[W]hy did the Buddha not teach the single vehicle until now? This crucial question was faced not only by the compilers of the Lotus, but by early Mahāyāna teachers more broadly. If, as they maintained, the Buddha had indeed intended others to follow the bodhisattva path as he had done, then why had he not said so? Why had he instead taught the path of the two vehicles, of śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas, leading to nirvāṇa? To explain this, the Lotus Sūtra returns to the scene of the Buddha’s enlightenment. It was here that the Buddha understood the nature of reality in its entirety. To offer a new vision of reality, and a new path to its realization, Buddhist authors retell the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment. This retelling has occurred over the centuries of the history of Buddhism, and it occurs in the Lotus Sūtra.

According to a well-known account, after the Buddha achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree, he remained in its vicinity for forty-nine days, relishing the experience and subsisting only on its power; he consumed no food during that time. He reflected that what he had realized was too profound for others to understand and that he should perhaps pass into final nirvāṇa without teaching. At this point, the god Brahmā descended from his heaven to implore the Buddha to teach, arguing that there were some “with little dust in their eyes” who would understand.

The Lotus Sūtra presents this scene, but with typical Mahāyāna excess; Brahmā is accompanied by other gods and hundreds of thousands of attendants, who entreat the Buddha to teach. And in the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha’s initial reluctance to teach is recast in terms specific to the Lotus itself: If he teaches the single buddha vehicle, many will reject it, causing them to be reborn as animals, hungry ghosts, or in the hells. He therefore should not teach but instead should enter nirvāṇa, that is, he should die, immediately. But then it occurs to him that he should teach something that many can accept; he should teach three vehicles, using skillful means, as the buddhas of the past had done. And, indeed, the buddhas of the ten directions immediately appear in order to endorse his decision.

In the standard version of the story, the Buddha surveys the world to determine who might have little dust in their eyes. He decides that his two old meditation teachers should be the first recipients of his teaching but then realizes that they have recently died. The next most deserving are the five ascetics with whom he had practiced various forms of self-mortification for six years, before they abandoned him for deciding that extreme asceticism is not the path of enlightenment. He discerned that they were living in a deer park near Vārāṇasī and set out to find them. When the Buddha arrived, he gave his first sermon, where he laid out the middle way, the four noble truths, and the eightfold path.

In the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha tells this story in brief. But he says that when he encountered the five ascetics, he realized that what he wanted to explain to them could not be put into words; and so, employing skillful means, he used words like nirvāṇa, arhat, dharma, and saṃgha — words that for others represent the foundation of the Buddha’s teaching. The Buddha goes on to explain to Śāriputra that now he is happy and fearless. He has set aside skillful means and teaches only the path to buddhahood. He predicts that, having heard this, the twelve hundred arhats in the audience and all the bodhisattvas will become buddhas.

Here we see the author or authors of the Lotus Sūtra displaying their remarkable rhetorical and doctrinal dexterity. They take the famous story of the Buddha’s reluctance to teach and give it an entirely new meaning. In the original story, fearing that he will be misunderstood, the Buddha hesitates to teach at all. In the retelling, it is not that the Buddha is reluctant to teach at all after his enlightenment; he is reluctant to teach the unalloyed truth of the buddha vehicle. He is quite willing to teach something less than that truth, adapted to the limited capacities, the clouded eyes, of his audience. It is only in the Lotus Sūtra that the Buddha finally conveys the full content of his enlightenment. This retelling has important implications for the narrative of the tradition. In mainstream Buddhism, the first sermon to the group of five ascetics is a momentous event in cosmic history, as the Buddha for the first time turns the wheel of the dharma. In the Lotus Sūtra, that momentous event is reduced to a mere accommodation for those whose understanding is immature. Only in the Lotus Sūtra is the Buddha’s true teaching revealed for the first time.

[T]he Buddha, having finally agreed to preach, tells Śāriputra that it is very rare that a buddha teaches the true dharma (saddharma) that he is about to teach, as rare as the udumbara flower (a flower said to bloom once every three thousand years). It is noteworthy that the Buddha says that he is going to teach the “true dharma.” This is the term that Mañjuśrī had used to describe what Candrasūryapradipa had taught so long ago. And this, of course, is the term that appears in the full Sanskrit title – a title rarely used in English – of the Lotus Sūtra: “White Lotus of the True Dharma.”

The teaching of the Buddha is of course called the dharma. The term saddharma means “true dharma” or “right dharma” and is widely used in Buddhist literature. Because dharma is a generic term for a doctrine or teaching, especially a religious doctrine, in ancient India, saddharma was sometimes used to distinguish the teaching of the Buddha from that of non-Buddhist teachers. Here, however, it means a doctrine that is more true, more correct, more real, than the doctrines that the Buddha has previously taught. The Buddha clearly implies that he is about to teach something new, although we know from the first chapter that it had also been taught by the buddhas of the distant past. It seems then, that this is the first time that Śākyamuni is going to teach the true dharma. In the Indian versions of the Buddha’s life story, Prince Siddhārtha leaves the palace at age twenty-nine and then practices asceticism for six years, finally achieving enlightenment at the age of thirty-five. In Chapter Fifteen of the Lotus Sūtra, Maitreya says that more than forty years have passed since the Buddha achieved enlightenment. Thus, he is more than seventy-five years old when he preaches the Lotus. His teaching of the “true dharma” occurs late in his life.

In response to Maitreya’s question about why the Buddha has illuminated the worlds, Mañjuśrī responds that he has seen this happen before. That is, he remembers something that Maitreya does not, suggesting that the power of his memory to encompass distant space and time — one of the markers of enlightenment in Buddhism — surpasses even that of Maitreya. It also suggests that Mañjuśrī has been cultivating the bodhisattva path far longer even than Maitreya, who was said to be but one lifetime away from achieving buddhahood. This is but one of many moments in which the Lotus Sūtra reverses conventional hierarchies by revealing hitherto unimagined expanses of the past.

Maitreya was the only bodhisattva of the present time familiar to the non-Mahāyāna, mainstream tradition of Buddhism. But he does not understand the Buddha’s miracle and so he is made to ask a bodhisattva unknown to that mainstream. Here again, this would give the traditional reader pause. The question that would typically open a sūtra is a question addressed to the Buddha from an unenlightened person. Here, the question is asked by an advanced bodhisattva, a bodhisattva a mere one lifetime away from buddhahood, and it is addressed to another bodhisattva, one not part of the mainstream Buddhist tradition. As we shall see, such things occur throughout the Lotus Sūtra, where something or someone familiar appears in a way that also seems unfamiliar, evoking recognition but also hesitation. Something is not quite right; indeed, the ground has shifted, and conventional expectations no longer apply.