The Lotus Sutra: the Capstone Teaching?

It’s been a while since I discussed anything that relates to Tendai Buddhism, but I was doing a bit of nerd-reading with my free time, and thought this was interesting to share.

As Buddhism spread from India via the Silk Road, transmitted by such peoples as the Kushans, Sogdians, and Parthians (the same Parthians who contended with Rome from to time), the vast wealth of Buddhist texts, teachings and information flooded into China in waves.

This import of information was kind of haphazard at first, but as translations improved and information continued to come, China developed its own schools of thought to help make sense of it all.

One of the first successful efforts was by a Chinese monk named Zhi-yi (智顗, 538–597 CE)¹ who founded the Tiantai school. He, or possibly by later patriarch Zhan-ran (湛然, c. 711-782 CE),² analyzed the various teachings and Buddhist texts and developed a chronology called the Five Time Periods and Eight Teachings (五時八教, wǔshí bājiào).³ This chronology looks like so:

1. The Buddha (Shakyamuni) taught the Flower Garland Sutra first, but it was incomprehensible to disciples.
2. The Buddha stepped back and taught Agama sutras next. The Agamas are equivalent to the Pali Canon in the Theravada tradition, and nearly the same in terms of content. The Agama sutras were more grounded and practical and thus easier for his community to understand.
3. Next, the Buddha taught sutras such as the Vimalakirti Sutra as an introduction to Mahayana teachings, and thus higher than the Agamas.
4. Next, the Buddha taught the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, such as the Heart Sutra, as a more complete teachings.
5. Finally, the Buddha taughy his ultimate teachings: the Lotus Sutra and Nirvana Sutra because the disciples were now ready.

Thus, out of all the Buddhist texts, Zhi-yi argued that the Lotus Sutra was the complete and ultimate teaching (円教). In Japanese Tendai Buddhism, 円教 is pronounced as engyō, or is sometimes more formally called hokke engyō (法華円教, “the complete teaching that is the Lotus Sutra”). Much of Tendai Buddhism is thus about putting the Lotus Sutra teachings into practice. From the Tendai perspective, things like meditation, venerating Amida Buddha, esoteric practices like mantras, and upholding the precepts are all ways to put the Lotus Sutra into practice, and Zhi-yi wrote quite a bit about this subject.⁴ The idea, expressed through the phrase shi-shū-yū-gō (四宗融合) or “Four Integrated Schools”.

The historicity of Zhi-yi’s textual analysis is unfortunately pretty dubious. Modern archeology and Buddhology show that the very earliest texts, historically, were the Agamas / Pali Canon (the Dhammapada and Jataka Tales probably came even earlier), but even those were not recorded in writing until three to four centuries after the Buddha. So, even with the earliest texts, we have a gap from when the early disciples passed everything down orally before committing to writing generations later. Granted, Indian oral tradition was quite sophisticated and designed to minimize errors and corruptions in recitation, but the Agamas and Pali Canon do slightly diverge from one another, mostly in ways that are interesting to scholars only.

The Mahayana Sutras such as the Vimalakirti Sutra, Lotus Sutra and Perfection of Wisdom sutras were written down even later. One could argue that they were passed down orally⁵ and just recorded later for some reason, but textual analysis casts this into doubt. The Mahayana sutras are more like “reboots” or compilations of earlier teachings, more polished and such.

Which is where the Lotus Sutra comes in, I think.

This is personal bias, admittedly, but I do believe that the Lotus Sutra is a capstone of the Buddhist tradition, not because the Buddha saved it for last. Instead, the authors of the sutra did a really nice job of synthesizing earlier teachings into a single narrative, and devised clever parables to bring the teachings to readers in a fresh, new way. The Lotus Sutra doesn’t necessarily introduce a lot of new teachings so much as it brings it all together. Like a capstone or keystone. There’s something in there for everyone, in other words.

So, to me the Five Time Periods and Eight Teachings isn’t very useful in a literal, historical sense, but it is useful for showing how some sutras synthesize other sutras into increasing comprehensive narratives.

P.S. featured photo is the capstone of the main entrance of Giusti’s Palace, photo by Paolo Villa, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

¹ Pronounced like “Jer-yee” in English. The “zhi” in pinyin sounds like English “jerk” without the “k” at the end. His name in Japanese is read as Chigi, by the way.

² Pronounced like “John-ron” in English. In Japanese, his name is read as Tannen.

³ This is read in Japanese language as gojihakkõ.

⁴ Pure Land practices as we recognize them do not seem to be prominent in Zhiyi’s time and were adopted into Tiantai later, and thus Japanese Tendai even later through such figures as Genshin.

⁵ The Lotus Sutra, for example is a mix of verse sections with narrative text around them. It’s argued that the verse sections came first, and then authors composed the narrative sections around them. When the verse sections were first composed is anyone’s guess.