Can one be a Buddhist who believes in protective deities and still enjoy moments of serendipity? I pick up one book and it leads me to another and that book talks about something I’m currently posting on this website. Coincidence?

When I was reading Daniel Montgomery’s Fire in the Lotus I enjoyed his summary of the life of Kumārajīva and posted it here. Montgomery noted that he picked up the story from Kōgen Mizuno’s “Buddhist Sutras: Origin, Development, Transmission.”

“Buddhist Sutras: Origin, Development, Transmission” was adapted by Mizuno in 1982 from a series of articles originally published in Kōsei, a monthly magazine of Risshō Kōsei-kai. In finding this book, I realized I had found the perfect companion for Keisho Tsukomoto’s “Source Elements of the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Integraton of Religion, Thought, and Culture,” which Rev. Ryuei McCormick recommended. The two Risshō Kōsei-kai books will provide an excellent foundation upon which I can build my understanding of the Lotus Sutra.

Anyway, back to serendipity. I am currently publishing quotes from Paul L. Swanson’s “Foundations of T’ien-T’ai Philosophy: The Flowering of the Two Truths Theory in Chinese Buddhism,” which includes a 96 page English translation of a portion of the first chapter of Chih-i’s Profound Meaning of the Lotus Sutra.

This is very esoteric stuff. I admit that Swanson’s footnotes are essential reading.

Take for instance Does the Buddha experience retribution?, a three paragraph quote from Chih-i that requires eight footnotes from Swanson.

While personally enjoying this esoteric material, I’ve been feeling a tad guilty about whether this might put off others who won’t see the value. Then the other day I came across this quote in Mizuno’s “Buddhist Sutras”:

In his Miao-fa lien-hua-ching wen-chü (Textual Commentary on the Lotus Sutra), Chih-i examined individual words and phrases of the Lotus Sutra from four points of view and further developed his thoughts in thirteen minutely considered facets. For instance, a Chinese ideogram meaning “buddha” is analyzed thoroughly from thirteen different perspectives. Such a study is invaluable from a scholar’s point of view because it encompasses all Chinese views on the Buddha current at that time; however, in terms of practical value, Chih-i’s commentary is so copious in its detail that it simply compounds any confusion that the average person might have been troubled with before consulting it.
In general, the following four interpretations of the word “buddha” offered by Chih-i seem to be most germane for the nonspecialist curious about the theoretical and practical meanings of the word.

1. The Buddha is one’s focus of devotion in the true sense. He is the savior who delivers human beings from their sufferings and fulfills their desires and is also the figurative parent and lord of humankind. Thus one should offer prayer and reverence to him with an attitude of total dedication and of obedience to his teaching. (This is regarded as the “first-step” view of the Buddha.)
2. When considering the essence of the Buddha objectively, the discriminating person thinks of his Law (that is, of the universal, logical truth of the universe), of justice and benevolence as the basic ideal virtues of humankind, and of selfless compassion as the means of saving all sentient beings.
3. Since the second interpretation alone is not sufficient to sustain a living faith, it must be merged with the first. Thus the third interpretation unites the abstract theory of the first with the concrete practice implied by the second.
4. When one has at last arrived at a state of profound faith, one has attained unity with the Buddha and is always embraced by him even if one’s awareness of the Buddha is not perfect (that is to say, not in complete accord with the union of theory and practice set forth above in the third interpretation). In this fourth interpretation one has already achieved buddhahood and sees the buddhanature in all the objects and beings one encounters and venerates all those objects and beings as buddhas. It is at this point that the buddha-land, or paradise, becomes a reality rather than an ideal or goal.

Although the T’ien-t’ai sect enjoyed a very highly developed intellectual and philosophical appreciation of Buddhism as a religion, unlike the Hua-yen sect [Flower Garland], for example, it also embraced a thoroughly pragmatic, down-to-earth practice of the religion that enabled it to survive while the completely academically oriented schools perished.

A timely message about the need for practice to leaven study.

Serendipity of simple coincidence or the intervention of the protective deities?