CHAPTER 7
Nichiren had predicted that the Lotus Sūtra, which had arrived in Japan from the west, having made its way eastward—from India to China and from China to Japan—would one day return, traveling west, to China and India. He was wrong. In the twentieth century, the Lotus Sūtra continued east from Japan, eventually reaching what is called the West, crossing the Pacific Ocean and the vast continent of North America, to arrive in Boston. As we saw in chapter 5, over a century earlier, in 1844, it had arrived in Boston, traveling west crossing the Atlantic.
The first stop on its eastward journey might seem unlikely: the island of Guam. After more than three centuries of Spanish rule, Guam came under American control under the 1898 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish-American War. On December 7, 1941, hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes bombed the small American installation on Guam. Two days later, Japanese troops landed on the island. After a brief battle, the American forces, outnumbered ten to one, surrendered the island to Japan. On July 21, 1944, U.S. Marines landed on Guam. By August 10, they had secured the island; more than eighteen thousand Japanese troops were killed in the battle.
On January 26, 1975, Ikeda Daisaku announced the founding of Sōka Gakkai International in order to spread the teachings of Nichiren around the world. The announcement was made at Sōka Gakkai's First World Peace Conference, held in Guam. As noted in the previous chapter, in the wake of Japan's defeat in World War II (which Sōka Gakkai leaders blamed on Japan's failure to embrace the Lotus Sūtra), Toda Jōsei had begun to promote world peace. This would occur through what he called “human revolution.” As devotion to the Lotus Sūtra increased, the possibility of conflict and warfare would decrease. Two months before the Guam conference, an article in the Sōka Gakkai newspaper, World Tribune, had stated: “Kōsen-rufu [wide propagation] is the sole purpose of NSA [Nichiren Shōshū of America]. We are united in a harmonious organization that will be ultimately effective in manifesting the dream of humanity—life in a peaceful and prosperous world.”1 (We recall that this announcement took place some sixteen years before Sōka Gakkai's break with Nichiren Shōshū.)
In many ways, the founding of Sōka Gakkai International was a postwar version of Tanaka Chigaku's great plan to evangelize the world. Today, Sōka Gakkai International claims 1.8 million members outside Japan. In 1995, Sōka Gakkai International adopted a charter. It reads in part: “We, the constituent organizations and members of the Sōka Gakkai International (hereinafter called ‘SGI’), embrace the fundamental aim and mission of contributing to peace, culture and education based on the philosophy and ideals of the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin. … We believe that Nichiren Daishonin's Buddhism, a humanistic philosophy of infinite respect for the sanctity of life and all-encompassing compassion, enables individuals to cultivate and bring forth their inherent wisdom and, nurturing the creativity of the human spirit, to surmount the difficulties and crises facing humankind and realize a society of peaceful and prosperous coexistence.”2 The SGI Charter also contained ten “purposes and principles,” where SGI's commitment to peace and interreligious harmony is also made clear:
1.SGI shall contribute to peace, culture and education for the happiness and welfare of all humanity based on Buddhist respect for the sanctity of life.
2.SGI, based on the ideal of world citizenship, shall safeguard fundamental human rights and not discriminate against any individual on any grounds.
3.SGI shall respect and protect the freedom of religion and religious expression.
4.SGI shall promote an understanding of Nichiren Daishonin's Buddhism through grass-roots exchange, thereby contributing to individual happiness.
5.SGI shall, through its constituent organizations, encourage its members to contribute toward the prosperity of their respective societies as good citizens.
6.SGI shall respect the independence and autonomy of its constituent organizations in accordance with the conditions prevailing in each country.
7.SGI shall, based on the Buddhist spirit of tolerance, respect other religions, engage in dialogue and work together with them toward the resolution of fundamental issues concerning humanity.
8.SGI shall respect cultural diversity and promote cultural exchange, thereby creating an international society of mutual understanding and harmony.
9.SGI shall promote, based on the Buddhist ideal of symbiosis, the protection of nature and the environment.
10.SGI shall contribute to the promotion of education, in pursuit of truth as well as the development of scholarship, to enable all people to cultivate their individual character and enjoy fulfilling and happy lives.3
We find in the charter no mention of slandering the dharma (or the consequences of doing so), no mention of shakubuku, and no mention of the Lotus Sūtra.
In 1993, two years before the charter, Ikeda established the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century. It is located at 396 Harvard Street in Cambridge, just two blocks from Harvard Yard. (In 2009, it was renamed the Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning, and Dialogue.)
In 1841, three years before “The Preaching of Buddha” would appear in The Dial, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a graduate of Harvard College, published his first volume of essays. In 1838, he had scandalized the audience at his address to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School when he condemned “Historical Christianity” for its “noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love. … To aim to convert a man by miracles, is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made, by the reception of beautiful sentiments.” For Emerson, the true Christianity is “a faith like Christ's in the infinitude of man.”4
This sentiment would be echoed in Emerson's volume of essays in 1841, including an essay that would become one of his most famous works and emblematic of the Transcendentalists: “The Oversoul.” The essay has often been cited as evidence of the influence of Eastern thought on Emerson's thinking. Yet it was only in 1845 that he acquired a copy of Charles Wilkens's 1785 translation of the Bhagavad Gītā, praising it in a letter to Elizabeth Hoar as “the much renowned book of Buddhism.”5 Nonetheless, even without evidence of direct influence, the essay is seen by some to have affinities with Hindu, and especially Vedānta, thought. In the essay, Emerson describes the Oversoul as follows:
The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character, and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.”6
On September 24, 1993, 152 years after the publication of Emerson's essay, and 149 years after a chapter from the Lotus Sūtra was published in Emerson's journal, The Dial, Ikeda Daisaku delivered a lecture at Harvard entitled “Mahayana Buddhism and Twenty-First Century Civilization.” In the course of the lecture, Ikeda refers repeatedly to the universal message of peace that one finds in the teachings of the Buddha and especially of Nichiren. He explains that “during World War II, the Soka Gakkai challenged head-on the forces of Japanese militarism.” His quotations from the Buddha tend to come from the Pāli scriptures, that is, the Buddha of the first half of the Lotus Sūtra. Near the end of the lecture, he quotes Emerson, from “The Oversoul”: “the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.”7
Amid references to Heraclitus, Goethe, Josiah Royce, and Walt Whitman, Ikeda mentions the Lotus Sūtra three times: first he says that “the Lotus Sutra, the core of Mahayana Buddhism, states that the purpose of existence—the eternal cycles of life and death—is to be ‘happy and at ease.’” Next he says that the drums and horns that are mentioned in the sūtra are “urging on … the human will to live.” His final reference is to the rain that falls on various plants and trees in Chapter Five, “Herbs.” He writes, “This scene, depicted with a vividness, grandeur and beauty characteristic of the Lotus Sutra, symbolizes the enlightenment of all people touched by the Buddha's Law of great and impartial wisdom. At the same time, it is a magnificent paean to the rich diversity of human as well as all forms of sentient and insentient life, each equally manifesting the inherent enlightenment of its nature, each thriving and harmonizing in a grand concert of symbiosis.”8
It was this chapter, of course, that Elizabeth Palmer Peabody translated from Burnouf's essay and published in The Dial in 1844. The Lotus Sūtra that traveled across the Atlantic to reach Boston in 1844 thus met the Lotus Sūtra that Nichiren had sent across the Pacific.
The Lotus Sūtra is a book of twos: a sūtra long recognized as having two parts, its chapters divided into prose and poetry, its parables telling tales of those who understand and those who do not, its constant division of the world into us and them. It is a text (clearly not unique in the history of religions) that has been used to promote world war and that has been used to promote world peace. That binary extended into the two essays that Elizabeth Palmer Peabody placed side by side in The Dial in 1844. In his own words, Burnouf presented the human Buddha, the historical Buddha, the social reformer who fought against the corruption of the priesthood and offered a path to liberation that was open to all. In his translation, Burnouf presented a cosmic Buddha who teaches a single truth that falls like rain upon all the creatures of the earth.
One hundred fifty years later, the two Buddhas, arrived from different worlds, sit side by side in America, perhaps uncomfortably, perhaps even back-to-back. The Buddha that we know best is Burnouf's Buddha, the human Buddha, the Buddha whom my students adore, a man who faced the facts of suffering and death and set out to find a state beyond them. He is the philosophy Buddha. The Buddha of Sōka Gakkai, of Nichiren, of the Lotus Sūtra, is a Buddha who has lived for aeons and who will live for aeons more, who taught the human Buddhism of Burnouf as a temporary measure for those unprepared to recognize his true identity. This is the Buddha that my students don't like, the one who ruined everything, the one who lied. He is the religion Buddha.
Throughout this study, I have noted the anxiety that runs through the Lotus Sūtra, as a new vision of the Buddha, and of Buddhism, challenged the old view. The anxiety of the sūtra's origin has redounded through history for two thousand years. The Lotus Sūtra, a text that contains two of the most uplifting statements in the history of Buddhism—all sentient beings will achieve buddhahood and the Buddha did not really die—statements that convey unity and eternity, would in various ways serve as the foundation, or justification, for all manner of fracture and division, of conflict and death.
In China, it was in many ways the Lotus Sūtra's dismissal of the Buddha's earlier teachings that made possible the system of panjiao (tenet classification), the system of periodizing, and ranking, the Buddhist scriptures received from India. In Japan, the antagonism present in the sūtra would become embodied in Nichiren, who would split from his own Tendai sect because it was not sufficiently devoted to the Lotus, who would condemn the state, and the other schools of Buddhism, for the same crime. After his death, the followers of Nichiren would split into their own sects and subsects and sub-subsects. In 1874, as the result of a Meiji-period reorganization, there were six major subsects of Nichiren Buddhism: with Nichirenshū Itchi-ha combining all lineages that held that the two halves of the sūtra were of equal importance (itchi) and Nichirenshū Shōretsu-ha consisting of five subsects that held that the second half was superior (shōretsu). In 1876, two sects of the previously suppressed fuju fuse (no giving, no receiving) movement, were restored; the five shōretsu lineages also became independent sects. In 1891, these five shōretsu sects, which had previously been designated as branches of Nichirenshū, changed their names, reflecting their independent status. In 1900, one of these, the Honmonshū, split, with the breakaway group calling itself Nichirenshū Fuji-ha (Nichiren School, Mount Fuji branch), later changing its name to Nichiren Shōshū, the “Orthodox Nichiren School.”9 As we have seen, in 1991, Sōka Gakkai, the lay organization of the most isolated of any of the Nichiren subsects, the Nichiren Shōshū, would split off. In each case, the Lotus Sūtra's predictions of the persecution of its devotees provided a ready justification.
There is a long history of saying that the Lotus Sūtra is a sūtra about nothing—indeed, that it is not a sūtra at all. The brilliant Japanese scholar Tominaga Nakamoto (1715–1746) was among the first scholars in the world, whether Asian or European, to offer what would be considered today a “historical” analysis of the development of Buddhism. He saw the great variety of Buddhist sūtras as a sign of discord, with competing factions composing their own sūtras after the Buddha's death but ascribing their favored sūtra to the Buddha in order to claim his authority. Of the Lotus Sūtra Tominaga wrote, “In one volume the beginning and the end are inconsistent, so that it does not amount to a literary work. Moreover from start to finish the words of the Lotus Sūtra are just words of praise to the Buddha, and do not have the real nature of a sūtra teaching. It should never have been called a sūtra from the beginning.”10 More recently, George Tanabe has written, “The text, so full of merit, is about a discourse which is never delivered; it is a lengthy preface without a book.”11
Nonetheless, generations of readers across Asia have found doctrines of profound importance in the Lotus Sūtra, identifying them, amid all of the self-reflexive hyperbole, as the key teaching of the first half of the text—that there is but one vehicle—and the key teaching of the second half of the text—that the lifespan of the Buddha is immeasurable—two ideas that, at the time of the sūtra's composition, were revolutionary. That the authors regarded them as such is reflected in the sūtra's alternation between bravado and fear.
Generations of readers, whether they have read the text in Sanskrit, Chinese, or English, have asked the question, “What is the Lotus Sūtra?” As one of my students asked on her index card, “What chapter does the Lotus Sūtra actually come up in? Is it even one thing, or is it the entire body of work?” And, indeed, both the student in “Introduction to Buddhism” and the scholar of Buddhist Studies are daunted by the question of precisely what it is. Which chapter or chapters, verses, or passages are “the Lotus Sūtra” that the Buddha so insistently praises? Scholars understand that the Lotus Sūtra is a work of accretion, constructed in layers over the course of several centuries, and they have presented plausible arguments for how this occurred, for how the sūtra evolved. There is general consensus that the verse portions are older than the prose portions and that the earliest stratum of the text, the ur–Lotus Sūtra, is the verses found in Chapter Two through Chapter Nine. Perhaps, then, this is the text that the later additions keep referring to. Perhaps it is in these relatively few pages that the Lotus Sūtra does not refer to itself. Yet even here our hopes are dashed, for in the verses of Chapter Three, perhaps the most cited of all chapters, the chapter about the burning house, the Buddha declares, “This very Lotus Sūtra shall be taught only to the profoundly wise. … Now listen to what I teach about the results of the errors of those people who frown upon and have doubts about this sūtra” (76). This is followed by the most discomfiting section of the sūtra, in which the Buddha describes in grisly detail the horrible fate that awaits those who “disparage this sūtra, and despise, hate, and hold grudges against the people who recite, copy, and preserve it” (77). And so still we wonder: What is it that must be recited, copied, and preserved?
Thus, there does not seem to be, or scholars have not yet identified, an original text, free of self-reference, around which the rest of the sūtra was constructed over time. The endless self-praise might only be reasonably explained, should a reasonable explanation be possible, by considering that the Lotus Sūtra, like the earlier Buddhist sūtras that it rejects, began not as something that was read but as something that was recited, not as text but as word. Hence, the repeated references to the Lotus Sūtra and its wonders were the words of the preacher, the “expounder of the dharma” (dharmabhāṇaka) who is extolled throughout the text and provides the title for two chapters (Ten and Nineteen).12 The self-promotion, so cloying to the modern reader, was the words of the preacher seeking to attract the crowd, preachers who exhorted their audience to write down and then read the words they recited. Perhaps the central teaching of the Lotus Sūtra is to teach the Lotus Sūtra.
One mark of a great religious text, the kind of text worthy of a biography in this series, is its capacity to be read in many ways, even in ways that strike us as unseemly. As Shakespeare reminds us, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” Nichiren and Burnouf read the Lotus Sūtra, in very different languages, in very different times, and in very different places, and saw two different Buddhas there, extolling one and rejecting the other. Both of those Buddhas are with us today.
Yet long before Nichiren on Sado Island and Burnouf in Paris, the Lotus Sūtra, like all texts, had its own particular place and time. The place was India, and the time was a period of upheaval in the Buddhist tradition, with the very nature of the Buddha being defined in new ways. What is perhaps most remarkable is that that moment of upheaval has extended far into the future; the Lotus Sūtra, a text replete with prophecies, has demonstrated its capacity to always include the present in its narrative of eternal struggle.
But where, in the end, is the Lotus Sūtra? It is a text marked with fissures and cracks, like the earth split by a rising stūpa, like the earth rent by bodhisattvas emerging from beneath the soil. Is it a fractured whole, or is it assembled fragments? Perhaps it is a puzzle that can never be put back together, leaving just its name. Nichiren wrote, “Now in the Final Dharma age, neither the Lotus Sūtra nor the other sūtras are of use. Namu-myōhō-renge-kyō alone is valid.”13 We recall that in Nichiren Shōshū, the dharma in the three jewels is not the Lotus Sūtra; it is the three great secret doctrines: the honzon, the daimoku, and the kaidan.
And so the Lotus Sūtra that we have been seeking seems to have disappeared. Perhaps it was never there. This text that seemed to lack any particular doctrine, this text that never seemed to begin, has become a source of short phrases (such as kōsen rufu, “wide propagation”) invested with meanings that would have been incomprehensible to its authors, as is so often the case with sacred texts. Among some of its modern adherents, we are left with something as vague (though laudable) as world peace.
Perhaps we have become those strange beings mentioned in Chapter Seven, called lokāntarika, “those between the worlds.” Perhaps it is time to return to the text, to live in the darkness of the fissures that seem to scar it. By returning to the text, by reading the Lotus Sūtra (as the sūtra itself exhorts us to do), by exploring its cracks and fissures, those of us who, in the words of the sūtra, have been living in “the dark places between the worlds, where the rays of the sun and the moon have been unable to penetrate” (123), may recognize each other as the many different readers of the many different readings of the Lotus Sūtra and say to each other, “How is it possible that sentient beings have suddenly appeared here?”