Chinese Master Hsuan Hua began his commentary on the Lotus Sutra with Chapter 25, the “Universal Door of Guan Yin Bodhisattva” on October 6, 1968. He finished explaining the “Universal Door” chapter on Nov. 9, 1968. On the next day, Nov. 10, he began his commentary on the full Wonderful Dharma Lotus Sūtra. These lectures were open to anyone wishing to attend and were delivered nightly in San Francisco, generally running from seven to nine in the evening. The lecture series continued for two years. Over this period, Hsuan Hua delivered over 350 lectures. The lectures concluded November 10, 1970.

The Buddhist Text Translation Society in Ukiah, California, turned the lecture series into a 14-volume commentary along with a 15th volume containing both the English and Chinese translations of the Lotus Sutra. The first edition of the commentary was published in 1998; the second edition in 2020.

Each volume starts with The Eight Guidelines of the Buddhist Text Translation Society.

1. A volunteer must free him/herself from the motives of personal fame and profit.
2. A volunteer must cultivate a respectful and sincere attitude free from arrogance and conceit.
3. A volunteer must refrain from aggrandizing his/her work and denigrating that of others.
4. A volunteer must not establish him/herself as the standard of correctness and suppress the work of others with his or her fault-finding.
5. A volunteer must take the Buddha-mind as his/her own mind.
6. A volunteer must use the wisdom of Dharma-selecting vision to determine true principles.
7. A volunteer must request virtuous elders in the ten directions to certify his/her translations.
8. A volunteer must endeavor to propagate the teachings by printing and distributing sūtras, śāstra texts, and vinaya texts when the translations are certified as being correct.

Three Forewords follow: The Lotus Dharma Blooms in Us All by Bhikṣuṇī Heng Chih; Fifty Years Later, the Lotus Continues to Bloom by Ron Epstein, PhD; and Timeless Ease for an Uneasy Time by Susan Rounds, PhD.

With the exception of Volume 1, Prologue, each volume contains an Outline of the Lotus Sutra covering the content in the volume. This outline was created by Ouyi Zhixu, a Chinese Buddhist monk and scholar in 17th century China. He is considered the Ninth Patriarch of the Chinese Pure Land tradition and the Thirty-First Patriarch of the Tiantai tradition as well as a Chan master.

Each volume contains a 44-page glossary and an index.

After I finished Hsuan Hua’s commentary I went back to see if I could discern any pattern in his work. As a student of Nichiren Buddhism, I wanted to know if there was an obvious difference in interpretation from what would be expected from someone in the Nichiren school. His focus on Guan Shi Yin was certainly far greater than a Nichiren devotee would have offered, but generally Hsuan Hua came across as a student of Zhiyi of the Tiantai School. (See Five Schools of One Buddhism.)

I counted 382 pages in the English text of the Lotus Sutra in Volume 15 of the set. The 14 volumes of commentary total 3,529 pages, not counting the stuff repeated in each volume. On average, each page of the sutra generated 9.24 pages of commentary text. But that’s just the average. By far the subject that generated the most commentary was Chapter 25, The Universal Door of Guan Yin Bodhisattva, which is Volume 13. The eleven pages of sutra text resulted in 229 pages of commentary – 20.82 pages generated for each sutra page. The other above average chapters were Chapter 1, Introduction, 16.40 pages of commentary for each sutra page; Chapter 12, Devadatta, 12.56; Chapter 3, A Parable, 12.49; and Chapter 10, Dharma teachers, 10.91.

---

Tomorrow: Variations In The Translation of Kumārajīva’s Lotus Sutra