And what I would like to do tonight is, first of all, talk about some practical things and then maybe introduce the Lotus Sutra, give a little context and background of the Lotus Sutra, and then maybe we could actually get into it tonight and start reading it and talking about it tonight. So the Lotus Sutra is a big sutra, a really famous sutra, and we only have so many weeks. Before I go into how I would like to highlight, what parts of it I'd like to highlight, I want to first of all apologize to you in advance for making a little schedule mistake, scheduling mistake, which I seem to do from time to time. I forgot to write down the dates of these classes and so I have conflicts with some of the classes. So there are two

[01:11]

Tuesday nights that I can't come to the class. So what I would like to do is add two Thursday nights, which I realize that everybody may not be able to make those Thursday nights, and so I'll give you the dates in a moment, but I want to welcome you to either come to the Tuesday nights and not the Thursday nights if you can't make it. You can still certainly attend the class, or to not take the class if you don't feel like you want to do that. And I'm sorry that's the case, but I'm kind of stuck right now. I can't get out of those two Tuesday night commitments. So I thought we would meet on Tuesday, May the 7th, Tuesday, May the 14th,

[02:12]

Thursday, May the 16th, Tuesday, May the 21st, Thursday, May the 23rd, and Tuesday, May the 28th. So that's six classes and two of them are on Thursday nights. What was the other Thursday night date, the 23rd and the 16th? So it's the 7th, Tuesday the 7th, Tuesday the 14th, Thursday the 16th, Tuesday the 21st, Thursday the 23rd, and Tuesday the 28th. Okay, so, and like I say, think it over and do whatever you think is best. And again, I do apologize.

[03:16]

It's one of those things where if I don't write something down, something else happens and that's the end of that. And sometimes you can get out of it, sometimes you can't. In these particular cases, I just, I tried and I can't get out of those things that I said I would do. So you're just meeting the 3rd and the 11th of June, basically. Yeah, yeah. The last two meetings. Is that right? Yeah, right. So I'm adding two up in the month of May. In a certain way, it might be nice because it'll immerse us a little bit more. Deeply into the Sutra in the sense that we'll be hitting it twice a week, it's going to feel, for those who can make it. So I will understand if you don't want to continue it. That's why I'm not sending out my usual sheet of who signed up. I'm going to wait until next week and see. You can decide, you know, between now and next week whether you want to stay with the class.

[04:19]

And you're welcome to come and not come to Thursday nights. I know for Green Gulch residents, I understand that's a night off and you might want to go out and do something different. Well, I know I'll be away on one of those Thursdays. Yeah, but that's fine with me, you know. But sometimes you might say, well gee, if I'm missing two classes, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to do it. So I'll give you a week to think it over and then next week I'll hand out the sheet and see who's going to stay with the class. So the next thing I'd like to do is talk to you a little bit about, first of all, the context of the Lotus Sutra, Mahayana Sutras in general, and which, because the Lotus Sutra is a Mahayana Buddhist Sutra, and I see looking around here that some of you know these things very well and others of you don't, so I'll kind of talk as if none of us knew any of it. And then I want to talk a little bit about the Lotus Sutra

[05:23]

itself, about the text that we're reading, and about some of the most important doctrines of the Lotus Sutra. And then I will tell you which chapters I think we should try to study in these six meetings, so you can have that. And then we'll start at the beginning and see what it says. I was told that the assumption was that we would order the text tonight, is that correct? Or is it already in the bookstore? It's in the bookstore, and I can go over there after class if you want. Thank you. Yeah, that'd be good. So, as you all know, I'm sure the Buddhist canon is very vast, right? There's a lot of text in it,

[06:33]

and the so-called early texts, or foundational texts, or sometimes called Hinayana texts, are really different from the Mahayana texts. In a way, I talked about this in my talk on Sunday. I talked about the difference between the Mahayana texts and the Hinayana texts. And I used the term Hinayana with quotation marks around it, just because it's a convenient historical distinction. But actually, the word Hinayana is a pejorative term. I don't like to use that word, but anyway, we'll use it tonight. So, those early texts are historical, relatively speaking brief, seem to take place on the planet Earth, more or less, involving this very wonderful and powerful spiritual teacher named Shakyamuni Buddha,

[07:41]

in which he speaks and tells about his teachings. And he's speaking to human beings who would like to put these teachings into practice, and he explains them, and he categorizes them, and so on. It's fairly straightforward stuff, very helpful, more or less down to Earth. There are some demons and supernatural creatures that appear from time to time, and there's some miracles that happen sometimes. But in general, you get the feeling that you can almost believe that these people really existed, and this guy really said this stuff, and so on. It's kind of like, in a way, like the Bible, where it sounds like the Earth, walking around, or guys, or people, various people. But the Mahayana sutras are called, in Sanskrit, vipulya sutras. Vipulya sutras,

[08:48]

and vipulya means extended, or amplified, or expanded. And these sutras are way, way longer than the other sutras, much, much longer. I mean, a really long sutra in the earlier canon might be, I mean, 50 pages would be a really long sutra. And a lot of the sutras are very short, you know, one page. There's different, various collections. Some of the collections are collections of just one-page sutras, or even less than a page. In the longer discourse, the sutras are up to maybe 50 pages, or 40 pages. That's a really long sutra, you know. All these Mahayana sutras, some of them run to the thousands of pages. The Lotus Sutra, I don't know how many pages in this book it is. Three, four hundred pages, what is it? Yeah, three hundred and some, three hundred and some pages. So far, far longer than the earlier texts. And they don't really take place on Earth. They take place, you know, in some

[09:53]

world, kind of beyond space and time. And they're very extravagant in their poetry, in their parables. And many of them are long on enthusiasm, and sometimes short on doctrine, or logic even, you know. So they're wonderful to read, in a way. You know, you really can get into them. And I hope that as part of our class, we will read out loud, maybe either in unison, or one by one, or something like that, just as a way of appreciating the sutras and how they sound. Each of the Mahayana sutras is kind of a whole world in itself, whereas the earlier sutras were detailing this or that, teaching, understanding that there were other sutras that were talking about other teachings. The Mahayana sutras are like a whole world in themselves, each one trying to, from a different perspective, present the whole dharma, so that all you need to do is

[10:59]

read this sutra, and that's all you need, you know, that kind of feeling. And in fact, there were different schools, unlike with the Hinayana sutras, with the Mahayana sutras, there would be a school that would rise up, that would venerate this sutra, or study only this sutra, or believe that only this sutra was the best, because each one was a kind of complete and full expression of the dharma in itself, didn't need the others. Whereas the so-called Hinayana sutras, once they were written down, more were written down over a period of maybe one or two hundred years, and then there was a canon that was closed, and that was that. With the Mahayana sutras, the situation is much more vague, you know, there are many, many, many, many Mahayana sutras, some of which are recognized by some schools, and others by other schools, and just really, just almost as if there's an outpouring of these scriptures, which purport to be

[12:03]

words of the Buddha, but clearly are much later. There are some Mahayana sutras that are quite early, but most of the Mahayana sutras are much later than the original canon. It appears as if the Mahayana movement, which is characterized by an emphasis on this kind of enthusiastic way of, and devotional way of understanding Buddhism, but also emphasizing compassion and universality, that's why it's called Mahayana, which means the great vehicle, as opposed to the Hinayana, which means lesser vehicle. The Mahayana is supposed to be teaching for everyone, everybody can join, you don't need any special, to be a monk or a nun or anything like that, just everybody can be part of this great vehicle. It seems as if that tendency or that movement in Buddhism was there very early on, nobody knows exactly, there was no like Luther, you know, who created, who you could point to and say,

[13:06]

this was the person who reformed. It wasn't like that, it would appear that among the earliest communities of monks and nuns, there were people who emphasized this side of the Buddhist teaching and cherished this more universal, more free and easy attitude, and at some point they began preaching and teaching about this, and then at some later point they began writing down some of these teachings, and the Lotus Sutra would appear to be one of the earliest of the Mahayana Sutras that may be written down as early as the first or second century. Also, the people who compiled these sutras had a very loose idea about how one went about doing such a thing. For instance, with the earlier sutras, there was a lot of care to keep the text pure and so on. With these Mahayana Sutras, often people would just say, hey, this

[14:07]

is a good sutra over here, why don't we put this onto that and add this onto that, and some of them are really confused conglomerations of a variety. Scholars, when they do their textual studies, they feel pretty sure that most or many Mahayana Sutras are a kind of conglomeration of various sutras that were added on here and there, and sometimes it's hard to tell, what is this doing there, how come that, and this is written in a different style, etc., but it all is put together into one sutra, and this is also true of the Lotus Sutra. The Cretans, they think the Lotus Sutra. The Mahayana movement seemed like it was stronger in Northern India than in Southern India, and Northern India is to the west of Central Asia than China, and the Silk Road through Central Asia. And so, as a result of that, the Buddhism that went to China, and China

[15:10]

received Buddhism fairly early on, like in the first century of the Common Era, the Buddhism that went to China in that time was pretty much Mahayanistic. In Chinese Buddhism, although there were so-called Hinayana schools and tendencies in Chinese Buddhism, pretty much Chinese Buddhism is Mahayana Buddhism, various versions of Mahayana Buddhism. One thing about the Mahayana Sutras that's also, in addition to this more symbolic language and looser sense of the text and expanded and all this stuff, one of the characteristics of the sutras that's very interesting and bizarre in a way when you read it, is the fact that these people who were writing down these texts and transmitting them in India and across Central Asia into China, they kind of

[16:11]

had a beef, because they were trying to establish the legitimacy of these texts against a canon that was a little older. And I'm not going to go into the various ways in which doctrinally there were arguments between the Hinayana and the Mahayana. There were some arguments, although, I'm trying not to lose my train of thought here, but there were arguments, but basically all that the Mahayana proposed was already in the Hinayana. It's just that they emphasized things more strongly in some different ways. But the point I'm trying to make here is that they were arguing against a canon. So they often, this had a variety of implications. Number one, they often were very belittling and polemic against the Hinayana viewpoints. They would often have characters in the sutras who would be quite foolish and dumb, who were Hinayanists

[17:17]

propounding Hinayana views, and they were often ridiculed. So this is a little embarrassing, and we try not to take this too literally in this day and age, when we see that Buddhism is really one teaching. So they were polemical. But in addition to that, you have this interesting phenomena in Mahayana sutras, where the sutra will go on saying something about the Dharma, and all of a sudden it will stop, and it will say, now, if you want to really do something good, what you should do is read this sutra, and you should copy it, and you should venerate it, and you should make light incense in front of it, and you should bow to it, and you should make sure other people read it, and you should pass it around, and you should go on. And the merit of doing this is equal to many, many, many, blah, blah, blah, millions of cents, blah, blah, blah. It will be twenty pages like that, and then there will be another chapter, and then it will go on for a while, and then all of a sudden it will say that again. The merit of reading this sutra is so great

[18:18]

that nobody can believe it, and everybody else, but this is far greater than that. So there's a lot of, these sutras are full of this kind of thing, because clearly the authors of the sutra, and we don't, of course, we don't know who the authors are. It's supposed to be the word of the Buddha, and I'm sure that the people who wrote these sutras down did feel that it was the word of the Buddha coming through them. The authors of these sutras are constantly, you know, concerned about the fact that we should really venerate these sutras, and not say that they're not the word of the Buddha, and not say that they're not important, or that they're not real, because the Buddha didn't really say these things. So, and the Lotus Sutra also has this feature. We probably won't spend a whole lot of time discussing that part, because it's, you know, not much to say about it, but it is in there. And so another quality of the, this is a devotional quality, the sutras are promoting a sense of devotion toward themselves, almost like the physical presence of

[19:21]

the sutra, almost being like a Buddha itself, and also a sense of devotion toward the Buddha. And you'll see that this is a big feature of the Lotus Sutra, because the earlier teachings were really not devotional much at all. In fact, you know, the sense of them was that the Buddha was a human being, and a teacher, who was a great, very great teacher for this age, whose ultimate purpose and goal was to pass out of existence altogether, and achieve peace, and show us how to do the same thing. So the Buddha passed away, so what's there to venerate? What's there to be devoted to? Where in the Mahayana Sutras, there is, you'll see as we get into the discussion of the Lotus Sutra, it's one of the main burdens of its teaching, is that the Buddha didn't really pass away. It looked like it, but it wasn't really true. So anyway, these are just a little bit

[20:27]

about the difference between the Hinayana and Mahayana Sutras. Now, the Lotus Sutra itself, they think, is a first or second century text, one of the earliest of the Mahayana Sutras. And it seems like the earliest text of the Lotus Sutra that exists is actually in Chinese, because it was first translated into Chinese in the year 255. And there is no earlier text than that. So now some people even wonder whether it ever existed in India as such. And scholars think that perhaps it, maybe it existed in, maybe it was written in as the Mahayana Buddhism came from India through Central Asia to China. I think there, everybody always used to think, you know, there was Indian Buddhism, there was Chinese Buddhism.

[21:28]

And nobody paid much attention to Central Asian Buddhism, because Central Asia didn't have all these great Indian culture, Chinese culture, you know, they didn't have the weight of these cultures. But I think that little by little, they're discovering that a lot of creative activity went on in these smaller countries of Central Asia. And it's possible that the Lotus Sutra was actually composed in Central Asia in some Central Asian language and translated from that language into Chinese, because the earliest Sanskrit texts that are extant now are probably maybe 11th century. There's a couple of texts that they think could be considerably earlier than that, but definitely no earlier than the 5th century. So are we talking like Vietnam, Thailand, Burma? Or Central Asia? No, that's like, what countries? Nepal, Afghanistan, Burma, yeah. Turkey, parts of Turkey, you know, in there. In those places, do we have other kinds of texts from India? Yeah, yeah, there's a mixture of all kinds of texts. There are texts that exist

[22:33]

in Central Asian languages too. So it's much more of a mixed, complicated situation. So anyway, so it was translated in 255, and then there was this very famous Central Asian, actually, monk named Kumarajiva, who, the story goes, was very storied and famous and well considered to be a real Buddha. So much so that the Emperor of China, at the time, who was a Buddhist, you know, China was very much a Buddhist country in the, I'm talking now about the 5th century, the Emperor of China decided he would conquer this, whatever, Kucha, I think was the name of this Central Asian country where Kumarajiva lived. He would conquer Kucha so that he could capture Kumarajiva and bring him to China, which he actually did, and captured Kumarajiva and brought him to China and then set him up to translate texts into Chinese.

[23:39]

And so Kumarajiva set up the most famous translation bureau in the history of Buddhism, where he had all the greatest Chinese literati, got them together, and they translated many, many, many texts. And they did it, it was like a kind of amazing brain trust, you know, because it was a hard job to translate from whatever it was, either Sanskrit or Prakrit or whatever, or some Central Asian language into Chinese. You know, it's a very big language barrier there and a cultural barrier. The Chinese were pretty culturally sophisticated and it was really hard to figure out how you're going to render these Buddhist terms and Buddhist concepts into Chinese with the Chinese pre-existing way of thought. So they just got the best minds together in China and Kumarajiva sort of directed this translation outfit and they produced texts that sort of became crowns in the jewel, I mean crown jewels of the Chinese culture for centuries

[24:44]

afterward. I'm sorry, I'm having trouble hearing that name. Can you spell it? Kumarajiva. K-U-M-A-R-I No, is that right? K-U-M-A-R-A-J-I-V-A. Kumarajiva. So he's really, really famous in Buddhist history as, you know, one of the premier translators in the history of Buddhism. So anyway, partly because of the Lotus Sutra's style and what it says, and partly because of the excellence of the translation that Kumarajiva made with his translation bureau, the Lotus Sutra is sort of like up there in China. In Chinese Buddhism it's like the greatest sutra of all time, you know, in China. And it had a huge influence on all of Chinese Buddhism and all of the Chinese Buddhist schools, more than any other sutra. I

[25:45]

think more, we don't really know what influence it had in India or Central Asia particularly. It doesn't occupy the same place in India and Central Asia as it does in China. Now, I said partly because of Kumarajiva and partly because of the nature of the text itself. So what about it? Well, the thing about it is that it has in it a number of wonderful parables. By and large, we're familiar with parables from Christian Bible, but by and large, you know, Buddhist literature doesn't have parables in quite the same way. These little, sort of neat little teaching stories that really make a point, kind of. But the Lotus Sutra has maybe five or six or seven of the most famous parables in all of Buddhist thought. And since the Chinese, see, the Sanskrit language is a highly inflected language, which means it has like, you know,

[26:48]

different prefixes and suffixes that change with the tense of the verb and so on and so forth. Well, when you have a language like that, you can, it's very easy and natural to make fine distinctions. So that's a good language for philosophy. The Sanskrit is a consummate philosophical language. So Indian thought, Buddhist thought, and other Indian thought is extremely given to philosophizing because of that. The language really lends itself to that. But Chinese is the opposite. In Chinese, there's almost no inflected language. You can't tell whether the verb is in the present tense or the past tense. You can't whether it's a he, a she, or it, who's doing this or that. You can't tell whether it's singular or plural. You can't tell much of anything. It's all contextual. So this is a pretty lousy language for what we consider, you know, our language is an Indo-European language. So for us, we can

[27:54]

really relate philosophically to Sanskrit because we come from, we have an inflected Indo-European language. But Chinese language is a totally different kettle of fish. So when the Chinese received Indian philosophy, they had a very hard time with it. First of all, they could not figure out what it was all about, and when they tried to translate it, it didn't compute. And they finally made, and then they made a lot of mistakes. There's whole, scholars have written whole books about how the Chinese misunderstood Buddhism for hundreds of years because, no really, because the language difference was so great that they couldn't figure out, you know, what was being said here, and they mistranslated and missed the concepts. Because Indian philosophical concepts are fairly subtle, and Buddhist philosophical concepts are fairly subtle. And so the Chinese, for hundreds of years, misunderstood things like emptiness. They really misunderstood it for a couple of hundred years. Anyway, they love the Lotus Sutra because the Lotus Sutra is essentially poetic. There's very little philosophy in the Lotus Sutra. Other sutras are much more philosophical

[29:00]

and make those kind of distinctions, and this one doesn't. It's really full of poetry and parable and, you know, that kind of thing. And so you could see why. And it's very magical and mysterious and wonderful. So you could see why it appealed to the Chinese, and they right away raised it up to a very high place. And in fact, the Chinese had a big problem when they, I mean, they were clear that Buddhism was from India, you know, and they were receiving these teachings, which in itself is an amazing thing since the Chinese are extremely, like most people in great cultures all over the world, extremely arrogant and think that only their culture is the only good culture and the only smart culture. So it's amazing in itself that they would accept a transmission from another culture and accept it as meaningful. Of course, the Buddhists in China were in a constant struggle against Chinese culture, who sometimes Chinese culture was friendly to Buddhism and

[30:02]

sometimes Chinese culture didn't like Buddhism and put it down as a foreign teaching. So there was this always going on. But it's amazing that there were some Chinese and many Chinese who accepted this teaching. So they had a problem of accepting all these holy teachings that were all true, right, they felt, coming from India, coming from Central Asia, and all contradicting each other, you see. And you get this holy scripture that the Buddha says, blah, blah, blah, and then you get another holy scripture where the Buddha says, don't believe that. So that's strange, what are you supposed to do with that? How do you understand that? So the Chinese had a big problem with trying to understand that. So they had various attempts, which the Indians apparently never did in this way, but the Chinese made various attempts to make it all make sense, to put the teachings in a kind of hierarchy and in a system where it would all make sense, and you explain why it said this and why this contradicted that and what it all meant.

[31:06]

And the great school of Chinese Buddhism that did this systematizing and explaining was called the Tiantai school. And the Tiantai school, maybe sometime along the way here, one of us, maybe me or somebody else, one of the other old timers could maybe give a little report about what the Tiantai school said was the system for how these teachings all ranked and were hierarchized and so on. But the point I want to make tonight is simply the fact that the Tiantai school said that the Lotus Sutra was the real and ultimate teaching of the Buddha, that it was all leading up to the Lotus Sutra. All the other teachings were sort of preparing everybody for the Lotus Sutra. And the Lotus Sutra actually more or less says that itself. That's why they got that idea. So they had a very elaborate system of categorizing the various sutras, showing how they all said the Buddha had this great plan and he taught this and he taught

[32:11]

that, prepared for this and prepared for that. It was all leading up to the Lotus Sutra. Yes? Even the Heart Sutra? According to that school, yeah. I don't say it's true. I'm just saying that's their system. Now the interesting thing is that the Tiantai school was transmitted to Japan. The Lotus Sutra enjoyed in Japan and even, I'll explain in a minute, in an even more exalted place in Japan than it did in China. And the Tiantai school, which was one of the key schools in Chinese Buddhism, was transmitted to Japan as the Tendai school. And the Tendai school, you know, had a huge monastic establishment which was founded, I think, in something like the 7th or 8th century. And basically the Tendai school was Japanese Buddhism for maybe 500 years or so. And in the Kamakura period, which is like the 13th century, there was a huge reformation of Buddhism.

[33:16]

But almost all the people who were part of that reformation came out of the Tendai school, just like Martin Luther, you know, came out of the Catholics. All the reformers of Buddhism in the Kamakura came out of the Tendai school. And so, and I'm mentioning this because Dogen was one of the reformers of the Kamakura school and he, you know, is the founder of our line of Zen, and he was a Tendai person and he read the Lotus Sutra and he thought the Lotus Sutra was enormously important as well. So, and we talk about the, when we mention the names of the Buddha, Buddhas, you know, in the meal chant, and other times we say, we mention the Lotus Sutra as if it were one of the Buddhas. That's how, you know, there's all these Buddhas, blah, blah, Buddha this, Buddha that, Buddha the other thing, and the Sadharma-Pundarika Sutra. The Sadharma-Pundarika Sutra is the Sanskrit name for the Lotus Sutra, Lotus of the True Law Sutra. So Dogen really venerated this Sutra and he has several chapters in the Shobo Genzo are about different phrases and

[34:23]

teachings of this Sutra. Now, also in the, just to show you how much people in the Far East loved this Sutra and how powerful they thought it was, in the Kamakura period some of the other reformers were, one of the other reformers was a man by the name of Nichiren, who was also a Tendai monk, and Nichiren said that there was only one way to practice and that was by reciting and venerating the Lotus Sutra. That was actually the only, anything else was a waste of time, including Zazen and precepts, it was all a total waste of time. The only thing that was really effective in this declining age, he said, was to recite and venerate the Lotus Sutra, even to the point where he said that all you have to do is say the name of the Lotus Sutra, repeat the name of the Lotus Sutra, and that's all you need to do. And to this day, the largest sects in Japanese Buddhism

[35:24]

believe this. The Nichiren sect and the Soka Gakkai and so on, that's what they do, they Maho Renge Kyo, that's the Lotus Sutra, that's the Japanese way of Maho Renge Kyo, is the Lotus of the True Law Sutra, and they just say that name. Tina Turner says that. And Herbie Hancock says that. She is proof. Yeah, that's right. That's right, and that's their practice, is just reciting the recitation of the name Lotus Sutra, because they feel that the Sutra is so holy and so powerful that just to evoke its name confers immeasurable spiritual benefits. That's how important the Lotus Sutra is in the Far East, in China and Japan. Now, one other thing about the text that I didn't mention, that my notes say here, is that you will

[36:26]

see when you read the text that there's a verse part and a prose part. And more or less, it's entirely the case that they say exactly the same thing. In fact, you'll be reading along in prose and then it'll say, and to make this point even more clear, Manjushri repeated what he just said in verse, and then there'll be ten pages of verse saying more or less the same thing that the prose says. So, if you want to save time, you could skip it. I would skip the verse and not the prose, if you want to do that. And they say, again, just to give you the full scoop here, the scholars say that the verse part is earlier. It's actually written in a slightly different language. The verse part is written in what they call Buddhist hybrid Sanskrit. And the reason why they got Buddhist hybrid Sanskrit was because they had this verse that was probably written in Prakrit,

[37:29]

which was a pre-Sanskritized language. And then when they translated it into Sanskrit, it didn't rhyme right, because it was from Prakrit, right? So, they couldn't quite figure out how to make it rhyme in Sanskrit, so they had to make up words that didn't exist in Sanskrit, to sort of make it rhyme, so they created a hybrid Sanskrit. And that hybrid Sanskrit seems to be an earlier language than classical Sanskrit, so that's how they know that the verse part is earlier. And the prose parts are written in at least better Sanskrit, not hybrid Sanskrit, but conventional Sanskrit, at least in the Sanskrit text. Now, we're working from the Chinese text here, but in the Sanskrit text that they have, it looks like that. So, the prose sections, I think, are a little bit more clear and explanatory, and if I was going to only read one, I would read the prose and not the verse. Yeah. So, the earliest copy was in Chinese, but the Sanskrit...

[38:41]

Well, see, we don't know. We don't know. Yeah, it could be, you see, that there were earlier Sanskrit texts. The Chinese were pretty clearly translating the text from some other language. It could have been Sanskrit, or it could have been a Central Asian language, but all of those texts were missing, they're gone, they've disappeared. Like, you know, the vast majority of the Buddhist texts disappeared. We have translations or versions, but the original texts are gone. When you mentioned the hybrid Sanskrit text, was that translation from the Chinese? Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, or maybe, you know. Yeah, the later ones were, yeah. So, anyway, so that's a little bit, another footnote about the text. Now, I want to, without, I don't want to go and say much about this, because I want to talk about key sort of ideas or doctrines of the Lotus Sutra, and the reason why I don't want to talk about it much is because that's exactly what we'll be getting into when we read it. But I want to just,

[39:45]

by way of orienting you toward what you'll be reading, I want to just mention what are the key elements or doctrines of the Lotus Sutra that are important. The first one is, you can look at it from two different angles. One angle is to say that the Lotus Sutra teaches that there's only one, you know, all these different teachings in Buddhism, the Hinaya, the Mahayana, this and that, really there's only one teaching. There's only one vehicle. There's not many vehicles. There's only one vehicle, and that everyone must aim for one vehicle, which is the Buddha vehicle, which is Buddhahood. Everybody has to aim for Buddhahood. It's the only real practice. Previous to this, there was the idea that there were various paths and various vehicles and various attainments. There were the arhats who attained nirvana.

[40:46]

There were the bodhisattvas who were aiming toward Buddhahood. There were the buddhas, there were the pratyekabuddhas who achieved enlightenment on their own, and these different types of practitioners with different destinations. But the Lotus Sutra says these destinations are all false. There's only one destination, and that's Buddhahood, and we all have to go for Buddhahood. Then, you know, the question arises, well, then why are there all these teachings about pratyekabuddhas and bodhisattvas and arhats and so on, if there's only one vehicle? Why did the Buddha, previous to the Lotus Sutra, teach all these other vehicles? And then in the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha says it's because of upaya, skillful means. The dharma is actually beyond definition, beyond comprehension, beyond understanding. If I had taught this in the beginning, everybody would have freaked out and gone crazy and just went berserk and went screaming out of

[41:48]

there. So I knew that I had to sort of bring them along slowly. So I taught them this, and then I taught them that, and I gave them this, and I gave them that. And now I feel that you're ready to hear the truth, which is it's all baloney. There's only one. And I'll teach anything that it takes, wherever beings are, that I will give a teaching that will be in line with what they need. But really and truly, now I'm telling you, you're ready to hear this, that there's only one vehicle. And in one of the famous passages of the Lotus Sutra, which astonished me, I was reading all these different synopses, and nobody mentioned this. And I thought, gee, I know this passage is in the Lotus Sutra. And it was in the Lotus Sutra. In fact, I was reading it and it's this very famous part where it's the only sutra, I think, where this happens. In the sutras, there's an assembly of people there. It always says, Thus have I heard the Buddha is in such and such a place. And listening to him there were the following people. There were so many monks. There were so many nuns. This is what it says in the

[42:48]

Hinayana sutras. In the Mahayana sutras, it says there were six billion monks, and there were 22 billion nuns, and there were six billion Kinnaras, and Garudas, and fighting demons, and demigods, and gods in this heaven, and gods in that heaven, and so on and so forth. All sitting there in this little room, listening to the Buddha. This is the only sutra in which, at some point, the Buddha starts telling something, and a whole bunch of them get up and leave. You know? They walk out on the Buddha. Can you imagine that? Five thousand, I think it says. Five thousand monks and nuns got up and left. And why? The reason why they got up, and we'll read that part, the reason why they got up and left is because they didn't like what the Buddha was saying. They didn't like the teaching. You know? And the reason why they didn't like the teaching is because the Buddha was saying to them, all the things that you have been doing and all that, you think that you have attained arhatship. Forget it. It's meaningless. It's only arrogance that makes you think that you have attained

[43:49]

arhatship. Really, we all have to attain Buddhahood. There's only one vehicle. And they didn't like that one bit. So they got up and left. And then it says in the sutra, the Buddha didn't say anything. He just let them leave. And then when they left, he said, good. He said, now the people who aren't capable of hearing this have left, and now we can really get down to business, and I'll go on now to preach the sutra. So there were a lot of people who didn't like this idea that it was one vehicle, you see, because it implies that these other things are not significant. And so this is a little bit of the polemic that I spoke of earlier, trying to argue for the position. But the other side of that, this teaching of one vehicle and skillful means, is that it's really a universal vehicle. And that's one of the second key element or doctrine that's taught by the Lotus Sutra, is that this vehicle is absolutely

[44:49]

universal. Everyone is included. Everyone will become a Buddha. Everyone must become a Buddha without anybody left out whatsoever. And there's a famous chapter 12 in which the Buddha explains that even Devadatta is going to be a Buddha, which is very shocking, because Devadatta was the Buddha's cousin who was a great disciple for a while, and then he turned on the Buddha and tried to kill him. And so nothing could be worse than that. Trying to kill the Buddha is like, this person is going to be in hell for a gazillion lifetimes. So there are people like that, that can't really become Buddhists, we think. But in the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha says, no, no, even Devadatta will become a Buddha. Then there's the famous passage in that same chapter to illustrate that the Sutra is universal. Another famous chapter, another famous section in that chapter, which is chapter 12, is about this little girl who was a Naga queen, Naga princess. She's eight

[45:56]

years old, Naga princess, who becomes a Buddha. And first of all, how can a Naga become a Naga? It's like an underwater snake. How can a Naga become a Buddha? Because they were a very sexist thing, and it was considered very heavy, the idea, wow, even a woman can become a Buddha. So this is all to say that this is a universal vehicle. This is not a vehicle in which anyone whatsoever is left out. So that's the second doctrine, which I think this emphasis on this is different from what we had heard in previous texts. This famous part in the Sutra where the Buddha says, there are an infinite number of bodhisattvas that I bring to enlightenment. And somebody says, well, if there's an infinite number of bodhisattvas, how can it be that you'd have to live forever in order to enlighten an infinite number of bodhisattvas? And the Buddha says, well, it's true.

[47:01]

And they said, well, wait a minute, but what about nirvana? What about parinirvana? What about your going to extinction, as it says in all the sutras? And the Buddha says, well, I just said that. It wasn't really true that I went to nirvana. The only reason that I pretended that I went to nirvana was so that I could encourage people, because I figured if they thought that I was going to be around forever, they would never practice. They would figure that they had all the time in the world, and so I needed to get them activated. And so in order to do that, I passed into nirvana. I seemed to pass into nirvana, but actually I really didn't. And the true Buddha is this universal, endless principle, endless existence that is not impermanent. This is very radical. Since all of early Buddhism is based on the notion of impermanence, even the Buddha is impermanent, the idea here that the impermanence was just

[48:09]

another trick, another upaya to help beings along, this is astonishing. So these kind of teachings are really different. They give a very different impression from what early Buddhism teaches, and I think as we study them and as we discuss them, we'll get into the differences and the similarities, and what does it really mean, and what's the implications for our practice, and so on and so forth. But I just wanted to kind of put that out there to let you know what the Lotus Sutra is talking about, and how that differs from what went before, and all that stuff. So having said all that, I know that some of you don't have... Oh, one more point, one practical point, is which chapters will we read, and which chapters will we discuss, and so on. Of course, oh, texts. These are the texts that are around. I think this is the one

[49:19]

that you were read to, mostly the Watson text. So this is actually pretty good, because Burton Watson, who translated this text, mostly translates Chinese literature. He's not really a Buddhologist, and so if you want the real Buddhist flavor, that's bad news, and then this is a better text, Leon Hurwitz's text, because he's also a Buddhist scholar who's an expert reader of Chinese. They're both working from Kumara Jiva's text. See, these are both English translations of Kumara Jiva's 5th century Chinese text, but Hurwitz gives it a real Buddhist flavor, and Watson gives it more of a literary flavor, which is actually in a way more readable, but there's some things that you'll miss from a Buddhist point of view. I haven't read this Watson one, and I'm reading it now. I'm really enjoying it. It's actually a

[50:20]

beautiful thing to read. He's really a good translator, a good writer. So we'll read this one mostly, and we'll refer to the Hurwitz one. Also, an interesting footnote is that the people who paid for this text to be translated are the Nichiren Buddhists, the Soka Gakkai people. They grabbed Bertie Watson about 20 years ago and said, you really have to make a translation of a sutra. So they kind of financed his work on that, and when he wanted to figure out what it said and solve problems, he used the Japanese Nichiren or Soka Gakkai version of the text. So it's going to have more of a flavor like that, whereas this one has more of a flavor of Sanskritized early Buddhist philosophical pre-Nichiren sect kind of feeling. I don't know if that matters to you, but anyway, it's just something to know. So what I thought we would do

[51:22]

is, first of all, I would urge all of you to read the whole text. Just start at the beginning and just see if you can read it all in six weeks, because it's a wonderful text. And like I say, this is really readable. I'm finding it just, you start reading and you just want to keep reading. It's really delightful. So please do read the whole text if you can, if you want. It's not hard to understand or abstruse or something. And then I thought that next week, on the 14th, we would talk about chapters two and three, which are really about upaya, this kind of skillful means and one vehicle teaching, and also includes the famous parable of the burning house, which you will enjoy reading, I'm sure. And then on the next Thursday, the 16th, we would read chapters four and five, which include the parable of the rich man's son

[52:27]

in chapter four. And chapter five is this beautiful image, it's very famous in Buddhism, the rain of Dharma. The Dharma is like a rain falling down equally on all planets and various things because of their seeds, the roots spring up in different ways, but the rain is the same. This is a metaphor, very beautiful and famous parable in Buddhism. Chapters four and five. On the 21st, we would do chapter seven and eight, the parable of the phantom city. The what? The phantom city. These are all parables about explaining why the Buddha gave these teachings, which are just not really true. You were on a long journey and it was tiring, and so that you wouldn't get too tired out and discouraged, I created a phantom city so that you could hang out in there for a while and enjoy yourself. It's not a real city and it's not the real destination, but I wanted to create it so that you would be able to make the whole trip.

[53:31]

This is the earlier teachings. Then there's also a parable about the man who had a jewel sewed into his garment. He was drunk and they thought he would lose the jewel, so they sewed it into his coat. And then he wandered around impoverished, not knowing that he had this jewel sewed into his clothing. Then on the 23rd, we do chapters 11 and 12, the famous stupa that appears in the sky all of a sudden with this ancient Buddha in it. And then chapter 12 is the one that I mentioned a minute ago with Devadatta and the Naga princess who becomes a Buddha. By the way, she has to turn into a man first. But of course. And then on the 28th, we'll do chapters 15 and 16, in which the Buddha reveals to everyone's surprise and shock that actually he never did enter nirvana, even though you thought he did,

[54:36]

as I mentioned a minute ago. So that would be the end, and I would put down chapters 25 and 28 just in case we go faster than expected and we get to it. We can do those chapters. Chapter 25 especially is a very famous chapter. It's the Avalokiteshvara chapter, a very famous chapter in China. It's all about how this long list of... We used to chant this on Thanksgiving, actually, during our Thanksgiving service every year until people got a little freaked out by it. But it says that Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, who is the Bodhisattva of Compassion, is so wonderful that all you have to do is call her name and you will be saved, for example. And then there's 50 pages of examples or something. If you're in a fire and you just say, Avalokiteshvara, please save me, the fire will immediately go out. If you're at sea and your boat is about to capsize

[55:40]

and you call on Avalokiteshvara, you will be saved. And it just lists about 50 pages or 30 pages of different things that could befall you, that all you have to do is call on Avalokiteshvara and it'll all disappear. So I always liked that chapter, but we don't do it anymore. But maybe after this class there'll be a popular move to reinstate it. Anyway, you can read that and maybe we'll discuss it and read it together. So that's the plan, right? We've got a good plan here. I think we can do it. And that's what we're going to try to do, okay? Well, no, it's not so hard to do. But it'd even be better to read all the chapters. And I think, you know, after all, six weeks is a long time. Oh, we don't have six weeks. We have four weeks. But four weeks is a long time. Well, see, that's the problem. At a certain point,

[56:45]

I disappear in thin air and I'm not here anymore. That's the problem. Yes, when I come back, I reveal that I only appear to be gone. So what I would like to do in the remaining time is to give you some of the highlights from the introduction. The first chapter is called Introduction. Because always in a sutra, the scene has to be set. Where was the Buddha and what were the circumstances of his teaching and so on. So like every sutra, this begins, you know, Thus have I heard. As you all know, I'm sure, all of the Buddha's teachings were overheard by Ananda, right, who followed the Buddha around wherever he went. Just like Galen follows Rev. and Rev. passes away, Galen is going to begin speaking. And this will go on for, you know, twenty or thirty years. And somebody will write it all down. And it'll say,

[57:47]

the new canon will begin, Thus have I heard, you know. Satsvan says, you know. But in this case, it's Ananda who says, This is what I heard. See, that's the difference between, you know, like Herbert says, Thus have I heard. That's the way they always translate that. And Burton Watson says, This is what I heard. So that's the, you see the difference already. This is what I heard. At one time the Buddha was in Rajgriha, which is the vulture, famous vulture peak. Most of the Malayana Sutras, the Buddha preached on vulture peak. Staying on Mount Gridhakuta, that's where the Buddha was, accompanying him were a multitude of leading monks numbering twelve thousand persons. All were arhats whose outflows had come to an end. That's a technical term, meaning they had no more outflowing energy. To confuse them, they were like completely self-possessed. They had no more earthly desires. They had

[58:52]

attained what was to their advantage and had put an end to the bonds of existence and suffering, whose minds had achieved a state of freedom. That's who was there. And then their names were, and then it gives you many, many names of the different, you know, monks over there. There were also two thousand persons, some of whom were still learning, and there was also the nun, Maha Prajapati, who was Buddha's aunt and stepmother, right? First Buddhist nun. She was there with her six thousand followers. And Rahula's mother, who had been Buddha's wife, right, was also a nun. That was a nice thing. The Buddha ordained his whole family. His son became a monk, his former wife became a monk, and his stepmother became a nun. His father did not. So they were all there. The whole family was there. There were Bodhisattvas and Mahasattvas, eighty thousand. It gives all their names.

[59:57]

There were gods. There were eight dragon kings. It gives their names. There were four Kinara kings. It gives their names. Four Gandharva kings. It gives their names. Four Asura kings, Garuda kings, and so on and so forth. Then the Buddha, he preached every day sort of a sutra. Not the Lotus Sutra, but another one. And then when he was finished with that, here's where the important part comes. He finished preaching that sutra, and he was sitting there. And all of a sudden, lo and behold, at that time, the Buddha emitted a ray of light from the tuft of white hair between his eyebrows. One of the marks of the Buddha is that he has a little, sometimes they call that the third eye. There's a little something there. And a ray of light came out of there all of a sudden, to the astonishment of the assembly. And this light

[61:00]

lit up eighteen thousand worlds in the east, like in the direction of China, sort of. And there was no place that the light did not penetrate, it reaching downward as far as the Avici hell, and upward to the Akanksha heaven. This is really powerful light. At that time, the Bodhisattva says more about it and so on. So it tells you all the different things that that light saw, that you could see in that light. So of course, this was an astonishing thing. And Maitreya, who was the Buddha of a future age, he saw that light and he thought to himself, now the World Honored One has manifested these miraculous signs, but what is the cause of these auspicious portents? Why is the Buddha doing this? So he went to Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, and he said, how come this is happening?

[62:01]

What is the reason for this? And then it says, Maitreya then, wanting to make sure that Manjushri understood his question, repeated the whole thing in verse four. Then there's several pages of verse where he repeats the whole thing. Why does the Buddha emit this ray of light, illuminating all these worlds? At that time, Manjushri said, and I'm reading now on page 13, for those of you who do have the text, at that time Manjushri said to the Bodhisattva and Mahasattva Maitreya and to the other great people there, good people, I suppose that the Buddha, the World Honored One, wishes now to expound the great law, to rain down the rain of the great law, to blow the conch of the great law,

[63:03]

to beat the drum of the great law, to elucidate the meaning of the great law, good people, in the past I have seen this auspicious portent among the Buddhas. They emitted a beam of light like this, and after that they expounded the great law. So I've seen this before. This light, I know about this light. It's the sign that the Buddha is about to expound a very special sutra, really special. And here's what I remember from the past. A long time ago, once upon a time, an immeasurable, boundless, inconceivable number of asamkheya kalpas in the past, in a really long time ago. Asamkheya kalpa is something like 10 to the 30th power, something like that. A really long time ago. There was a Buddha named Sun Moon Bright, and he was worthy of offerings, he had right and universal knowledge, he was perfect in clarity and conduct, etc., etc., etc.

[64:06]

And for the sake of all his disciples, he expounded a wonderful sutra. Then there was another Buddha who was also named Sun Moon Bright, and then another Buddha also named Sun Moon Bright. There were 20,000 Buddhas, in fact, like this, and they all were named Sun Moon Bright. They were all very worthy and wonderful. The last of them, the last of these 20,000 Buddhas, had eight sons. The first was named Having Intention, the second was named Good Intention, the third was named Immeasurable Intention, the fourth was named Jewelled Intention, and the fifth was named Increased Intention, the sixth was named Cleansed of Doubt Intention, the seventh, Echoing Intention, and the eighth, Law Intention. When they heard that their father had left family life and attained enlightenment, they did the same.

[65:12]

At that time, this Buddha, with now his sons and all his people, sat down and emitted a light in the middle of his forehead, and this light penetrated everywhere. In that assembly, there was a bodhisattva named Wonderfully Bright, who had 800 disciples. At this time, the Buddha Sun Moon Bright was the last of these 20,000 Buddhas named Sun Moon Bright. At that time, he got up from samadhi, and because of the bodhisattva Wonderfully Bright, he preached a sutra called the Lotus Sutra. He said after he preached that sutra, Tonight, at midnight, I will enter nirvana and pass away.

[66:23]

So he did, and then after that, the bodhisattva Wonderfully Bright upheld the Lotus Sutra and began to teach it for 80 kalpas, expounding this sutra for others. Among the 800 disciples of Wonderfully Bright was one named Seeker of Fame. He was greedy for gain and support, and though he read and recited numerous sutras, he could not understand them and mostly forgot them. That's why he was called Seeker of Fame. Because he had, in addition, planted various good roots, however, he was able to encounter immeasurable millions and trillions and gazillions of Buddhas, and to make offerings to them, and so on. Maitreya, now remember this is a story being told by Bhanu Manjushri to Maitreya, this whole thing,

[67:30]

explaining why in the present moment of this sutra, the light is coming out of the Buddha. So then he says, Maitreya, you should understand this. Bodhisattva Wonderfully Bright, who lived then, could he be unknown to you? He was no other than I myself. I was that in a former life. That's who I was. And the bodhisattva Seeker of Fame was you. Now when I see this auspicious portent of the light coming out, it is no different from what I saw then in my former life when I saw Sun Moon Bright preach the Lotus Sutra after he had a ray of light coming. Therefore, I guess that the Buddha is about to preach the Lotus Sutra. And in case you didn't get that, I'm going to repeat it in verse. And he does that. He repeats it in verse for many pages, and that's the end of the introduction.

[68:34]

So that's the setting of the stage. It's a little intricate, isn't it? How do you think it was received? How do you think what? How was it received? How do you mean? I'm not sure what you're asking. It sounds a little far-fetched, really. This is my tradition, or my mission, to stand up and say, oh, I've seen this before. Yeah. Well, far-fetched is not a word that exists in the Mayana Sutras. Nothing is far-fetched. What could be far-fetched? You know what I'm saying? There's no such concept in these sutras. Like I said, this is not taking place on the planet Earth. This is not taking place in space and time as we know it. It's a whole other realm. So you have to suspend all ideas of far-fetched

[69:38]

and close-fetched and just give yourself to this cosmic setting and see what you can get out of it and what you can learn from it. Because, yeah, far-fetched, yeah. When there's 20,000 sun, moon, lights or whatever before that, is that like saying that, or an idea of sun and moon before Buddha? Would be that kind of thing? Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's never... See, it's interesting. Even in the early sutras, there is the idea that Buddha was not the first. The seven Buddhas came before him, or the Buddha will say, I rediscovered something that had been lost. But the idea that the Buddha invented the path is never anywhere in the sutras. And this is just

[70:44]

an exaggeration of that same thing. And all the Amahayana sutras have that idea that there's millions and millions of Buddhas before Buddha, and that he's just the Buddha of this place or this era. So the Indians contextualized our world in the context of many, many, many, many worlds. This is just one little world. There's many worlds. And this world is called Jambudvipa, and it has four continents, and there's a big mountain in the middle of it called Mount Sumeru, and it's arranged in this way and that way, and it lasts for so long. And Shakyamuni Buddha is the Buddha in this place for this era. But there's many other worlds, and there's been a long past and an infinite future and so on. Yeah? There are many other worlds simultaneously? Multiverse? Well, that... Is it a linearity like everything that goes around comes around? Yeah, yeah. Well, in the Avatamsaka Sutra, you get this very strong stress on this idea of the

[71:49]

simultaneity. The simultaneity of linear time and simultaneous time. Yeah. But in the Lotus Sutra, this is not stressed. It sounds more like linear. So I think what I'll do is stop there for tonight rather than launch into another. And so then we really will, next time, we'll talk about chapters two and three. And I think what we'll do is I may very briefly point out a few passages and talk about them and then ask you if you have any passages that you would like to talk about. And we'll discuss it for a while, assuming that we all read it. And then maybe we'll pick a section and read aloud. I think it's really neat to read aloud for some period of time, you know, 20 minutes or at least 15, 20 minutes, just to experience the language of the Sutra. So that's what we'll do in the subsequent classes. Usually, the first class I always yak for a while to set the context

[72:51]

and give you an orientation to whatever text we're studying. And then after that, we'll have more discussion. Yes? Are we doing this primarily for scholarship, historical work, practice? Well, I would say, no, tonight was, of course, historical. I mean, I don't, I'm not a scholar, you know, but I do, I feel that it is important to put out in the beginning some, that kind of context. But no, I think that my idea is that we will read this to appreciate the teachings involved in it and the language of it. And that in discussion, we'll probe what does it mean to us as practitioners, because as always in our classes here, that's always the issue, right? What does it mean to us? So to some extent, it's a tricky business because if you focus, if you don't listen to the teaching because you're

[73:56]

thinking about what it means to you and not hearing what it is, so you have to suspend what it means to you for a minute to hear enough of it, you know what I mean? So that it sort of seeps in. And then when it seeps in, then you say, okay, now I'm hearing this, I see what's being said here. Now, how can I understand it for my practice? So I think we're interested in both those aspects, but definitely, how does it relate to our practice? So those will be the points I'm sure that we'll be discussing. You know, in a way, you know, if you, certain things, that's why I like to give classes in the in the older texts, which I often do, because it's real obvious, you know, what those texts have to do with our practice. In other words, it immediately evokes those kinds of questions. And other things that you can study, you study Dogen Zenji or Zen texts, and those things, I think, are clearly, we immediately evoke questions about it. This is a little harder

[74:58]

to do that with because it's a little bit in the sky, right? So I think we're going to have to appreciate it as such, but it will bring up questions about our practice that we'll end up talking about. It sounds like it's had a really big influence on the practice as we know it. Oh, absolutely. It's been like a filter for centuries. Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's really hard to appreciate Buddhism without knowing the Lotus Sutra. You really have to understand the Lotus Sutra to see where Buddhism is coming from and what it's all about. Yeah, very important text to read. And it's one of, you know, in our curriculum of five root studies, it's one of the, you know, we have organized Buddhist studies into five basic studies, and one of them is called Ethics and Compassion. And we read a number of texts under Ethics and Compassion, and this is one of them, one of the four or five texts that we read,

[75:59]

because it's really important. So what else for tonight? Anything else? Okay, so think about whether you would like to continue in the class the next week. We'll make a sign-up sheet. Yeah, you can, it's fine to miss. Oh, you can listen to the tape. Yeah, that's right. If you have to miss one class, if you'd like, you can listen to the tape. Okay, so those who arrived late, just send me an op-ed and I'll do the changes. Yeah, maybe I should go over the dates one more time, because we're not meeting every Tuesday. Just one more time, we're going to meet

[77:07]

May 7th, tonight, May 14th, next Tuesday, May 16th, which is a Thursday, May 21st, which is Tuesday, May 23rd, which is a Thursday, and then we're going to conclude on May 28th, which is Tuesday.

[77:31]

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