But the Lotus Sutra was not so difficult for people to understand when the sutra first appeared. The person we call the Buddha, or Awakened One, was born Siddhartha Gautama, whom history knows as the Sage of the Shakya clan, or Shakyamuni. During his lifetime in the fifth to fourth centuries BCE, he was not a mysterious figure who spoke in riddles like an entranced medium; nor did he force dogmatic ideas on others. Shakyamuni was a conscientious person who thought long and ha