2023/07/29

*** Lotus Sutra KEY Teachings [from Wiki]

Teachings[edit]

One vehicle, many skillful means[edit]

This Lotus Sūtra is known for its extensive instruction 

The many 'skillful' or 'expedient' means and the "three vehicles" are revealed to all be part of the One Vehicle (Ekayāna), which is also the Bodhisattva path. 

This is also one of the first sutras to use the term Mahāyāna, or "Great Vehicle".

 In the Lotus Sūtra, the One Vehicle encompasses so many different teachings because the Buddha's compassion and wish to save all beings led him to adapt the teaching to suit many different kinds of people. 

As Paul Williams explains:[129]

Although the corpus of teachings attributed to the Buddha, if taken as a whole, embodies many contradictions, these contradictions are only apparent. Teachings are appropriate to the context in which they are given and thus their contradictions evaporate. The Buddha’s teachings are to be used like ladders, or, to apply an age-old Buddhist image, like a raft employed to cross a river. There is no point in carrying the raft once the journey has been completed and its function fulfilled. When used, such a teaching transcends itself.

The sutra emphasizes that all these seemingly different teachings are actually just skillful applications of the one Dharma and thus all constitute the "One Buddha Vehicle and knowledge of all modes". 

The Lotus Sūtra sees all other teachings are subservient to, propagated by and in the service of the ultimate truth of the One Vehicle leading to Buddhahood.[16] 

The Lotus Sūtra also claims to be superior to other sūtras and states that full Buddhahood is only arrived at by exposure to its teachings and skillful means.

All beings have the potential to become Buddhas[edit]

The dragon king´s daughter offers her priceless pearl to the Buddha. The narrative of her instantaneous attainment of Buddhahood was understood as a promise of the enlightenment of women.[130] Frontispiece of a 12th century Lotus Sutra handscroll.[131]

  • The One Vehicle doctrine defines the enlightenment of a Buddha (anuttara samyak sambhodi) as the ultimative goal and the sutra predicts that all those who hear the Dharma will eventually achieve this goal. 
  • Many of the Buddha´s disciples receive prophecies that they will become future Buddhas. 
  • Devadatta, who, according to the Pali texts, had attempted to kill the Buddha, receives a prediction of enlightenment.[132][133][134] 
  • Even those, who practice only simple forms of devotion, such as paying respect to the Buddha, or drawing a picture of the Buddha, are assured of their future Buddhahood.[135]
  • Although the term buddha-nature (buddhadhatu) is not mentioned once in the Lotus Sutra, Japanese scholars Hajime Nakamura and Akira Hirakawa suggest that the concept is implicitly present in the text.[136][137] 
  • Vasubandhu (fl. 4th to 5th century CE), an influential scholar monk from Ghandara, interpreted the Lotus Sutra as a teaching of buddha-nature and later commentaries tended to adopt this view.[138][139] 
  • Based on his analysis of chapter 5, Zhanran (711-778), a scholar monk of the Chinese Tiantai school, argued that insentient things also possess buddha-nature and in medieval Japan, the Tendai Lotus school developed its concept of original enlightenment which claimed the whole world to be originally enlighted.[140][141]

The nature of the Buddhas[edit]

Another key concept introduced by the Lotus Sūtra is the idea of the eternal Buddha, who achieved enlightenment innumerable eons ago, but remains in the world to help teach beings the Dharma time and again. 

The life span of this primordial Buddha is beyond imagination, his biography and his apparent death are portrayed as skillful means to teach sentient beings.[142][143] 

The Buddha of the Lotus Sūtra states:

In this way, since my attainment of Buddhahood it has been a very great interval of time. My life-span is incalculable asatkhyeyakalpas [rather a lot of aeons], ever enduring, never perishing. O good men! The life-span I achieved in my former treading of the bodhisattva path even now is not exhausted, for it is twice the above number. Yet even now, though in reality I am not to pass into extinction [enter final nirvana], yet I proclaim that I am about to accept extinction. By resort to these expedient devices [this skill-in-means] the Thus Come One [the Tathagata] teaches and converts the beings.[144]

The Buddhas Prabhūtaratna and Shakyamuni seated side-by-side in the jeweled stupa. Stele, bronze and gold, dated 518 CE

The idea that the physical death of a Buddha is the termination of that Buddha is graphically refuted by the appearance of another Buddha, Prabhûtaratna, who passed long before. In the vision of the Lotus Sūtra, Buddhas are ultimately immortal.

Crucially, not only are there multiple Buddhas in this view, but an infinite stream of Buddhas extending infinitely in space in the ten directions and through unquantifiable eons of time. 

The Lotus Sūtra illustrates a sense of timelessness and the inconceivable, often using large numbers and measurements of time and space.[citation needed]

According to Gene Reeves, the Lotus Sūtra also teaches that the Buddha has many embodiments and these are the countless bodhisattva disciples. These bodhisattvas choose to remain in the world to save all beings and to keep the teaching alive. Reeves writes, "because the Buddha and his Dharma are alive in such bodhisattvas, he himself continues to be alive. 

The fantastically long life of the Buddha, in other words, is at least partly a function of and dependent on his being embodied in others."[145] The Lotus Sūtra also teaches various dhāraṇīs or the prayers of different celestial bodhisattvas who out of compassion protect and teach all beings. 

The lotus flower imagery points to this quality of the bodhisattvas. The lotus symbolizes the bodhisattva who is rooted in the earthly mud and yet flowers above the water in the open air of enlightenment.[146]

Impact[edit]

According to Donald Lopez, the Lotus Sutra is "arguably the most famous of all Buddhist texts," presenting "a radical re-vision of both the Buddhist path and of the person of the Buddha."[147][note 10]

The Lotus Sutra was frequently cited in Indian works by Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, 

Candrakirti, Shantideva and several authors of the Madhyamaka and the Yogacara school.[148] 

The only extant Indian commentary on the Lotus Sutra is attributed to Vasubandhu.[149][150] 

According to Jonathan Silk, the influence of the Lotus Sūtra in India may have been limited, but "it is a prominent scripture in East Asian Buddhism."[151] 

The sutra has most prominence in Tiantai (sometimes called "The Lotus School"[152]) and Nichiren Buddhism.[153] It is also influential in Zen Buddhism.


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