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Is the Lotus sutra just a story?
Silouan
Veteran
There have been many comments in this forum regarding the Christian faith, and obviously due to the nature of the forum, outside of the faith. I have made the observation that perhaps much is influenced from predominantly negative experiences, or ignorance about the faith. I admit that ignorance also comes from within including with me. God is a mystery on the horizon that we walk toward never quite getting there, and if we try to grasp Him in our hands (intellect) He slips through our fingers.
I have read in threads that the Bible as been just a story, that the Church uses it teachings just to control people, or that people outside the faith know more about what Christ was teaching or what it means to be Christ like as opposed to those in the faith.
This certainly is true. To the pedestrian soul the bible is just a story and nonsense, some churches do steal money from the sick and the old where abuses and control issues do abound, and there are certainly holy people outside of the faith.
However, to think that one’s own faith tradition is without issues, that their aren’t teachers who are only serving their self interest, to think that because the Buddha or Jesus came before us and struggled we don’t have to, or that we know better and don’t need to follow the tenets of our faith in our own spiritual struggle is the worst form of ignorance. We follow the tenets of our respective faith’s to become Buddha or Christ like. We take refuge and place our trust and confidence there.
Is there something more to the Lotus Sutra than just a story of cosmic proportion, or could it, like the Bible, reveal the illumined or enlightened life?
I have read in threads that the Bible as been just a story, that the Church uses it teachings just to control people, or that people outside the faith know more about what Christ was teaching or what it means to be Christ like as opposed to those in the faith.
This certainly is true. To the pedestrian soul the bible is just a story and nonsense, some churches do steal money from the sick and the old where abuses and control issues do abound, and there are certainly holy people outside of the faith.
However, to think that one’s own faith tradition is without issues, that their aren’t teachers who are only serving their self interest, to think that because the Buddha or Jesus came before us and struggled we don’t have to, or that we know better and don’t need to follow the tenets of our faith in our own spiritual struggle is the worst form of ignorance. We follow the tenets of our respective faith’s to become Buddha or Christ like. We take refuge and place our trust and confidence there.
Is there something more to the Lotus Sutra than just a story of cosmic proportion, or could it, like the Bible, reveal the illumined or enlightened life?
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Comments
there are many good buddhists who have never heard of or read the lotus sutra.
why we need the additional sutras of dubious origin is beyond me.
I don't know if the lotus sutra or the bible are true or just stories I've actually never read either. I only care that the world view they present make sense and withstand logical scrutiny.
The Four Noble Truths, for example, are of not so different from the earliest physicians' observations that, for example, humans need oxygen and good nutrition (among other things) to be their healthiest. It's a very basic, foundational statement, on which further theories are then based and developed.
Accepting foundational beliefs is not enough--one has to apply them to life. If there's no advice on application, no advice on "practice," the foundational beliefs don't take effect in our lives, other than as bits of knowledge.
The question is not whether later teachers wrote anything and whether these things are invalid simply because they aren't directly attributed to the Buddha, but rather whether the teachings of these later masters were in fact valid instructions on putting the Buddha's teachings into practice.
If one gives a new student the Four Noble Truths, but no further teaching on how to practice the Four Noble Truths, it's of limited benefit, I think.
However, the Holy Trinity is first revealed in the Genesis account. The Spirit of God hovering over the face of the water, and the Word of God saying “Let There Be Light”, and in divine counsel “Let Us make man in our own image and likeness”.
In addition, there was a Jewish presence in India before the rise of Mahayana Buddhism, and before the Greco Roman art influence on Buddhism the symbol of the Buddha was a foot print with the eight spoked wheel in the sole. Buddhism is not impervious to influence.
Though there are some similarities between the Trinity and the Trikaya there are huge differences. God is without origin, and beyond change and cause and effect, and in this manner is distinct from His creation. Anything that is subject to change must have a beginning and an end. Man becomes defied through his participation in God's uncreated energies and that is his end. Where in Buddhism one only need realize they are Buddha.
The Dalai Lama has taught that the primordial faculty of awareness can not arise without a cause, but cannot be produced by matter because it is of a different nature, therefore it must come from a ceaseless continuum.
In essence, the Luminous Mind, is naturally arising and uncompounded wisdom, the union of awareness and emptiness, and has always been inseparable from the kayas and wisdoms. It is naturally pure, the nature of things, just as it is, pervading all phenomena, beyond any transition or change, like space.
However, I ask, how can the primordial faculty of awareness be beyond change, as it is so often described, when it can not arise without cause? Because there is no distinction between emptiness and form and the natures of each this places Buddhism more in alignment with polytheism. Buddha's all.
Getting back to the Lotus Sutra. It expounds that all beings can obtain enlightenment in their present lifetimes, and in particular women will not have to be reborn as a man to do so, and Devadatta, the Buddha's cousin who tried to murder him likewise can still obtain enlightenment. Whether Mahayana or Theravada the spirit of Lotus Sutra's influence can be in the attitudes of its practitioners.
from my experience, i find many people who praise the lotus/heart sutra knows
virtually nothing about the suttas spoken by the buddha.
But the core of enlightened life is you and me, not the scripture. The scriptures should be throwing us back on ourselves; on our own responsibility; on our own source of wisdom.
We can’t hide behind a convenient quote and claim that things are settled by it. We do the quoting and another human being did the saying. There is no authority in the words.
Enlightened life –what it is and how it is done – is what we make of it. It is up to us.
and if you believe that you dont need to know much about the pali canon
to know buddhism, all the best to you.
Any canon includes writings from authors who obviously lived long after the founder of the religion. However, the authority that closes a canon isn't concerned with that. They want writings that support their own bias and beliefs, and that's all that matters. Once chosen and closed, nobody can ever write another word in their sacred canon, because nobody has the authority. The Mormons had to create an entirely new religion with their appendix to the Bible.
However, since no one Buddhist sect ever had the authority or power to declare one set of sutras to be sacred, or establish some arbitrary cut off date on what writings are allowed and close the book forever, then "who wrote this and when" is no longer relevant. It's "what does it say?" that matters. If a monk writes something tomorrow that gets passed around and quoted and becomes part of the teachings, then it's Dharma along with the oldest sutras.
If you think that by following the Pakli Canon you're only reading the words of Buddha, you're fooling yourself. Yeah, I know supposedly the old monks remembered and passed down what Buddha actually said word for word. That's the myth. Supposedly, all the Cardinals got together and made separate lists of the books to be included in the Bible and miraculously all the lists were identical. Yeah, right.
The Lotus sutra became immensely popular and influential, especially among the lay population. That makes it Dharma. You cannot argue that it doesn't deserve to be in the canon because there is no canon. There is only the Dharma, which includes whatever teachings your particular school decided is important to use. The Dharma is not an ancient boat in a museum that you're not allowed to touch because it's too fragile. It's a ship we're sailing on today and its purpose, to get us where we want to go, is all that matters.
In fact the even realer question is whether a teaching helps point a specific person, in a specific time and place, toward a foundational principle. By definition, this means the the pointers will change in appearance; the issue is not their appearance but whether they work. What works for one may not work for another, but it's foolish to get hung up on methods that don't work for us, but do work for others. It's like arguing over which hand to point with.
It's a good exercise--take any Buddhist teaching and see where it points. If Medicine Buddha practice, for example, which is tantra, points to developing compassion and wisdom, it's not a new teaching--just a new pointer.
One thing to think about--the Pali Canon is not the only branch of the tree. In linguistics, in order to reconstruct an old, lost word, we look at the various, different words, in different languages, that descended from the original word. The more descendants we have to examine, the better able we are to reconstruct the original word.
The Pali Canon is not just useful on its own; in fact, its usefulness is magnified greatly when used with other information. The Gandharan texts, for example, predate the Pali Canon; combining the info from the Pali and Gandharan texts, as well as Prakrit, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, etc., all helps build a clearer picture of the original writings.
I think the Buddha himself said - Don't believe this stuff is true just because it is written down in some sacred text or spoken by me or some other trusted authority figure. It would seem he knew human nature well and that inevitabley some would try to make it into nothing more than a religious belief system.
So it doesn't matter who said it or when it was said. If the teachings work to identify and end suffering, they work.
We just need to put a practice in place and learn to see for ourselves.
Best Wishes
Also ironic that multiple, different canons, containing different numbers and orders of books, end (almost end) with said passage:
"For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book." (Rev. 22:18)
Worrisome is the fact that way back in the Old Testament, Moses said the same thing:
"Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish [ought] from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you." (Deut. 4:2)
[Mod Note: Fixed and quote-reply removed. ~Cloud]
Other canonical languages preserve what was almost certainly once in the Pali
Canon--the Mulasarvastivada Vinaya, for example, is preserved in Tibetan.
So there's no need to confine the Canon to some rigid, Pali-only collection when we have clear translations of what were once Pali texts. We have the advantage today of archaeological, linguistic and philosophical analyses which can show us additional pieces of the precious puzzle. Rather than pre-constrain the collection, isn't it better to keep an open mind and use the best judgement and research available to see what is likely to have stemmed from the Buddha's teaching?
The Christian church has lost much precious insight by prematurely and artificially excluding what by today's research would certainly be considered additional valid teachings of Jesus.
The essential teaching is something we can know without the canon because it says something about our lives, our suffering and about liberation.
The manual gives us the basic idea how things work, but when we get familiar with the machine we don’t need the manual anymore. At some point we can use it with eyes closed.
We can improve the manual.
One can buy a copy of the Gandhari Dharmapada now:
"The famous brich-bark manuscript in the Kharosthi script, which contains a recension of the Dharmapada in a Prakrit dialect, has long been familiar to students of early Buddhist literature under the name of `Ms. Dutreuil de Rhins`. The manuscript, written in the first or second century A.D., is generally considered to be the oldest surviving manuscript of an Indian text. It was discovered near Khotan in Central Asia in 1892, and reached Europe in two parts, one of which went to Russia and the other to France. In 1897 S. Oldenburg published one leaf of the Russian portion; and in 1898 E. Senart edited the French material in the Journal Asiatiqque, together with facsimiles of the larger leaves, but not of the fragments. Now, almost seventy years after the discovery of the manuscript, it is possible for the first time to place before scholars an edition of the whole of the extant material, together with complete facsimiles."
http://books.google.com/books?id=aytJ5w074RYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
In interesting note from the book:
"An important question which can only be touched upon very briefly here is the possibility that the originals of some of the earlier translations of Buddhist works into Chinese were written in Gandhari." (p. 50)
"The oldest parts of the text (Chapters 1-9 and 17) were probably written down between 100 BC and 100 AD: most of the text had appeared by 200 AD. (Paul Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations. Routledge 1989, page 142).
The Lotus Sutra presents itself as a discourse delivered by the Buddha toward the end of his life.
Modern scholars have not released much of the [Lotus] sutra on early fragments, except to say that they are not dependent on the Chinese or Tibetan Lotus sutras. Furthermore, other scholars have noted how the cryptic Dharani passages within the Lotus sutra represent a form of the Magadhi dialect that is more similar to Pali than Sanskrit. For instance, one Dharani reads in part: "Buddhavilokite Dharmaparikshite". Although the vilo is attested in Sanskrit, it appears first in the Buddhist Pali texts as "vilokita" with the meaning of "a vigilant looker" from vi, denoting intensification, and lok, etymologically connoting "to look"." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Sutra
"The earliest known mention of "Mahayana" occurs in the Lotus Sutra between the first century BCE and the first century CE. However, some scholars such as Seishi Karashima suggest the term first used in an earlier Gandhari Prakrit version of the Lotus Sutra was not "mahāyāna" but the Prakrit word "mahājāna" in the sense of "mahājñāna" (great knowing)." http://www.tamqui.com/buddhaworld/Mahayana
One last tidbit:
BBC, May 3, 2012: A rare Buddhist manuscript, discovered by cattle grazers in 1931, has been released in book form in India.
The Lotus Sutra was found in Gilgit region, now in Pakistan.
The document, which dates back to 5th century, is perhaps the oldest manuscript in India.
Thanks for sharing this information on Lotus Sutra.
I was not aware about it - so thought of reading about it. So i went to your wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Sutra , which states below about Lotus Sutra:
Hi Sile/All,
Now reading the above has raised many questions in my mind:
1. What does this thing mean - Buddhas are ultimately immortal? Did Buddha ever taught this thing - because as per Buddha's teachings, all conditioned phenomena are anicca, dukkha and anatta. So how can something eternal is coming into picture here?
2. what is this Buddha Wisdom? How can it transcend emptiness?
3. Is the Lotus Sutra - something created by some follower of Buddha to showcase Buddha as God?
Please suggest. Thanks in advance.
Hi Sile/All,
Now reading the above has raised many questions in my mind:
1. What does this thing mean - Buddhas are ultimately immortal? Did Buddha ever taught this thing - because as per Buddha's teachings, all conditioned phenomena are anicca, dukkha and anatta. So how can something eternal is coming into picture here?
2. what is this Buddha Wisdom? How can it transcend emptiness?
3. Is the Lotus Sutra - something created by some follower of Buddha to showcase Buddha as God?
Please suggest. Thanks in advance.
In the Lotus Sutra, we see one of the competing visions of what even the disciples of Buddha during his life wanted Buddhism to be. When you look at all of these groups, you see that the monks or early disciples were just regular people and even before Buddha's death, argued about the Dharma. If you want a taste of what it's like, get involved in a church board sometime and watch the group dynamics at play. So the sutras from various teachers and regions and eras reflect an early and robust debate as should be expected.
It might be appropriate at this point to talk about the term buddhavacana, "words of the Buddha."
"[Buddhavacana] refers to the works accepted within a tradition as being the teachings of the Buddha. All traditions recognize certain texts as buddhavacana which make no claim to being the actual words of the historical Buddha, such as the Theragāthā and Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra.
According to Donald Lopez, criteria for determining what should be considered buddhavacana was developed at an early stage, and that the early formulations do not suggest that the Dharma is limited to what was spoken by the historical Buddha. The Mahāsāṃghika and the Mūlasarvāstivāda considered both the Buddha's discourses, as well those of the Buddha's disciples, to be buddhavacana.
A number of different beings such as buddhas, disciples of the buddha, ṛṣis, and devas were considered capable to transmitting buddhavacana. The content of such a discourse was then to be collated with the sūtras, compared with the Vinaya, and evaluated against the nature of the Dharma. These texts may then be certified as true buddhavacana by a buddha, a saṃgha, a small group of elders, or one knowledgeable elder." (Wiki)
@vinlyn: thanks for your reply, too.
I'm encouraging you to read some suttas and sutras, rather than relying on second-hand interpretation and commentary. And ideally read different translations of the same texts.
Maybe your reading a book or listening to a talk, and there is reference to the Buddha having taught x, or said y - but often such statements are interpretative or generalised or out of context. So I think it's very useful to know what the relevant sutta or sutra actually says, so you can make your own assessment.
And more generally a familiarity with the suttas and sutras helps one to understand Buddhist teachings at a deeper level.