The fact that before becoming a fully awakened buddha Sun and Moon Light was a prince¹ living in a palace with eight sons reveals a recurrent theme of the Sutra: the idea that what is happening now is both new and unprecedented, and has happened many times before. Here, that Sun and Moon Light Buddha was a prince living in a palace shows a biographical connection to Shakyamuni Buddha. Most buddhas, perhaps all buddhas in the Dharma Flower Sutra, anticipate or replicate the life of Shakyamuni at least to a large extent. Their life stories are similar. That Sun and Moon Light had eight sons while Shakyamuni had only one indicates, however, that their lives were not the same in all respects.

So when Manjushri, talking about the light with which the Buddha has illuminated other worlds, indicates that he has seen many buddhas in the past do the same thing as Shakyamuni, he does not indicate that what they do is exactly the same. In the Dharma Flower Sutra, the present is always emerging from the past, never completely discontinuous from it. Patterns are repeated, sometimes over and over. The first of the buddhas named Sun and Moon Light taught the four truths and nirvana for those who wanted to be shravakas, the teaching of twelve causes and conditions for those who wanted to become pratyekabuddhas, and to lead them to supreme awakening and all-inclusive wisdom he taught the six transcendental practices to bodhisattvas. This threefold structure and division of three teachings is precisely what will be ascribed to Shakyamuni Buddha in the Sutra. Yet in this story there are twenty thousand buddhas, one after the other, all with the name Sun and Moon Light. That is very different from Shakyamuni. In this sutra we are not given the name of his predecessor, but we are told that his successor is to be Maitreya. There is only one Shakyamuni Buddha.

Perhaps the most important point here is that in this, as in many other things, the Dharma Flower Sutra does not subscribe to a rigid structure. As in our own experience, here the present both repeats the past and is different from it. History is always bound to the past, enormously influenced by it, but never completely so.

1

This is one of the rare places where Gene Reeves misstates the facts. As the Murano translation clearly states: The last Sun-Moon-Light Buddha was once a king, not a prince. While Reeves stretches the truth in an attempt to link this to Shakyamuni, it better matches the tale in Chapter 7, where we learn about Great-Universal-Wisdom-Excellence Buddha, a former king who had sixteen sons, one of whom becomes Shakyamuni Buddha. return

See Mistaken Facts

In the Lotus Sutra there are worlds, heavens, purgatories, and so on, making up a very rich imaginary cosmos. Much has been written about Indian and Buddhist cosmology, but none of it is very helpful in facilitating better understanding of the Dharma Flower Sutra. In this Sutra, cosmology is used, not as quasi-scientific description of the universe, but to enhance the place and importance of Shakyamuni Buddha, the Dharma Flower Sutra preached by him, and the world of Shakyamuni Buddha, this “saha world.” It is important to realize from the outset that the cosmological episodes – the mysterious and even magical events that occur in the Dharma Flower Sutra – are imaginative stories, used for the practical purpose of transforming the minds and hearts and lives of the readers or hearers of the Sutra. They are used for the purpose of having us understand – not only in our heads, but also spiritually, in the depths of our beings – that how we live our lives is important, not only for ourselves and those close to us, but for the whole cosmos as well.