Category: d26b

At the end of the [prose section of the Divine Powers chapter] is a very interesting passage, a part of which is often used in Buddhist liturgical services. Let’s look at the entire paragraph:

After the extinction of the Tathagata, you should all wholeheartedly embrace, read and recite, explain and copy, and practice [this sutra] as you have been taught. In any land, wherever anyone accepts and embraces, reads and recites, explains and copies, and practices it as taught, or wherever a volume of the sutra is kept, whether in a garden, or a woods, or under a tree, or in a monk’s cell, or a layman’s house, or in a palace, or in a mountain valley or an open field, in all these places you should put up a Stupa and make offerings. Why? You should understand that all such places are places of the Way. They are where the buddhas attain supreme awakening; they are where the buddhas turn the Dharma wheel; they are where the buddhas reach complete nirvana.

Here, putting up a Stupa is a dramatic way of indicating that all places where the Dharma is embodied in actual life are sacred places, as holy as any stupa. In a sense, it is a rejection of the idea that only temples and stupas and such are holy places. For the Lotus Sutra, any place at all can be a holy place, a place of awakening, a place of the Way, simply by being a place in which the Dharma is embodied by being put into practice. And it is precisely in such places, wherever you are, that “the buddhas attain supreme awakening, … the buddhas turn the Dharma-wheel, … the buddhas reach complete nirvana.” This is a fantastically powerful affirmation of the reality and importance of the holy ground on which we all stand. In a sense, wherever Buddha Dharma is successfully shared or taught a Stupa has already emerged.

If you take refuge in the Buddha, the Buddha has refuge in you – your practice is what enables the Buddha to be alive in this world. Not yours alone, of course, but your practice of the bodhisattva way, along with the practice of others, is what can dispel the darkness and the gloom of living beings.

Buddhist sutras begin with the words, “This is what I heard.” We are to understand that this is Ananda who is speaking and that the sutra that follows is what he heard, and what he recited from memory at the First Buddhist Council shortly after the death of the Buddha. If this is true, or even close to being true, it is a truly remarkable accomplishment, as the Buddha taught for some forty-five years, during which he preached a great many sermons. Apparently there was no writing in India at that time, and it was not until some centuries after the Buddha’s death that Buddhist texts could be recorded in written form. Thus it may be that the vast bulk of Buddhist sutras were memorized by Ananda.

A cousin of Shakyamuni and a brother of the infamous Devadatta, Ananda joined the Sangha when he was about twenty, along with six other high-caste young men. At first, the request by Ananda and his brother to be allowed to join the Buddha’s following was refused. So they became disciples of another religious teacher. But later, when they approached Shakyamuni a second time, permission was granted for them to join the group and become Buddhist monks. Some twenty years later, Ananda was surprised by his selection to be Shakyamuni’s personal attendant – a position he kept for about twenty-five years.

According to legend, Ananda was not able to achieve nirvana, the awakening of an arhat, during the Buddha’s lifetime. Right up to the night before the Council at which he would recite the Buddha’s teachings, he was unable to reach that highly sought stage. But late that night, before the dawn, as he was in the process of lying down to sleep, he suddenly experienced nirvana, thus becoming eligible to participate in the Council along with all of the other arhats.

Like Shakyamuni, Ananda was a Shakya noble. There are many stories about his kindness, especially toward women, and about his attractiveness to women. It was he, more than any other, who persuaded Shakyamuni to admit women into the Sangha, in particular Shakyamuni’s aunt and stepmother Mahaprajapati, thus creating the first Buddhist community for nuns.

There are a great many stories of people going to Ananda for advice or counsel, often on matters of doctrine, not only monks and nuns but also a variety of brahmans and householders. In addition to accounts of Ananda preaching both to monks and to lay men and women, there are also stories of Ananda being appointed to speak for the Buddha, either in place of the Buddha or to complete a sermon the Buddha had started.

Though highly suspect, it is written that Ananda lived to be a hundred and twenty years old. At the beginning of the fifth century, the Chinese monk Fa-hsien traveled to India, reporting extensively on what he saw and heard. At Vaishali, where it is said that the Buddha gave his last sermon, Fa-hsien found two stupas on opposite sides of the river, each containing half of the remains of Ananda. This was said to be a consequence of Ananda’s body being cremated on a raft in the middle of the Ganges River. Nuns worshiped at the stupas of Ananda, since it was through his help that the community of nuns had been established.

One Pali text says that Ananda was “a dispeller of gloom in the darkness.” This could easily remind us an important verse from the end of Chapter 21 of the Lotus Sutra. About anyone who can teach the truth, it says:

Just as the light of the sun and the moon
Can dispel darkness,
Such a person, working in the world,
Can dispel the gloom of living beings.

Despite the fact that this chapter is taken by some as praising the actual sacrifice of one’s body or body parts by burning, I believe that the Lotus Sutra does not teach that we should burn ourselves or parts of our bodies. The idea that keeping even a single verse of the Lotus Sutra is more rewarding than burning one’s finger or toe suggests this. And further, suicide would go against the teachings of the Sutra as a whole as well as the Buddha’s precept against killing. The language here, as in so much of the Lotus Sutra, is symbolic, carrying a deeper meaning than what appears on the surface.

Why does Medicine King Bodhisattva travel around in this world of suffering? This is the question with which the chapter begins. He does so because he wants to help all those in need, and over many lifetimes has prepared himself to do so. We too, the story of Seen with Joy by All the Living suggests, can bring comfort and satisfaction to those in need by embodying the Dharma Flower Sutra in our own lives, that is, by being Dharma flowers.

Chapter 23 of the Lotus Sutra tells a story about previous lives of Medicine King Bodhisattva, when he was a bodhisattva called Seen with Joy by All the Living, a bodhisattva who burned his whole body as a sacrifice to a buddha and later burned just his arms as a sacrifice to a buddha. It then praises the Dharma Flower Sutra and those who follow it.

Like the Sutra as a whole, this chapter has had enormous impact on East Asian Buddhism. Many will remember the sight of Vietnamese monks burning themselves to death in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, beginning with the monk Thich Quang Duc in 1963. It has been said that these monks and nuns used their bodies as torches to illuminate the suffering of the Vietnamese people so that the world might see what was happening in Vietnam. Theirs was an extremely powerful message. And it is a fact that the story and pictures of Thich Quang Duc burning himself were soon seen all over the world. And within a few months the regime of President Diem was overthrown and his anti-Buddhist policies ended.

A great many Chinese monks right down to the middle of the twentieth century followed the practice of burning off one or more of their fingers as a sign of dedication and devotion. Until very recently, virtually all Chinese monks and nuns, and I believe those in Vietnam as well, when receiving final ordination, used moxa, a kind of herb used in traditional Chinese medicine, to burn small places on their scalps, where the scars usually remained for life. This ritual burning was taken to be a sign of complete devotion to the three treasures – the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.

While deeply sympathetic with those who show such great devotion by sacrificing their bodies by fire, it is not a practice I can recommend to anyone. It is much better, I believe, to sacrifice our bodies through dedicated work, in a sense burning our bodies much more slowly. Since Chapter 23 is naturally read as advocating self-immolation, it has been my least favorite chapter in the Lotus Sutra, one that I some times wish had not been included. And yet the last part of the chapter contains some of the most beautiful aphoristic poetry in the Dharma Flower Sutra.