schools that rejected the Mahayana Sutras as the word of the Buddha.

We know that because work like the Lotus Sutra and many others are constantly defending their authenticity as the word of the Buddha.

And we have great scholars like Nagarjuna,

Bhaviveka,

Shanti Deva,

Writing defenses of the Mahayana over courses of centuries.

So we know that this never went away,

That this criticism that these texts were not the word of the Buddha.

So why don't we take that a little bit further?

What does the Lotus Sutra do to legitimize itself or to give authority to itself or create a sense that it's authentic,

The authentic teaching?

I mean,

It works very,

Very hard to do that.

I mean,

All religious texts try to make a claim to authenticity and they have various ways of doing it.

But it's so salient to the Lotus Sutra,

Which may make it a little bit different because it's just right there.

And it's very aggressive in that way.

Is that correct?

Is that fair to say?

And what is authority then in Buddhism?

It positions itself as the Buddha's supreme teaching.

And it does that in many ways,

A lot of very clever literary devices employed in the Sutra.

First of all,

It's presented as the Buddha's final teaching.

He's about to enter Nirvana and so he preaches this Sutra.

In the opening chapter,

We have a scene where the Buddha emerges from meditation and flowers fall from the sky and the earth shakes and Maitreya,

The Bodhisattva who is supposed to be the next Buddha and therefore should be pretty wise,

Doesn't know what's going on.

And so he asks a more experienced Bodhisattva,

Manjushri,

What's happening?

And Manjushri recalls a scene from before the time of the earliest Buddha,

Cosmic ages past mentioned in the received tradition and talks about long,

Long,

Infathomable kalpas ago.

There was a Buddha and before he entered Nirvana,

We saw the same signs and then he preached the Sutra of the Lotus Blossom of the Wonderful Dharma.

So I think that's about what Shakyamuni is going to do.

So it positions itself as the final Sutra.

It positions itself as a Sutra that's older than anything recorded in the Buddhist tradition.

And most interestingly,

It's constantly referring to itself.

It's an actor in its own script,

As you will.

And one passage that I particularly like that works as a tremendous legitimation says that the benefits of somebody who embraces this Sutra and practices it in an evil age after the Buddha's passing will enjoy benefits that are beyond even the wisdom of the Buddha to understand.

When we're talking about the way the Sutra legitimizes itself,

It also does it in more prosaic ways because 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 Tripitaka?

Why is it not in the Canon?

And so as the Buddha is about to preach the Lotus Sutra,

He says,

Okay,

I'm now going to begin teaching.

I'm going to teach you something I've never taught before this.

I'm going to reveal the true teaching 5,

000 monks and nuns get up and walk out and the Buddha says,

Shariputra says,

What are they doing?

Should I stop them?

Let them go.

And so of course what it's saying is,

Of course,

5,

000 monks and nuns didn't hear him preach it and therefore they don't know about it.

It's their fault.

That's pretty clever.

It takes care of that.

So let's talk about the book for a second.

I mean,

It seems to have a dual function.

You teach us about the Lotus Sutra at the time that it was written and what it came to mean a thousand years later to say Nichiren in medieval Japan.

Can you say a little bit about that?

Because we're really looking at two different things.

We're looking at this original document or as it existed after three or 400 years since its origins and then all of a sudden we're looking at something very different.

So in other words,

If I read the Lotus Sutra,

I'm not going to pick up what Nichiren teaches.

Right.

And that in a way was precisely one of the reasons for doing the book,

One of the points behind it.

On the one hand,

It is a chapter by chapter guide to the Lotus Sutra.

A much needed one.

Yes.

Because it's a text that speaks in mythic imagery rather than discursively.

It's very hard to read cold.

And so that sort of guide was necessary.

But at the same time,

What holds these two disparate poles that you mentioned together is we conceived of this as a study in religious interpretation,

How people reimagine or refigure their traditions in response to changing circumstances.

So part of the book looks at the compilation of the Lotus Sutra as a way these Mahayana thinkers,

Practitioners were responding to the earlier tradition and reworking that earlier tradition in light of their new goal of the Bodhisattva.

And then a thousand years later at the extreme opposite end of Asia,

We have the figure Nichiren who is taking the Lotus Sutra and the long received tradition of its interpretation and reworking that to fit the needs of his time.

So we conceived of it as an introduction to this problem of how religions stay alive and readjust to changing circumstances.

Right.

You know what I found really helpful?

I think it was an interview we did with you,

Don.

You mentioned that in a similar way,

The New Testament saw itself as a fulfillment of the old.

So they make the Old Testament in that way inferior and they rethink it.

Exactly.

And so the Buddha in the Lotus Sutra is not denying that he taught all those things,

That he taught the Four Noble Truths,

The Eightfold Path.

All those things are accepted.

But now as he reaches the end of his life,

He wants to say,

I now need to tell you the truth.

And in fact,

In the parable of the burning house,

The first thing he says to Shri Putra,

Did the father lie when he told the children that there were three vehicles away?

Was that a lie?

And Shri Putra says no,

Because he wanted to save the lives of his beloved children.

And therefore he used this,

As we say,

Expedient device to get them out.

And so that the tradition,

The previous tradition is not rejected at all.

It's simply reinterpreted.

And so it's all about interpretation in a given historical moment,

As the moment of the composition of the sutra and the community that created that,

The monks and nuns who wrote this text and the charges they faced from this community of the mainstream,

As we're calling it.

And then the community that Nichiren lived in and all the things that he had to face,

Which were quite substantial.

Well,

You know,

You used the term expedient means.

Can you say more about that?

Because that's pretty important.

Expedient means are skillful means,

Expedient devices.

There are a lot of different translations.

But 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.

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.

And the Lotus Sutra makes this claim.

That's how we tie them all together.

There's the parable of the plants that some are small,

Some are medium height,

And some are tall,

So people are very in capacity.

The reign of the Dharma falls equally.

Underneath all of that,

There's an underlying message.

These are leading people toward a goal that is unified.

Of course,

This raises the question of could the Buddha teach directly without skillful means?

Is the Lotus Sutra itself a skillful means?

Or does it transcend all means?

Is it absolute in itself?

And of course,

These were issues that were debated at great length.

A skillful means is a way to express some aspect of the Dharma that's going to help the person hearing it to understand.

So the Buddha is often just talked about as a doctor,

And he's not the sort of the quack who sells the same snake oil to everybody to cure everything.

He adapts the medicine to the malady.

In each case,

He knows what's in the mind.

He knows their interests.

He knows their capacities and teaches what's best for them.

So the question is,

What was really in the Buddha's own mind?

What did he really think when he adapted his teachings?

And the Lotus claims to be that definitive teaching is final statement.

But then we have other Mahayana Sutras,

Which make the exact same claim,

Which say something different than the Lotus.

So the great conundrum for the Mahayana exegete is to decide which among these sutras is the Buddha's final statement.

And in that case,

How did the others become expedient devices?

So even those,

Though,

Who think that the Lotus Sutra is the definitive teaching,

The final teaching,

The one vehicle,

Its proponents even disagree about what that one vehicle is or means.

So could you talk a little bit about the one vehicle and how it's been understood differently?

Okay.

I think we could say that there are two different,

Broadly speaking,

Two different strands of interpretation that emerge out of this.

If we look,

For example,

At the Tendai tradition that develops in Japan,

For example,

There we can see clearly two different lines of interpretation about the one vehicle.

One is that this is an ineffable truth.

It cannot be fully expressed in words.

It cannot be taught except through skillful means.

So correctly understood as the ocean into which all rivers flow.

The one vehicle is what the Buddha has realized,

The enlightenment he has realized,

And what he is leading all other beings to realize.

And so one thread of interpretation is that when one practices without understanding any form of practice,

Seating in meditation,

Chanting the Buddha's name,

Reciting sutras,

Copying texts,

Commissioning Buddha images,

Any of that could be the practice of the Lotus Sutra.

It's all going to lead one to supreme enlightenment if one has that understanding.

Then there's another school of thought that allies the notion of the one vehicle to a specific practice that is now going to transcend everything else.

You mentioned at one point in another writing the Lotus Sutra as pedagogical model.

Could you explain that a little bit?

That's essentially what you're saying.

Does the Lotus Sutra have propositional content?

Is there any real doctrinal substance there?

And as I mentioned,

It does not teach discursively.

And there we have these tremendous,

Fabulous imaginative scenes,

These wonderful parables and metaphors,

But very little ABC spelling out of doctrine.

So some people,

Both in Asia and certainly in the West,

Have raised the criticism that there's nothing here.

It's a text with an empty center.

It's nothing but self praise.

And others say,

No,

The sutra is enacting the way that the Buddha taught.

In other words,

His skillful means are not separate from the truth that they're meant to illustrate.

For example,

There might be no other path other than those three vehicles.

Right.

You know,

I want to just stop for a minute and ask a question.

I don't know what our listeners are thinking,

But you know,

We have Pure Land practitioners,

We have Nichiren practitioners,

We have students of Zen,

And they might ask,

And they have asked the other day,

A Zen student asked me,

What are you going to be doing in the next podcast?

And I said,

We'll be talking about the Lotus Sutra.

And he had not read it,

Or he tried to read it and stopped.

He found it too daunting.

And his question was,

Why would I read that?

Not guessing for a moment that so much of his practice,

How he thought and how he even understood Buddhism was shaped by this sutra.

Can you explain how and why that's true?

Oh,

My own bias,

Of course,

Is that practice is only going to be enhanced by doctrinal and historical understanding.

But apart from that,

The Lotus Sutra is arguably one of the most influential Buddhist texts in East Asia.

And the Tenne tradition shapes Pure Land belief and practice.

It shapes Zen practice.

So many streams of Buddhist thought and discipline come out of the tradition that is rooted in the Lotus Sutra.

And then not only that,

But in the broader religious culture,

The metaphors of the Lotus Sutra,

The parables,

The three carts in the burning house,

The gem in the robe,

The story of the great physician.

These things are important to Buddhist art.

Those images are represented again and again,

The two Buddhists seated side by side in the title of the volume,

A very key image in the sutra.

It's important to understanding Buddhist visual culture and literary culture.

The phrases and imagery of the sutra are reworked into tales,

Poetry,

Drama.

I think that whatever one's particular persuasion,

Whether one's a Zen practitioner,

Or a Pure Land devotee,

Or a follower of Nichiren,

One's going to learn a lot more about one's own tradition from some exposure to this text.

You mentioned the title of the book,

Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side.

That's rich,

It means a lot of different things.

Why don't you talk a little bit about that and explain to us what that book title means?

So there's a scene in the sutra in which a great rumbling is heard,

And a giant stupa emerges from beneath the earth.

And from inside the stupa,

A voice is heard.

This is kind of scary in Buddhist context,

Because a stupa is supposed to contain the burned up bones of a past Buddha.

And to hear a voice coming from inside is a bit eerie.

This stupa is floating in the air.

And Shakyamuni Buddha,

The audience of course,

Asks,

What's his voice?

Shakyamuni Buddha says,

Would you like me to open the door?

And the text actually says that he leaves his finger and you hear this kind of a creak of a door opening like in a horror movie,

As he pushes back the iron bolt.

And there is seated a beautiful,

Fully alive Buddha Prabhuta Ratna,

Who has vowed that he will always appear at the place where the lotus sutra is taught.

So Prabhuta Ratna scoots over on his seat and invites Shakyamuni to sit next to him.

And so we have two Buddhas seated next to each other.

Now,

Iconographically,

So what?

I mean,

What's the big deal here?

But when we go back to the earlier tradition,

This mainstream tradition,

We have one of the most famous Pali texts,

The questions of King Malinda.

So in a very famous Pali text,

The question of King Malinda,

Malinda asks Nagasena,

The monk,

Wouldn't it be easier if we had two Buddhas in the world that you can kind of help each other out and kind of tag team the Dharma,

You know,

It's not so exhausting.

And Malinda says,

No,

The presence of a Buddha in the world is of such cosmic importance in the language of the 60s.

It's so heavy that the world could not survive the presence of two Buddhas.

It would be like having a little canoe that just meant for one person,

A second person steps in and it starts to tip over and everything just kind of falls apart.

And so,

No,

There can only be one Buddha in the world for each cosmic age.

And so to have two Buddhas side by side,

Once they're two,

That means there can be three.

And if there can be three,

There can be a billion.

And those billion soon show up in the Lotus Sutra to hear Shakyamuni teach.

Oh,

That's great.

You're listening to Tricycle's editor and publisher,

James Shaheen,

In conversation with professors Donald Lopez and Jacqueline Stone,

Authors of Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side,

A Guide to the Lotus Sutra.

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Now,

Let's return to James Shaheen,

In conversation with Donald Lopez and Jacqueline Stone.

James Shaheen I want to talk a little bit about Nichiren a little bit because he's so important in your book.

And he's probably one of the,

If not the most well known interpreter of the Lotus Sutra.

I mean,

He shaped a whole school really.

So he's so important in the book.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about him,

Who he was,

What he thought and why he was considered so radical,

Really.

Nichiren is a Buddhist teacher who lives in the 13th century.

Not so important in his own lifetime,

Actually a rather marginal figure,

Oppositional figure.

But as you said,

He becomes very important.

There are more than 40 Buddhist schools,

Organizations,

Institutions today that claim descent from Nichiren.

I think it's no exaggeration to say that Nichiren followers dominate the practice of the Lotus Sutra in the contemporary world.

That was one reason that we chose him as a figure to focus on.

Another one was since we couldn't deal with the entire East Asian history of interpretation.

Nichiren is somebody who draws on many threads.

So he's a key figure to look at.

And also,

He so beautifully exemplifies this issue of how people reformulate their received tradition to meet the needs of his time.

Nichiren's time is an age of political upheaval.

There are a lot of internal troubles in Japan,

Famine,

Epidemics,

Threat of invasion by the Mongols.

Nichiren is coming out of the Tendai tradition.

From his perspective,

The Lotus Sutra had been established in Japan by Saicho several centuries earlier,

Founder of the Japanese Tendai school,

But was now becoming overshadowed or overwhelmed by other teachings,

Zen,

Pure Land,

The esoteric practices,

Which from Nichiren's standpoint are provisional teachings,

Expedient means.

And his feeling,

His conviction was that now in the final Dharma age,

This is this degenerate age that we live in predicted in the Sutras that after the Buddhist passing into Nirvana,

The capacity of human beings to receive and practice his teachings is going to decline.

And we are now in that age of decline.

And in that time of decline for Nichiren,

There is only one teaching powerful enough,

Profound enough to save all men and women,

And that is the Lotus Sutra.

So he saw that as the sole vehicle of liberation,

Of realizing Buddhahood in this time.

And he struggled to articulate a form of practice of the Lotus Sutra that would be accessible to all persons.

And he promoted the chanting of the Lotus Sutra's title in the phrase Nam-myoho-renge-kyo,

Or some people say Nam-um-myoho-renge-kyo,

You hear both pronunciations.

Here he was drawing on a tradition that we find on the East Asian mainland that the meaning of a sutra is in some sense completely encapsulated within the title.

The great sixth century Lotus Sutra exe-dee-jur-ee in his lecture on the Lotus Sutra profound meanings of the Lotus Sutra devotes more than two thirds of it to a discussion of the five Chinese characters,

Myoho-renge-kyo,

That they compose the title.

Nichiren is also educated in esoteric teachings.

So he very much has the idea of the mantra,

You know,

The sacred phrase that encompasses or encapsulates an enlightened state.

So he teaches this practice of chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

And his genius is really that he's able to take some tremendously sophisticated Mahayana thinking and weld it to this not easy,

But very simple practice.

And one of the key points of his teaching that I think really resonates today and that keeps this a living tradition is his insistence that not only is Buddhahood to be realized in this body,

Not after death in a pure land,

But as many people begin to practice the Lotus Sutra,

This world will be transformed into an ideal Buddha land.

And of course,

That idea has been interpreted in many ways by Nichiren's later followers.

But,

You know,

It's funny from now on when I hear something referred to as skillful means,

I'm going to think of it as an insult.

But one of the things is,

You know,

To reduce the practice,

To boil it down to the simple recitation of the title of the Lotus Sutra,

Leeds would ask the simple question,

Then why the Lotus,

I mean,

Not why study it,

But for Buddhists then or followers of people who venerate the Lotus Sutra,

Why is it necessary then if all that's necessary is the title?

I know that's a silly question,

But it would obviously come up for people who are reciting the Daimoku,

The title of the Lotus Sutra.

Why would they then read the Lotus Sutra if that's sufficient?

Or is this just a more democratizing approach to practice or to enlightenment?

It's accessible to everyone,

But it's assisted by reciting the text.

And Nichiren has two key chapters that,

Two in 16,

That he encouraged his followers to recite and then to study,

If they were to study also if they were literate.

One of the questions I have is,

And Don,

You've talked about this as well.

If we're not looking at this as the actual words of the Buddha and say you're a Mahayanist and you feel,

Oh,

I'm betraying the tradition,

I don't believe these are the actual words of the Buddha,

How do I read the Lotus Sutra then in a fruitful way?

Or how do I understand its historical context at the same time,

Find great spiritual value in it?

Like,

How do those two come together?

Well,

I think Jackie and I both felt before we began the book and maybe even more strongly after we finished it,

That one's appreciation of the Lotus Sutra is enhanced by understanding the circumstances of its composition.

Rather than thinking of it as this sort of transcendent truth that some Buddha taught a gazillion years ago,

And all the Buddhists teach it over and over again through time,

To think of it instead as the product of a creative,

Beleaguered community of Buddhist monks and nuns in India who knew doctrine very well,

Who were visionaries and were able to compose a text which is,

From every perspective,

A masterpiece,

A religious masterpiece,

A literary masterpiece,

A text that is able to take the tradition and reinterpret it for their own time in a way that is inclusive of all sentient beings and has passages that will make you weep with their beauty.

That,

Speaking for myself,

Is in many ways much more inspiring than to think of it as simply the words of this transcendent distant being.

Right.

Don't we all sort of face that in the modern era?

We look at our religious texts,

We understand them comparatively,

We are exposed to all sorts of different beliefs,

And there's no real good reason for deciding that one's is superior to anyone else's.

So then we have to still find value in those texts,

And they seem to rest on their authenticity,

And that authenticity seemed to rest on the fact that they were the words of the Buddha.

And yet,

Like Nichiren,

We have to come back to that text and interpret it perhaps in a way that is relevant to our time,

Just as you point out that he was doing.

Is that right?

Yes.

And if we think about it,

This is not a new issue.

I think about Japan in the early 20th century,

When they have their first encounters with European Buddhist studies.

And at the time,

The polycanon was thought to be a record of the direct preaching of the Buddha.

We now know that this is perhaps not the case,

In all instances.

So Japanese Buddhist scholars,

Many of whom were also Buddhist priests,

Had to find a way to reclaim the Mahayana.

And they did this by saying,

Okay,

Maybe it wasn't the direct words of this historical person Shakyamuni who lived and taught.

But if we take seriously the idea that all people have the Buddha nature and access to the Buddha wisdom,

There is no reason why new forms can't appear to inspire people,

And that answer the needs of the present,

That creatively use the resources of the past,

But interpret them in terms of the needs of the present.

And if we look at this philosophically,

It's really profound.

It's moving.

It's exciting.

That speaks to us today.

So I think there are ways of legitimizing that don't rest on historically was this or was this not preached by the historical Buddha?

Well,

Many of us don't seem to care as much as others.

There are those who find it very,

Very meaningful that these are.

It's the same in in Pali Buddhism,

The same insistence that these are the words of the Buddha.

Well,

With the Mahayana,

It's easier because we can date them a little bit better.

But you get the same thing.

People insist that the Buddha Vachana,

You know,

When they're reading the Pali Canon and so forth,

I like you find that's perfectly fine that these are the words of the Buddha.

These were the result of sort of collective sort of consciousness among a certain group of people at a certain time that continues to be interpreted.

So I think you say that reading a text is always a question always involves interpretation regardless.

Can you say something about that?

What I tell my students is any practitioner or believer,

Somebody involved in a tradition,

Whether it's conscious or not,

Is continually involved in a process of sort of hermeneutical triangulation we could call it.

So they are continually having to negotiate between the received tradition,

The social,

Political,

Historical circumstances in which they live,

And then their own position.

And so at any moment,

Some parts of the received tradition are going to speak more powerfully,

More cogently.

Others that maybe were important in the past now maybe become marginalized.

And those aspects that are treated with importance might be particularly relevant to this time or to one's own situation.

But practitioners are continually involved in this process.

And I think that the more conscious we are that we're doing that,

The more effectively it's going to be carried out.

Right.

And we may then revisit earlier emphases that we've overlooked,

Right?

And so we don't lose them.

I don't know if this is relevant.

I'm just I just throw it out there.

Is there any application of Paul Ricoeur's notion of second naivete here?

Does that resonate at all?

I think it does.

I mean,

That idea is that you begin with your first naivete in which you really don't know much about the historical circumstances of the work.

Then you do all of the study as scholars do of the additions,

The translations,

Knowing about the circumstances of its composition.

And that brings you to what he calls the second naivete,

Which then is bringing you back to moments of wonder and appreciation,

Which are similar to your first reading,

But informed by one's own study.

And so I think certainly in the case of the Lotus Sutra,

That's quite appropriate.

So you know,

The book itself,

I mean,

I'm really impressed that two people wrote it and it's so cohesive and it's such a smooth and an accessible read.

How did you work together?

Did you focus on different things?

Was it history and Nichiren in particular or medieval Japan was Jackie's area?

I don't know.

How did you guys do this?

So the way we decided to divide up the work was that I would draft the sections on India about that.

I would go through chapter by chapter,

Talk about what historical circumstances,

Final issues were at play in each one.

Then Jackie would then go and talk about what issues in that chapter were discussed by Nichiren.

She actually had the harder job because Nichiren never wrote a commentary on the Lotus Sutra.

He talks about all 28 chapters,

But never in the same place.

So she commands his entire corpus of works and was able to go and draw out from different letters and essays and commentaries on other works exactly what he said on each chapter.

Sometimes he didn't say anything about things that we think are super important.

Other times he would focus on a single phrase that we just kind of skim over.

So that was quite fascinating to see how that works.

So we wrote our individual sections and we sent them to each other.

She added some things to the Indian section.

I rarely added something to the Japanese section.

We worked on our prose to make sure that it read as if it were written by the same person.

So we went back and forth many different drafts and rounds of editing to get it to the final form.

Yeah.

Well,

I have to say the Lotus Sutra is a really tough text for the uninitiated.

And certainly the first time I read it,

I didn't finish it.

And it was only after I began reading commentary that I really started to get into it.

So this is a really accessible and clear presentation as step by step,

Chapter by chapter explication of the Lotus Sutra.

So there's no reason not to read the Lotus Sutra now,

At least if you have this book as a companion.

So Jackie,

You've just retired,

Don,

In a few years,

You're considering retirement.

So what's next?

I mean,

You both say you want to retire in order to work.

What does that mean?

It's just more time to translate,

More time to read Buddhist texts,

More time to write about Buddhism.

We're these sort of freakish people whose idea of fun is,

Our idea of fun is reading about and writing about Buddhism.

And we look forward to that in our retirement.

So is there any,

Is there anything that you want to say about the Lotus Sutra that you didn't get a chance to say,

I know we could talk forever,

But are there important things about it or why you wrote the book that you'd like to talk about or mention?

We've talked a lot about the Lotus Sutra's historical importance and the need for a chapter by chapter guide,

And also wanting to deal with this problem of religious reinterpretation.

But I think that the issue of making it accessible was something that we really cared about,

Because it is a tough read.

You don't know what's going on if you're not initiated into the interpretive tradition.

Even if you don't know what's going on,

Like the first time I read it,

There are some pretty wild scenes in there.

I guess the term you use at one point,

Perhaps with tongue in cheek,

Mahayana excess,

But what excess?

What beautiful excess?

Exactly.

It's a Baroque text in many ways.

I find something new in it every time that I read it.

I haven't read it many times at this point.

So I think we just wanted to share with people the delight and inspiration that we find in reading the text.

How did this collaboration come about?

Don wrote a book on the history of the Lotus Sutra's reception for Princeton University Press in their biographies of great religious books.

I was asked to be a reviewer of the manuscript and they told me the manuscript is too long.

Tell us what we could cut.

I told them there's a section in here that gives a blow by blow chapter by chapter summary of the Lotus Sutra.

For this book,

You don't need it,

But it's very valuable.

Why don't you cut it and encourage Professor Lopez to write a commentary on the Lotus Sutra?

I got that advice.

The anonymous readers were identified to me by our editor at the press.

And so I contacted Jackie and I said,

What about a book in which we have the Lotus Sutra from its origins in India and chapter by chapter,

How Nichunen,

A thousand years later and across the continent of Asia,

Saw that same text?

And thankfully she said yes.

Yeah,

It's an amazing book.

I hope you collaborate together again.

I mean,

It says so much about religion in general,

Really,

And how it evolves and how it's interpreted and how it becomes meaningful for different reasons at different times and how open I think the Lotus Sutra is to interpretation.

That's the last question I'll ask you.

Why is this so open to interpretation as opposed to other texts?

It lends itself so easily to that.

We could cite many reasons.

One is that the one vehicle is never articulated.

We read through the Lotus Sutra and the Buddha continually praises the one vehicle,

Everything I have done is to lead people to the one vehicle.

You should embrace the one vehicle.

You should teach the one vehicle.

You should commit your life to the propagation of the one vehicle.

What is it?

It's never explicitly stated.

So this invites and allows room for interpretation.

And I think the fact that it's not a text that's logically or discursively spelled out,

That it speaks in images.

Stupas rising out of the ground,

Lotus blossoms emerging from the ocean,

Dragon princesses attaining Buddhahood in front of the assembly,

Throngs of bodhisattvas coming out of the earth and bodhisattvas coming from other worlds.

All of these images are open to interpretation.

So I think it's a text that invites continual rethinking on the part of its devotees or people who simply are inspired by it.

I'll say something perhaps unrelated to close.

Our feature setter said it reads like a prelude to an event that never takes place.

That never takes place.

Exactly.

I mean,

So there is some question where in the Lotus Sutra is the Lotus Sutra because chapter is,

I'm going to teach the Lotus Sutra.

He says that chapter after chapter,

Does it ever happen?

And so exactly what that is.

But there's also,

I think,

Something very inspiring about that,

This element of enactment.

And in the medieval Japanese tradition of interpretation,

We find a phrase,

The solemn assembly on Eagle Peak is still present and has not yet dispersed.

So where and when is it happening?

It's happening here and now.

That's a great way to end.

Thanks again so much for joining us.

Thank you.

It was a real pleasure.

You've been listening to professors Donald Lopez Jr.

And Jacqueline Stone discuss their new book,

Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side,

A Guide to the Lotus Sutra,

Here on Tricycle Talks.

If you'd like to hear more episodes,

Visit us at tricycle.

Org slash podcast.

We'd love to hear your thoughts about the podcast.

Write us at feedback at tricycle.

Org or leave us a review on your podcast player.

Tricycle Talks is produced by Paul Ruest at Argo Studios in New York City.

I'm James Shaheen,

Editor and publisher of Tricycle,

The Buddhist Review.

Thank you for listening.

Reviews

Excellent. Almost skipped this one but so happy I didnt.