Buddhist Integration of Religion, Thought and Culture
From Keisho Tsukamoto’s Preface:
The central idea of the Lotus Sutra is integration, that the teaching of three vehicles is an expedient to enable all to reach enlightenment (in the words of the classical commentators, “opening up and merging,” Ch., k’ai-san hsien-i). We may think of the Lotus Sutra as the scripture of a religious movement within Mahayana Buddhism that set out to integrate within Buddhism the religion, thought, and culture of the peoples who lived in northwestern India around the beginning of the common era. This is what is generally called Ekayāna (One Vehicle) thought. This book verifies the historical background, together with the relevant social and cultural factors, that encouraged such religious harmony and fostered establishment of the idea of integration. It approaches those phenomena through not only philology but also historical science, archaeology, art history, paleography, epigraphy, and numismatics.