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This is the fourth lecture in my seven part summer lecture series on the Lotus Sutra, and was recorded on August 8, 2011. This series will be an approach to studying the Lotus Sutra that will focus each session on various aspects of the Lotus Sutra, thereby giving a complete, though not necessarily in-depth, overview of the entire Lotus Sutra.
This fourth lecture is an overview of the Grand Drama found within the Lotus Sutra. In this lecture I cover the appearance of the stupa of Many Treasures Buddha as well as the events surrounding this appearance and the emergence of the Bodhisattvas from Underground. This is not a complete exploration of each of these chapters and is in fact only the study of the past live and predictions contained in each of these chapters.
The recording associated with this lecture is not edited.
I hope you find this material useful.
With Gassho
Ryusho
————notes————
Here are the notes I used in the course of delivering this lecture. They are unedited and are provided with the hope they will be of some use as you listen to the recorded lecture.
Lotus Sutra Lecture Summer 2011
Session Four
Grand Drama and Transition Moments
Good evening thank you for participating in tonight’s lecture the fourth in this summer series of lectures on the Lotus Sutra. Tonight we are going to primarily focus on the chapter 11, 13, 14, and 15. This will cover most of the preliminary events surrounding the appearance of the stupa with Many Treasures Buddha as well as the beginning of the ceremony in the air. We will stop at the end of chapter 15 before the Buddha reveals his eternal relationship with the Bodhisattvas who arose from beneath the earth, which we will cover in session 5, in two weeks.
Let me begin by recounting for you the events as the occur in these chapters. The drama of the Lotus Sutra really picks up right as Chapter 11 begins (Murano page 181, and Reeves page 235). Without any introduction or prelude Chapter 11 opens with a stupa of seven treasures springing up from underground and then hovering in the sky above the congregation that had gather around the Buddha who was preaching the Lotus Sutra. This is an immense object. The measurements of the object are given in yojana in the Lotus Sutra.
A yojana is a unit of measurement which is a Vedic unit of measure used in ancient India. There is some dispute as to its modern equivalent, with it being roughly between 4-9 miles. This distance changed over different periods of time in India. The basis of the yojana was the distance an ox cart could travel in one day. As you might imagine when the condition of roads improved over time the distance would increase from when roads were difficult to pass along. There is a general consensus that 8 miles is a rough standard that can be used for the time period of the 6th century. So for our purposes let us be a bit conservative and use 5 miles for one yojana.
The measurements of the stupa that is appearing from underground is given as; 500 yojanas high, two hundred and fifty yojanas wide and deep. This would equal 2500 miles for the height, and 1250 mile wide and deep. This makes the structure 3,906,250,000 cubic miles big, or 6,286,500,000,000 cubic meters. So how big is that really? Well I did some checking and it is considerably smaller than the volume of the earth. I found one page where a teacher said he could fit on average 8 students in a cubic meter of space. Here is the number of high school students you could reasonably fit inside this great stupa; 50,292,000,000,000, that is 50 quadrillion, 292 trillion students in one space. That is more high school students than there are on this planet of ours. So clearly this is a significant structure that is now hovering above the assembly seated on the ground. The description of the decorations of this object says it has 5000 railings and 10,000,000 chambers. That would make each chamber on average 390.625 cubic miles in size.
The sutra goes on to describe it being decorated with innumerable banners and streamers, from which jeweled necklaces and billions of jeweled bells hang. The decorations and adornments go on for half a page in the Murano translation. This is no ordinary structure and certainly nothing like anything we have seen, even in the movies with the aid of modern CGI.
From within this great stupa there comes a loud voice which says:
“Excellent, excellent! You, Sakyamuni, the World-Honored One have expounded to this great multitude the Sutra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Dharma, the Teaching of Equality, the Great Wisdom, the Dharma for Bodhisattvas, the Dharma Upheld by the Buddhas. So it is, so it is. What you, Sakyamuni, the World-Honored One, have expounded is all true.” Murano page 181
Now I don’t know about you but if I had just witnessed this fantastic phenomena, this large stupa structure appearing from underground and then I heard this voice say the above I would be impressed to say the least. Just imagine the volume of the voice to be heard from not only within the structure but to be heard outside as well by those in the great multitude of people gathered around the Buddha. If nothing else I would imagine something pretty significant had just occurred and just been said. I also would probably be wondering what the heck is going on. Wouldn’t you too?
And so it is with those in the congregation, they too expressed their curiosity over this occurrence.
The Buddha then explains that inside this stupa is the body of a Tathagata who long time lived in a world called Treasure-Purity which is located in a far distant world east of this world. This Buddha was called Many-Treasures Buddha, who made a vow that,
“if anyone expounds a sutra called the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Dharma in any of the worlds of the ten quarters after I become a Buddha and pass away, I will cause my stupa-mausoleum to spring up before him so that I may be able to prove the truthfulness of the sutra and say ‘excellent’ in praise of him because I wish to hear that sutra direct from him.” (Murano page 182)
It is important to note here that there are two causes mentioned in the Lotus Sutra that result in the effect of the appearance of Many Treasures Buddha and his stupa. Those causes are the original vow of Many Treasures Buddha and the supernatural powers of Many Treasures Buddha which he attained as a result of his practice.
The folks in the congregation make a request of Buddha Sakyamuni to see this great Buddha Many Treasures. I think I too would want to see this Buddha, wouldn’t you also?
The Buddha then relates that a condition of revealing the body of Many Treasures Buddha is that the present Buddha must call back all of his replicas who will also be expounding the Dharma in the worlds of the ten quarters. At this time the Buddha Sakyamuni calls back all of his replica Buddhas.
The Buddha emits a ray of light which illuminates the worlds to the east numbering as many as the sands in the river Ganges. These worlds are beautiful and adorned with jeweled trees and are filled with many thousands of billions of Bodhisattvas, where the Buddhas were expounding the Dharma with loud and wonderful voices, and these Bodhisattvas were also expounding the Dharma. So not only the Buddhas were teaching the Dharma but the Bodhisattvas were as well.
Next the Buddha illuminates other directions, the south, west, north and the four intermediate quarters; south-east, south-west, north-east, and north-west, as well as the zenith and nadir. All of these additional worlds were just as the worlds of the east.
Now each of the Buddhas in all these worlds of the ten quarters said to their congregations;
“Good men! Now I will go to Sakyamuni Buddha of the Saha-World. I also will make offerings to the stupa of treasures of Many Treasures Tathagata.” (Murano page 184)
This great accumulation of replicas of the Buddha and their respective attendants was so large that not even this world, our world could accommodate them all. So the Buddha then joins not just a thousand million Sumeru-worlds, he then purified and joined two hundred billion nayuta worlds of each of the eight quarters and still it wasn’t large enough, so more worlds were joined to this one and purified. The description of this joining and purification goes on for over a page and a half. This is quite a collection of worlds from an unimaginable number of universes which have now been joined together with this world to accommodate the large collection of replica Buddhas.
I think we can safely say, and Nichiren points this out that we have here the largest assembly and collection of Buddhas that can be found in any of the sutras taught by the Buddha. This is meant to impress us to awe us and to sink home the importance of the teaching of the Lotus Sutra. How can we doubt the truth contained within?
Let me move on here, I think you get the idea of the grand scale of this event that has just occurred and continues for several chapters in the Lotus Sutra. The Buddha Many Treasures then invites Sakyamuni to sit beside him in the stupa. This is the foundation for the imagery we use in our Honzon or object of veneration which is either depicted in statue form or in calligraphic form on mandalas.
The congregation is next raised up in the sky so that they can witness and see the two Buddha sitting side by side. This is the beginning of what is called the Ceremony in the Air. As I mentioned in lecture one when I gave a brief overview of the Lotus Sutra, one of the ways of dividing the Lotus Sutra is Three Assemblies in Two Locations. We have now witnessed two assemblies in two locations. The first assembly is the group of disciples who had gathered around the Buddha (not an insignificant number of people mind you) up to the appearance of the stupa. The second assembly is the now very large congregation that includes the replicas of the Buddha and their attendants. The two locations are the original location on Mount Sacred Eagle, and now the location in the sky.
It is now that the focus of the Lotus Sutra makes a shift. Up to this point the Buddha had been talking about the expedient of the Three Vehicles and the shift from these three independent ways of focus to the single Vehicle of Buddhahood. So that is one transition. Here we have a transition from a view of the present to a view of the future. Up to this point the Buddha had been teaching his contemporaries those who we could say practiced at the time of the Buddha. But now the Buddha is beginning on focusing on the future generations, those people who will live after the time of the Buddha. In a way we could say now the Buddha is talking about us or thinking about us.
He asks the large assembly;
“Who will expound the Sutra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Dharma in this Saha-World? Now is the time to do this. I shall enter into Nirvana before long. I wish to transmit this Sutra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Dharma to someone so that this sutra may be preserved.” (Murano page 187).
So now we see the Buddha has made a transition from his present to his future, or from our past to our future depending upon how you wish to view it.
In the verse section of the Sutra there is an important eight stanzas that I would like to point out to you at this time.
“Anyone who protects this sutra also
Should be considered to have already made offerings
To the Buddhas of my replicas, who have come here
And adorned the worlds with their light.Anyone who expounds this sutra
Will be able to see me,
To see Many-Treasures Tathagata,
And to see the Buddhas of my replicas.” (Murano page 190)
I point this out because I think all to often we forget that because we live in this time, this age so far removed from Sakyamuni Buddha that somehow we are unable to have a connection to the Buddha. We may sometimes think it is beyond our capacity to understand the Buddha or to understand this Lotus Sutra. Yet simply by our protection of the sutra, our daily practice and praise of the sutra and our genuine efforts to share this sutra with others we are automatically in the presence of Many Treasures Buddha, Sakyamuni Buddha and all the other Buddhas and replica Buddhas. You all have heard me say something like this many times, and I can’t stress enough how true this is and how important this promise is. Without this promise and without the connection we will discuss in Chapter 16 this sutra would be nothing other than a 3000 year old document which we would be trying to follow as some instruction guide. It would be like trying to bake a cake with an ancient recipe with outdated ingredient lists and measurements we no longer used. I don’t know if you have looked at old cookbooks or not, but the ingredients used then and now vary greatly as do the measurements. So unless you were a skilled cook your results may not be satisfactory. And so too, without these promises, you would need to be a great Buddhist scholar possibly in order to gain benefit from the Lotus Sutra.
I hope you can see this.
It is here that I will end my recounting of the events in Chapter 11, though by no means is this all that is found in this chapter. Briefly though what follows in this chapter are the Nine Easy and Six Difficult practices as well as the passage from which the Hotoge comes. The Hotoge is the part of our standard service that has the irregular beat and we refer to in English as the Difficulty of Retaining the Sutra.
Next I would like to skip to Chapter 13 and 14 where various groups of people make a pledge to spread the Dharma of the Lotus Flower Sutra. Briefly let me say that some of the people agree to spread the Dharma but not in this Saha World, the world in which we live, and some who are not from this world agree to try to do so in this world. Basically the Buddha rejects their offerings. First because those who would not do so in this world would not fulfill his request to teach in the Saha world. They declined to teach it here because the people of this world would be too difficult to teach and so they wanted to go someplace where it would be easier. For those who were not from here the Buddha rejected them also for the very reason they were not from here and so would not understand how to relate to the people of this world. I sometimes jokingly say just think how poorly ET was received here, imagine if lots of ETs came here and tried to teach Buddhism. Robert Heinlein wrote a book that was considered the hippie bible in the ‘60s called Stranger in a Strange Land. His main character was a Martian and he was almost killed because he was so peaceful and people did not understand him. So the Buddha was very wise in his rejection of this outside effort to spread his teachings.
Of course this is an oversimplification but you get the general idea. Instead the Buddha had something else in mind and so in Chapter 15 we have the appearance of appearance of Bodhisattvas from Underground. The Buddha says that there is a great assembly of Bodhisattva-mahasattvas numbering sixty thousand times as many sands of the River Ganges who are accompanied by attendants also number sixty thousand times as many sands of the River Ganges who will protect, keep, read, recite, and expound this sutra after his extinction. (Murano page 228)
At this time the earth then quakes and cracks and all of this great grouping of thousands of billions of Bodhisattva-mahasattvas spring up from underground.
“Their bodies were golden-colored, and adorned with the thirty-two marks and with innumerable rays of light. They had lived in the sky below this Saha-World. They came up here because they heard these words of Sakyamuni Buddha. Each of them was the leader of a great multitude.” (Murano page 229)
These Bodhisattvas are great in appearance and stature. I always like to point out when I talk about the appearance of these bodhisattvas how when the approach the Buddha they do not ask about things for themselves as the contemporary disciples of the Buddha had. Instead they inquire as to the health and wellbeing of the Buddha saying:
“World-Honored One! Are you in good health? Are you peaceful or not? Are the living beings, whom you are to save, ready to receive your teachings or not? Do they not fatigue you?” (Murano page 230)
How much different is this from those who approached the Buddha in previous chapters asking for predictions of their future enlightenment?
Ok, so now we have this huge number of Bodhisattvas who are simply awesome to look at, and those in the congregation who have witnessed their appearance make comment about this. These great Bodhisattvas are lead by Four Bodhisattvas who are called; Superior-Practice (Jogyo), Limitless-Practice (Muhengyo), Pure-Practice (Jogyo), and Steadily-Established-Practice (Anryugyo). It is these four leaders who are depicted in images or statues, or their names written on the Omandala Gohonzon. On the picute Omandala on the side altar you can see them hovering in the sky. On the calligraphic mandala they are the four names flanking the names of Sakyamuni and Taho (Many Treasures); two to the left and two to the right.
The Buddha Sakyamuni tells the congregation that he has trained these great Bodhisattvas in the past, which everyone finds extremely difficult to understand. They wonder how this can be so since many had been with Sakyamuni since he began teaching and they had never seen these great Bodhisattvas. It is here that I will end my recounting of the events in these Chapters. It is here that an announcer would come on, if this were TV and say “Stay tuned for our next episode.”
I will pick up the story in our next lecture as we talk about chapters 2 and 16.
Now what the heck has just happened? Yes it is fantastic, I don’t think anyone can deny that, but what is the significance to us in all this? That is the key thing. It’s a nice story, it’s pretty impressive; but so what?
I have spent a large amount of time in this lecture recounting the events and of the remaining time left I would like to talk about some of the meanings we can draw from these events. As some of you may know I am not a big fan of supplying interpretations of the Lotus Sutra for others. I generally prefer to let people come to their own conclusions about the meanings of things found in the sutra. This whole series of lectures is a change in that approach but I still hope that just because I say something means a certain thing is not the end of the story. There are many meanings and interpretations we can come to from the events in the sutra, and what I am providing is just a small part of those meanings. In a way it is just to get you started, to make is possibly more approachable to you.
Let’s go back to the beginning of this lecture. We are introduced to a Buddha, Many Treasures who is old. But he is not just old he is ancient, and he is even older than ancient. You could say that this Buddha is beyond time altogether. He is not just a Buddha from the past but he represents the primordial Buddha, the Buddha from the metaphysical beginning of things. And here we have our Buddha, Sakyamuni Buddha taking a seat along side of this Buddha. In this moment the past, present and as we shall see in chapter 16 the future is all contained right here. In fact in this moment all dimensions of eternity coalesce this is the synthesis of time and eternity. We are beyond time, we are in every moment of every possible time. When we sit before such a great object as we do in our daily practice we are fusing our lives with the past, the present, and the future and our lives expand beyond the moment we currently perceive ourselves to be in. When we take this kind of view, then how can the trouble and tribulations of this moment not seem insignificant while at the same time our own lives achieve the greatest possible significance.
Next we come to the integration of the countless worlds joining with and into our own present world. We have the collections of Buddhas the replicas of the Buddha all assembled together in a conjoined world which is so beautiful it is almost beyond description. Every day we look around us and we see our worlds our lives as being perhaps small and full of suffering or troubles. Yet the image that is presented to us in the ceremony in the air is an expansive one and one of great beauty. Just as the seating of the two Buddhas side by side presents us with a view of the eternity of time, the image of the joined worlds is one of infinite space. So now we have an expansive time element and an expansive space element all in one moment.
When we place ourselves in front of the Honzon as presented in the Lotus Sutra in these chapters we place ourselves outside of our present time and our present space. Again this allows us the opportunity to view our current condition in this life as really one of great reward. How many people everyday participate in such a grand drama.
But it is not easy for us to see this as we live out our lives and experience our day to day problems. Yet this is the invitation that the Buddha makes to us; to realize that we are not merely some lonely person chanting Odaimoku and practicing the Lotus Sutra, but that we are actually participants in a drama unlike anything that can be contained by either space or time.
Next we come to the assembly of all the replicas of the Buddha Sakyamuni. These Buddhas. Dr. Reeves in his book The Stories of the Lotus Sutra says that the Chinese term used is difficult to interpret and could be said to mean representatives, or duplicates or replicas or even embodiments of Sakyamuni. He makes the point that they are both independently real apart from Sakyamuni and yet subordinate to him. In other words the reality of being both separate and together is presented to us. In a sense these Buddhas are real to us but unimportant to us in our lives in this Saha world. They are real but they offer no value to us from the context of the Lotus Sutra. Remember these countless Buddhas, the emanations of Sakyamuni come here to our world to hear the Dharma expounded and witness the Buddha Sakyamuni of the Saha World sitting beside Many Treasures Buddha who also came to this Saha World.
Also these Buddhas serve to demonstrate that Sakyamuni is not just the Buddha of this world but he is also at the same time is a Universal Buddha who is represented everywhere throughout the multi-verse by these Buddhas.
I have spoken elsewhere about the significance in our daily practice about purifying our world as we prepare to do our recitation of the sutra or Odaimoku so I won’t go into it here, but I encourage you to look up those other writings and consider them carefully in your daily practice.
Now let me talk about the truth and the living Dharma. The appearance of this great stupa serves as a devise or reason for bringing together a great assembly of Buddhas and lands but it also serves as a validation of the truth of the Wonderful Dharma of the Lotus Flower Sutra. Many Treasures Buddha shows us the truth that the underlying Dharma or the truth of the Lotus Sutra does not change. While the actual words or make up of the Sutra may take on different appearances or different words the truth that underlies it all is unchanging. The two Buddhas sitting beside each other shows us that not only is the teacher to be respected but the truth of the teaching is equally respectable. We are not really devoting ourselves to the teacher but to the truth of the teaching and that is the real basis of our devotion to the Buddha.
In Chapter 10 there is another transition that takes place in the Lotus Sutra and that is the transition from an emphasis on the body of the Buddha to the teaching of the Buddha. In Chapter 10 the Buddha tells his disciples that instead of enshrining his relics the teaching of the Wonderful Dharma of the Lotus Flower Sutra should be what is contained within the Stupa we revere. Here too in this great drama we should remember that because the teaching is true the teacher is great. We devote ourselves to the Lotus Sutra and to the teacher of that sutra and through our devotion we bring it to life.
Remember it is our lives that determine the reality of the Lotus Sutra. It is our practice and our proof that demonstrates whether this is merely a historical document recording a teaching of Sakyamuni or the great universal truth of the Wonderful Dharma of the Lotus Flower. And then bringing this sutra to life we discover how to teach this wonderful truth to others and ensure the protection and endurance of this wonderful teaching.
Remember the Stupa of Many Treasures Buddha does not come from some distant heaven but arises out of the ground of this Saha world, and so too does the Lotus Sutra blossom in our lives from the practice in this Saha World.
Thank you all for participating in this rather long lecture. I hope you have found it both informative and encouraging. Let us all strive together to realize the truth of the Lotus Sutra, the truth that this world is the Buddha’s pure land, and the truth that we all together can attain Buddhahood in this life.
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