This piece appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal.
Every
morning at thousands of Buddhist shrines in Japan—and at the Nichiren Temple
in Queens, N.Y., the Rissho Kosei-Kai Center of Los Angeles, and the
Daiseion-Ji temple in the small town of Wipperfürth, Germany—there rises the
chant “Nam myoho renge kyo.” These five syllables don’t sound so lyrical in
translation—“Glory to the wonderful Dharma of the Lotus Flower Sutra”—but for
those who utter them they proclaim the enduring mystery, wisdom and salvific
power of one of the most important and ancient books of Buddhist teachings, the
Lotus Sutra.
The lotus, which roots in mud, rises up through water and raises its
beautiful petals towards the sky, is the most ubiquitous of Buddhist motifs, an
image of the ascent from the morass of worldly desires and suffering to beauty,
peace and virtue. Sutra comes from the Sanskrit word “sutta” or “thread,”
meaning a set of thoughts or aphorisms on a given subject (as in the Kama
Sutra, a treatise on love and courtship). Since there is no written record
of Buddhist doctrine from the time of the Buddha, the canon of Buddhist literature
brims with hundreds of such sutras which purport to reveal his true teaching.
The Lotus Sutra has a special place in the Buddhist canon. A lively if
often confounding grab bag of parables and proclamations told in both prose and
verse, it is rich in narrative pleasure and contains more braggadocio than
a Donald Trump speech. (“The Buddha is the king,” we read at one
point, “this sutra is his wife.”) Indeed, many scholars trace its
self-promotional tone back to the era of its composition, when it had to
establish itself within a crowded market of religious texts and sects in India.
The nature of the Lotus Sutra’s influence is taken up by the scholar of
Buddhism Donald S. Lopez Jr. in the latest in Princeton
University Press’s excellent series on the “lives of great religious books.”
As with so many religious works from antiquity, the Sutra has a history
shrouded in uncertainty. Even its authorship is a mystery. By the time it was
composed in Sanskrit early in the first millennium, the Buddha had been dead
for 500 years. His striking message, at once austere and compassionate, offered
a vision of liberation resolutely free of mythological content. The Buddha’s
eerily convincing diagnosis of the nature of human suffering and the way to
transcend it had achieved a wide currency in India and had extended to China
and Sri Lanka. But Buddhism had begun to break up into sects over divergent
interpretations of the teaching.
The major schism was between the Hinayana and the Mahayana. The Hinayana
school stressed the importance of monastic life as the only real path to
liberation. Mahayana Buddhism, on the other hand, was much more worldly even in
its quest for transcendence. Its hero was not the “arhat,” or the being who has
attained nirvana, but the “bodhisattva,” the enlightened person who perceives
the truth but stays behind in the world to help others across to the far shore
of peace.
The Lotus Sutra is a classic—and cacophonous—Mahayana text. The book
unfolds as a series of dialogues between the Buddha and his followers, many of
them men of great spiritual prowess themselves. The text slowly and artfully
builds to a revelation: that of the “saddharma,” or true dharma. The Buddha
reveals to his interlocutors that the “threefold path” that he teaches in other
texts—a somewhat arcane theory of different streams of learning and
discipleship that open out paths to liberation—is actually something of a
deception.
In truth, there is only a single Way. But “this Dharma is indescribable
/ Words must fall silent.” (A very lucid account of the possible nature of this
vision, which the Buddha says cannot be formulated in language, can be found
in Heinrich Zimmer’s 1952 book “Philosophies of India.) The Buddha is so
far gone, he explains, that had he taught such a difficult doctrine, he would
have made himself clear to precisely nobody. Instead, he used the path of
“skillful means” to set people off on the path to transcendence, preaching to
each person according to his estimate of their capacity for enlightenment.
With this master stroke, the Lotus Sutra makes the goal of liberation at
once more mysterious and more practicable (and, conveniently, knocks out other
sutras competing for the attention of the faithful). The ultimate goal, so
elusive, seems almost unattainable, but this makes every teacher a student and
every student part of a great, throbbing chain of learning. Indeed, following
the Buddha, any teacher must think seriously not just about knowledge, but the
right way to transmit it. In this way, the Lotus Sutra makes itself
indispensable not just as a teaching, but as a tool of pedagogy. As Mr. Lopez writes:
“Perhaps the central teaching of the Lotus Sutra is to teach the Lotus Sutra.”
The allure of Buddhism eventually faded in the land of its birth, where
Hinduism was too vivid and well-established to give way to this more
introspective ideology. But the Lotus Sutra and other key texts gradually took
root in others lands and languages. To the raft of entertaining characters
found in the text itself—peasants and princes, initiates and religious masters,
the Buddha as both truth-teller and deceiver—Mr. Lopez’s book adds a cast
of historical figures across two millennia united only by their passion for the
book, including the 13th-century Japanese monk Nichiren, whose
fire-and-brimstone message declaring all other Buddhist texts but the Lotus
Sutra to be heretical earned him a long incarceration on a lonely island,
and Gustave Flaubert.
The author focuses on two especially interesting figures, both of them
translators. The first, the Buddhist monk Kumarajiva, lived in eastern India in
the 4th century, and had the misfortune of being taken hostage by an invading
Chinese general. Over long years as a prisoner, he picked up enough Chinese to
translate the Lotus Sutra for the benefit of the Chinese emperor, already a
devout Buddhist. Thus the Sutra took root in China, and spread slowly through
the Far East.
Just as fascinating is the story of how the book arrived in the West.
The Sutra was among a large cache of Buddhist manuscripts sent early in the
19th century to the French Sanskritist Eugène Burnouf by Brian
Hodgson, an enterprising young officer of the British East India Company.
Burnouf immediately set to translating it, noting among other things the book’s
“discursive and very Socratic method of exposition.” His French version,
published posthumously in 1852, made its way across the Atlantic, where it was
picked up and circulated in translation by Ralph Waldo Emerson and
the Transcendentalists, who regularly published scriptures from Asia in their
magazine, the Dial.
Mr. Lopez’s book shows us that translators are the unsung heroes of
religious, as much as literary, history. Here he has serviced the text with yet
another sort of translation—this one to a general audience.
The Lotus Sutra is a rejection, observes Mr. Lopez, of the kind of
nirvana “that is a solitary and passive state of eternal peace.” Rather, we are
all travelers on a long road, even the enlightened ones among us; we cannot see
through to the end right from the start and must begin with small acts of
compassion and caring. The inspiring message of the Lotus Sutra is that
buddhahood is immanent in all of us.
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