Two Buddhas, p241-242[Given Avalokiteśvara’s] popularity, Nichiren occasionally sought to disengage Avalokiteśvara from a Pure Land context and assimilate him to the Lotus Sūtra. In one rather humorous passage, he depicts Avalokiteśvara and Mahāsthāmaprāpta, another bodhisattva attendant of Amitābha, as being utterly dismayed on hearing the Lotus Sūtra preached directly by Śākyamuni Buddha himself and learning that the teachings associated with Amitābha’s pure land were merely provisional. When Amitābha himself confirms this (since all buddhas assemble to testify to the Lotus Sūtra’s truth), Avalokiteśvara reflects that it would be pointless now to return to Amitābha’s land and instead joins the other eighty thousand bodhisattvas who are attending the Lotus assembly, “vowing in all sincerity to protect practitioners of the Lotus Sūtra as he, in the words of the ‘Avalokiteśvara’ chapter, ‘wanders throughout the Sahā world.’ ”
Some temples within the Nichiren tradition have incorporated Avalokiteśvara among the various protectors enshrined on their premises. In such cases, the bodhisattva is understood as representing the compassionate workings inherent in the daimoku of the Lotus Sūtra, Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō, and protecting its propagation.
Category: 2buddhas
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Representing the Compassionate Workings Inherent in the Daimoku
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A Bodhisattva Who Watches Over the Lotus Sūtra’s Female Devotees
Two Buddhas, p239-240Gadgadasvara [Wonderful-Voice Bodhisattva] finds brief mention in a personal letter Nichiren wrote to a woman who had made offerings to each of the Lotus Sūtra’s twenty-eight chapters. “The ‘Gadgadasvara’ chapter,” he wrote to her, “tells of a bodhisattva called Gadgadasvara (“Fine Sound”) who dwells in the land of the buddha Kamaladalavimalanakṣastrarā jasaṃkusumitābhijn͂a (“Knowledge [Conferred by] the King of Constellations [Named] Pure Flower”) in the east. In the past, in the age of the buddha Jaladharagarjitaghoṣasusvaranakṣatrarājasamkusumitābhijn͂a (“Flowering Wisdom of the King of Constellations [Named] Thunder-Sound of Clouds”), he was Lady Vimaladattā (Pure Virtue), the consort of King Śubhavyūha (Fine Adornment). At that time, Lady Vimaladattā made offerings to the Lotus Sūtra and was reborn as the present bodhisattva Gadgadasvara. When the tathagata Śākyamuni expounded the Lotus Sūtra in the Sahā world, this bodhisattva arrived and promised to protect those women who would embrace the Lotus Sūtra in a latter age.”
Here Nichiren draws on the interpretive tradition that Gadgadasvara had in a past life been the consort of King Subhavyūha, who appears in Chapter 27 of the Lotus, to assert that this bodhisattva will watch over the sūtra’s female devotees.
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Upholding the Lotus No Matter What
Two Buddhas, p228-229Nichiren emphasized, not the literal performance of self-sacrifice in offering to the sūtra as exemplified by Bhaiṣajyarāja’s [Medicine King] self-immolation, but the willingness to face abuse, ostracism, verbal and physical attacks, or indeed, any sort of hardship in order to uphold and spread the sūtra’s teachings. In his reading, the offering that ordinary people can make, done with firm resolve, is the moral equivalent of the advanced bodhisattva’s sacrifice of his body, and it yields identical merit.
From another perspective, Nichiren concluded that the acts of Bhaiṣajyarāja and other bodhisattvas in the sūtras who relinquished eyes, limbs, and life itself for the dharma’s sake were no longer appropriate to his own era. As a young man, he wrote, he had taken the statement in the “Perseverance” chapter, “We will not be attached to our bodies or our lives,” to mean heroic undertakings on the order of making the perilous sea crossing to China to study the dharma, as pioneering Japanese monks like Saichō and Kūkai had done, or offering up one’s body in self-sacrifice like the bodhisattva Bhaiṣajyarāja. But over time, he concluded that this was not the sūtra’s true intent: “At a time when the country is filled with respected persons who declare that there are other sūtras that surpass the Lotus Sūtra and join in attacking its votary, and when such persons are revered by the ruler and his ministers while the votary of the Lotus Sūtra, being poor and humble, is despised by the entire country, if he persists in his assertions as did [the bodhisattva] Sadāparibhūta or the scholar-monk Bhadraruci, it may well cost his life. [To maintain one’s resolve at such at time] is the most important thing of all.” What counts, in short, is upholding the Lotus, no matter what.
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Proof of the Unique Truth of the Lotus Sūtra
The first of the ten signs, the buddhas extending their tongues to the heavens of Brahmā, is culturally bound and may not resonate with modern readers. In the context of the sūtra’s compilation, a long and wide tongue was considered one of a buddha’s distinguishing physical marks, a sign that he never lies, and the buddhas’ act of extending their tongues was intended to verify the Lotus Sūtra’s truth. Nichiren often mentioned this act as underscoring the significance of the transmission that Śākyamuni was now about to make: “Having summoned these people [i.e., the four bodhisattvas who lead the bodhisattvas of the earth], Śākyamuni Buddha entrusted to them the five characters Myōhō-renge-kyō. This was no ordinary transmission, for the Buddha first manifested ten transcendent powers. When Śākyamuni extended his wide and long tongue to the upper limit of the world of form, all the other buddhas did likewise, their tongues reaching into the air above four million nayutas of worlds and filling the sky like billions of crimson rainbows arched together — an altogether awesome display.” Elsewhere, Nichiren would note that the Buddha sitting side by side with another buddha (in Chapter Eleven) and buddhas extending their tongues to the heavens of Brahmā appear in no other Buddhist sūtra, Hinayāna or Mahāyāna, further proof of the unique truth of the Lotus Sūtra.
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The Practice of Bowing to Others
Two Buddhas, p208Chinese commentators … stressed the bodhisattva Sadāparibhūta’s attitude as a model for practice. Huisi, Zhiyi’s teacher, commented on this sūtra chapter as follows: “Looking upon each and every being as though it were a buddha, you should join your palms and venerate it as though paying reverence to the Lord [Buddha himself]. You should also regard each and every being as a great bodhisattva and good spiritual friend.” Fragmentary evidence suggests that East Asian Buddhists sometimes literally attempted to imitate the bodhisattva Sadāparibhūta’s practice of bowing to all. One example can be found in the “Three Stages” movement, founded by the Chinese master Xinxing (540-594) as a form of Buddhism suited to the degenerate Final Dharma age. Xinxing incorporated Sadāparibhūta’s practice of bowing into a set of interrelated practices combining the attitudes of universally venerating others and recognizing one’s own shortcomings. The practice of bowing to others was also sometimes conducted in Japan. The monk Shōnyo (781-867), to repay his debt to his parents, is said to have carried out Sadāparibhūta’s practice by bowing at the homes of more than 167,600 people. In aristocratic circles, this practice was carried out on the fourteenth day of the seventh month. Entries for that date in the diary of the poet and courtier Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241) record that he himself performed this practice in the streets or had others do it on his behalf.
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Realizing Buddhahood ‘Quickly’
Two Buddhas, p20As we have seen, Zhiyi and other Chinese Tiantai thinkers drew on the Lotus Sūtra to integrate the disparate Buddhist teachings into a coherent whole and to explain how all phenomena, being empty of independent substance, interpenetrate and “contain” one another in an interrelated holistic cosmos. Saichō and later Japanese Tendai thinkers took these ideas in new directions. One was the claim that practicing the Lotus Sūtra enables one to realize buddhahood “quickly.” We find some basis for this in the Lotus itself, and the idea had already been proposed in the Chinese Tiantai tradition. Zhiyi’s teacher Huisi (515-577), for example, had written that Lotus practitioners awaken spontaneously and without proceeding through sequential stages of practice, and Zhiyi, as we have seen, saw the possibility of sudden and full awakening to the threefold truth in its entirety as what distinguished the “perfect teaching” from the “distinct teaching”: where bodhisattvas of the provisional Mahāyāna must practice for three incalculable eons to achieve full awakening, practitioners of the sudden and perfect teaching, exemplified by Lotus Sūtra, can do so directly. Saichō also understood the Lotus as the “great direct path” that enabled the realization of buddhahood in only two or three lifetimes, or in some cases, in this very lifetime.
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Chih-i’s Three-Fold Doctrine
Zhiyi [Chih-i] drew on the Lotus Sūtra’s claim that the Buddha’s various teachings were all his “skillful means,” or teaching devices, preached in accordance with the capacity of different individuals but all ultimately united in the fundamental principle of the one vehicle.
What was that fundamental principle? Zhiyi described it as the “threefold truth,” or “threefold discernment,” of emptiness, conventional existence, and the middle. Discerning all phenomena as “empty,” lacking self-essence or independent existence, frees the practitioner from attachment to desires and intellectual constructs. It collapses all categories, hierarchies, and boundaries to reveal an absolute equality and nondifferentiation. This insight corresponds to the wisdom of persons of the two vehicles of the “Hinayāna,” those who seek the goal of nirvāṇa, stopping the wheel of birth and death, as well as the wisdom of novice bodhisattvas. However, from a Mahāyāna perspective, it is one-sided. Though empty of fixed substance, all things nonetheless exist conventionally in dependence upon causes and conditions. The discernment of “conventional existence” reestablishes discrete entities and conceptual distinctions as features of commonsense experience but without false essentializing or clinging; it frees the practitioner to act in the world without bondage to it. This corresponds to the wisdom of more advanced bodhisattvas. Finally, phenomena are neither one-sidedly empty nor conventionally existing but exhibit both aspects simultaneously: at each moment, every existent, without losing its individual character, permeates and contains all others. This insight, termed “the middle,” encompasses both poles of understanding – emptiness and conventional existence – without dissolving the tension between them. The bodhisattva path culminates in the simultaneous discernment of all three truths as integrated in one. Page 16-17
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Faith Is the Cause for Wisdom
Two Buddhas, p196In its claims for the salvific powers of the Lotus Sūtra, the “Description of Merits” chapter says that the merit accruing to those who generate even a single thought of willing acceptance — that is, faith — in the Lotus Sūtra immeasurably surpasses that gained by men and women who cultivate the first five perfections of a bodhisattva for eighty myriads of kotis of nayutas of eons. The sixth perfection, wisdom, is not included. But Nichiren held that wisdom, too, is inherent in, and emerges from, faith in the Lotus Sūtra. Scholars of his day, he notes, all agree that those who would practice the Lotus Sūtra must devote themselves to the three disciplines of moral conduct, meditative concentration, and wisdom; lacking any of these, one cannot attain the way. Nichiren adds, “I too once thought the same.” But over time, he became convinced that this was not the case. Citing the “Description of Merits” chapter to support his argument, Nichiren asserts that the Buddha had restrained persons at the first, second, and third of the five stages of practice from focusing on the cultivation of moral conduct and meditative concentration and directed them solely to cultivate some degree of wisdom.” And because our wisdom is inadequate, he teaches us to substitute faith, making this single word ‘faith’ the basis. … Faith is the cause for wisdom and corresponds to the stage of verbal identity.”
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Revealing the Original Cause and Original Effect
Two Buddhas, p185-186Nichiren understood the revelation of Buddha’s inconceivable “lifespan” as the very heart of the sūtra. The sūtra text makes clear that, even after realizing buddhahood, Śākyamuni has remained in the world, and will continue to do so, for countless eons, “teaching the dharma and inspiring sentient beings.” For Nichiren, this signaled a seismic shift in the entire concept of buddhahood as a realm apart from the nine realms of ordinary experience. Conventional understanding holds that the cause of buddhahood and its effect, that is, practice and attainment, are separated in time. To become a buddha, one must carry out the practices of the bodhisattva for three immeasurable eons, a staggering length of time spanning countless lifetimes. The “trace teaching” or shakumon portion of the Lotus Sūtra, even while extending the promise of buddhahood to all beings, still preserves this perspective on realizing buddhahood as a linear process in which one moves from practice (nine realms) toward attainment (buddhahood). We see this in Śākyamuni Buddha’s predictions in the sūtra’s early chapters that his individual śrāvaka disciples such as Sāriputra, Mahākāśyapa, and others will become buddhas in the remote future, after many eons of bodhisattva practice. From this perspective, buddhahood remains a distant goal, abstracted from one’s present experience.
But with the origin teaching, Nichiren wrote, the cause and effect of the pre-Lotus Sūtra teachings and of the trace teaching are “demolished” and “original cause and original effect” are revealed: “The nine realms are inherent in the beginningless buddha realm, and the buddha realm inheres in the beginningless nine realms. This represents the true mutual inclusion of the ten realms … and three thousand realms in a single thoughtmoment.” That is, he saw the origin teaching as overturning linear views of practice and attainment, in which one first makes efforts and then realizes buddhahood as a later result, and revealing that cause (the nine realms) and effect (the buddha realm) are present simultaneously; buddhahood is manifested in the very act of practice.
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Who Are These Bodhisattvas?
Two Buddhas, p174-175Who are these bodhisattvas who emerge from beneath the earth? One interpretative move, current in medieval Japanese Tendai circles in Nichiren’s day, was to associate their four leaders — Viśiṣṭacaritra (J. Jōgyō, “Superior Conduct”), Anantacāritra (Muhengyō, “Boundless Conduct”), Viéuddhacāritra (Jyōgyō, “Pure Conduct”), and Supratisthitacāritra (Anryūgyo, “Firm Conduct”) — with the four universal elements of fire, wind, water, and earth, which were believed to constitute and benefit all beings. In a sense, Nichiren also understood these bodhisattvas as innate, for example, when he writes that they represent the bodhisattva realm within us; they are “the followers of the Śākyamuni Buddha who dwells within ourselves.” However, he also took them to be historical agents, entrusted by the Buddha with the mission of propagating the Lotus Sūtra specifically in the Final Dharma age, that is, his own time. “And what is this dharma that was entrusted to them?” he asked. “From within the Lotus Sūtra, it discards the broad to take up the condensed and discards the condensed to take up the essence, that is, the five characters Myōhō-renge-kyō.”