The Lotus Sutra is Not Difficult to Understand
In East Asian Buddhism today, it is widely believed that the Sutra of the Lotus Flower of the Wondrous Dharma, more commonly known as the Lotus Sutra, is the finest of all the sutras.
Despite this belief, people assume that the teachings of the Buddha are very difficult to understand. I think one of the main reasons is that, at first glance, Buddhist sutras appear quite intimidating because the versions of the text available to us today are filled with challenging words and unfamiliar language. If we take a look at commentaries on the Lotus Sutra, we will be disappointed to discover that they are often little more than verbatim restatements of the literal meaning of the original text. On top of this, the Lotus Sutra abounds with scenes that come across as dreamscapes or mythical stories, and it also contains quite a bit of philosophical Buddhist jargon. All this leaves us with the impression that the Lotus Sutra is strange or mysterious and perhaps even out of touch with reality. Consequently, most people give up on the Lotus Sutra because they find it esoteric and incomprehensible, or they dismiss it as some sort of fantasy with no relevance to today’s world.
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 hard about questions such as the nature of our world and what human beings are. As a corollary to these considerations, he also deeply pondered the problem of how human beings should live in this world and what a harmonious society should look like. At the end of this quest, Shakyamuni discovered a universal truth applicable to any time, place, or person. A truth that is a universal one should, by definition, be easy for people to understand. For example, we might consider something like dividing one by three, which results in one-third. This is a universal mathematical truth that anyone can understand. Like this simple math problem, a universal truth is never something we have to believe with blind faith because we cannot understand it rationally.
But we are not able to make heads or tails of even such an apparently obvious truth until we reach a certain age or level of intellectual development. The Rikkyo University professor and mathematician Yoichi Yoshida (1898–1989) writes about this in his book of essays on mathematics. When Yoshida learned decimals in the third or fourth grade of elementary school, he came across repeating decimals such as 1 ÷ 3 = 0.3333 . . . , which is a calculation that cannot be perfectly completed and therefore repeats forever. But when he actually attempted to fold a piece of paper in three equal parts, he was able to divide the paper perfectly. “Um . . . I don’t get this!” he thought. When using decimals, dividing one by three without any remainder is logically impossible, but when you actually try to do so in real life, it is possible.
As we might expect of a future mathematician, Yoshida gave serious thought to this mystery, and later, in the fifth or sixth grade, when he learned fractions, he was taught the fractional number 1/3. Fractions gave Yoshida a new way of looking at the problem. When he first learned that it was indeed possible to divide one by three using fractions with no leftover, he felt as if he had been played for a fool earlier. Yoshida took a liking to fractional numbers, however, and tried hard to imagine 1/3 not just as a fraction but also as a whole number without a repeating decimal. Thanks to this experience, Yoshida eventually came to understand why the ability to fold a piece of paper in three equal parts is no mystery at all.
The Buddha Dharma is just like this. Fundamentally, it’s something anyone can learn, but truly understanding it requires mature faith and continued effort. Even with mathematics, it might sound like a good idea to start with learning a more advanced arithmetic that you can do many operations with, like fractions. Yet, if you jump directly to teaching fractions to first or second graders, they will only end up confused. For this reason, teachers begin with whole numbers such as one, two, three, and so on, and after that they can go on to teach fractions to their young students.
On the other hand, instead of trying to teach 1/3 through an abstract approach, teachers can directly demonstrate it to children in a concrete practical way by folding a sheet of paper in three equal parts. Shakyamuni taught the people of his day in just this way. He explained the Dharma according to his listeners’ ability and degree of understanding, using all sorts of ways to explain his teachings, such as parables or stories that illustrated truths including the principle of causation. Because of these methods, the people of Shakyamuni’s time understood him well. It would be premature to conclude, just by glancing over the text of the Lotus Sutra, that its pages contain some kind of unrealistic fantasy world that cannot be taken seriously. If we grasp the essence of the Lotus Sutra, we will realize that it is replete with thoroughly modern, scientific, and humanistic truths.
I would like to stress that, because of his methods, the people of Shakyamuni’s day absorbed his teachings quite easily, and those teachings profoundly transformed their lives. If this were not the case, there is no way so many people would have wholeheartedly devoted themselves to Shakyamuni and his teachings during the short, less than fifty-year span of time that he disseminated the Dharma. Shakyamuni’s group, the Sangha, was an extremely free and open religious community. The Lotus Sutra’s “departure of the five thousand,” a scene that appears in chapter 2, “Skillful Means,” is a case in point. Some five thousand prideful and arrogant disciples who assumed they were already enlightened stand up and leave the Dharma assembly all at once, but Shakyamuni does not try to stop them. Although he never forced people to join the Sangha—and did not prevent anyone from leaving—the number of people devoted to Shakyamuni and his teachings rapidly grew to tens of thousands. This increase was certainly owing to Shakyamuni’s unparalleled ability to inspire and persuade, but, more important, it was because his teachings were highly esteemed and also easily understood.
From Buddhism For Today, 2023.
Preface: 1. The Lotus Sutra Is Not Difficult to Understand p. 17
Next: Preface: 2: One Buddha Vehicle p.19