Category: d5b

Even the very fancy carriage that the father gives to the children is, after all, only a carriage, a vehicle. All of our teachings and practices should be understood as devices, as possible ways of helping people. They should never be taken as final truths.

Appropriate means are means, not ends. In this sense they have only instrumental and provisional importance. While it is true that the notion of skillful means is sometimes used to describe something provisional, it is important to recognize that being instrumental and provisional does not mean that such methods are in any sense unimportant. At one point at least, the Dharma Flower Sutra even suggests that it is itself an appropriate means. The context is one in which the Sutra is praising itself and proclaiming its superiority over others (“those who do not hear or believe this sutra suffer a great loss”), but then has those who embrace the Sutra in a future age say:

When I attain the Buddha way,
I will teach this Dharma to them
By skillful means,
That they may dwell within it. (LS 273)

The parable is interpreted as saying that the world is like a burning house. … [T]he verse version of the parable goes to great lengths to describe the terrors inside the burning house, perhaps leading some to think that our goal should be to escape from the burning house that is this world.

But escaping from the world is not at all what the Sutra teaches. Elsewhere it makes clear that we are to work in the world to help or save others. The point here is more that we are like children at play, not paying enough attention to the environment around us. Perhaps it is not the whole world that is in flames but our own playgrounds, the private worlds we create out of our attachments and out of our complacency. Thus leaving the house is not escaping from the world but leaving behind our play-world, our attachments and illusions, or at least some of them, in order to enter the real world.

Even the very fancy carriage that the father gives to the children is, after all, only a carriage, a vehicle. All of our teachings and practices should be understood as devices, as possible ways of helping people. They should never be taken as final truths.

Appropriate means are means, not ends. In this sense they have only instrumental and provisional importance. While it is true that the notion of skillful means is sometimes used to describe something provisional, it is important to recognize that being instrumental and provisional does not mean that such methods are in any sense unimportant. At one point at least, the Dharma Flower Sutra even suggests that it is itself an appropriate means. The context is one in which the Sutra is praising itself and proclaiming its superiority over others (“those who do not hear or believe this sutra suffer a great loss”), but then has those who embrace the Sutra in a future age say:

When I attain the Buddha way,
I will teach this Dharma to them
By skillful means,
That they may dwell within it.

We should realize that in this story it is the lure of the three “lesser” vehicles that actually saves the children. In running out, the children are pursuing the shravaka, pratyekabuddha, and bodhisattva ways. And here, these three ways, including the bodhisattva way, are essentially equal, as they are equally effective, perhaps with one appealing to some of the children, another to others, and the other to still other children. These “smaller” vehicles, in other words, are sufficient for saving people, that is, for enabling them to enter the One Buddha Vehicle and become bodhisattvas, ones who are on the way to becoming buddhas themselves.

All of these stories [of the Lotus Sutra] essentially say to the hearer or reader, “you too.”

If shravakas and evil monks and little girls can become buddhas, so can you. And the teaching that buddha-nature is universal, a teaching not explicitly presented but strongly implied in the Lotus Sutra, does the same thing. It basically says that there are no exceptions to having buddha-nature; therefore you cannot make an exception of yourself.

That, I think, is the core purpose of the Lotus Sutra, not merely the abstract notion of universal awakening, but the always-present possibility and power of awakening, which is a kind of flowering, in each one of us.

The Buddha says to Shariputra in Chapter 3 of the Lotus Sutra, “Did I not tell you before that when the buddhas, the world-honored ones, by using causal explanations, parables, and other kinds of expression, teach the Dharma by skillful means, it is all for the purpose of supreme awakening? All these teachings are for the purpose of transforming people into bodhisattvas.” (LS 112)

These stories, then, are instruments, skillful means, to help us see and embrace what we might not otherwise see or appreciate – the potential and power in each of us to take up the way of the bodhisattva, which is to become supremely awakened, which is to become a buddha.