UnMind 33. Lotus Sutra Quartet 1: Eternal Lifespan

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Eternal lifespan
of the Buddha is nonsense —
the transcendent kind.

With this look at the last of the Buddha’s attributed teachings, following upon the Four Noble Truths from the First Sermon, the Four Immeasurables, and the Heart Sutra, we complete our cursory survey of the beginning, the middle, and end of the complete teaching of the original founder of Zen, Shakyamuni himself. I will touch lightly on some of the highlights of this long sutra in the four movements of this quartet. The brief Metta Sutta, or Loving-Kindness Sutra, which came somewhere in the middle of his life, is waiting in the UnMind queue line. And finally the Surangama, a personal favorite of mine, closely tied to Zen. Zen claims to transmit the essence of Buddha’s true teaching, mainly through his method of meditation.

At almost exactly two-thirds of the way through “The Sutra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Law,” abbreviated as the Lotus Sutra, we find “Revelation of the [Eternal] Life of the Tathagata,” commonly referred to as the life-span chapter. This is perhaps the most frequently recited section of the Lotus, which is said to be the last major tract of Buddha’s vast corpus.

Several other transcendentally mystical, and therefore somewhat discomfiting, implications of buddha-dharma may be found herein, including the teaching of “no Path.” They seem to directly contradict Buddha’s earlier utterings. My supposition is that throughout the arc of his career, Buddha gained ever-deeper insight into his experiential truth, and greater eloquence in expressing it to others, and in increasingly non-dualistic terms. At the same time, his audience was becoming ever-more astute in hearing and understanding his message, by virtue of their own practice-experience, primarily in meditation. I leave it to scholars and historians to resolve this debate.

For us practitioners of Zen, I feel the main thrust of this complex sutra, overall, to be inspirational — however jaundiced an eye we may cast at its over-the-top visionary, revelatory passages. Its place in the reverential regard of Buddhists is illustrated by the popular sect that believes that merely chanting the title, in Japanese “Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,” is sufficient to bring good fortune, and even spiritual insight, into one’s life — without the bother of sitting in meditation and other more demanding devotional practices.

While we Zen folks cannot claim proof positive that meditation is absolutely necessary to Buddhist realization, we would argue that it, deep realization, is much more likely with, than without. If only we actually follow through, and do what Buddha did, to divest ourselves of our own inhibiting opinions about the import of objectless meditation, that is. He resorted, at long last, to upright sitting, in order to fully understand suffering, and finally clarify the laws of reality, or causality. “Do thou likewise” is our touchstone in Zen.

The oratorial flourishes, the technique of dazzling the audience with fantastical visions, embellished with ever-greater quantities of geometrically expanding hordes of whole hosts of buddhas, elephants, and flowers, appearing in sweeping and glorious landscapes of the world of Nirvana, whose ground and trees are lushly encrusted with the seven treasures of the physical world, including gold, lapis lazuli, et cetera, is dizzying. And the general hortatory tone of the language, the relentless call to action — exhorting the listener to enter into this new world through meditation, confession and repentance — reminds me of a common trope from the 1960s era of the LSD revolution, or revelation, as one of my friends once beseeched me: “Talk me on a trip, man! Talk me on a trip!”

Buddha expounds several teachings herein that are considered by some to be most essential tenets of Buddhism, and we hear resonances of them yet today, as central to modern Zen praxis. Initial impressions upon reading the sutra invoke a contrary interpretation. What sounds very much like passages describing miraculous events from other world religions, strike a stark contrast with the usual, cool-headed Zen worldview, where what is being pointed at seems so much more down-to-earth, and practical of import. This perceived difference, however, may reduce to mere semantics.

For example, a footnote in a modern translation explains that an earlier translator claims that a reference, in the beginning stanzas of the life-span chapter, to the “secret, mysterious, and supernaturally pervading power of the Tathagata” actually refers to the traditional teaching of the Three Bodies — Trikaya in Sanskrit — and that they are combined as one, in the Buddha’s body:

Spiritually or supernaturally pervading power… is the function of the three bodies… the dharmakaya (truth-body or Law-body), the samboghakaya (reware-body or bliss-body), and the nirmanakaya (mutation-body or response-body).

The footnote goes on to explain that the first “body” indicates the “buddhahood in its universality,” the second, the “buddhahood embodied…” and the third, the “buddhahood as spirtualized.” This smacks a bit of the Trinity in Christianity: the the “Son,” the “Father,” and the “Holy Ghost,” respectively. But Buddha claims that his truth, of three interconnected bodies in one, was revealed directly through meditation, and so does not constitute an a priori belief, absent evidence.

I find resonances here with the Surangama Sutra, wherein Buddha speaks of the ability of the mind to pervade not only mentally, throughout the corporeal body of a bodhisattva (i.e. any of his followers), but also its capability of spreading to and pervading external objects as well. This suggests that supernatural or paranormal powers may be tapped in meditation. Buddha warns against giving them too much importance, and admonishes against demonstrating to others, should they arise. This kind of advice is contained in the “Fifty Warnings” appendix to this earlier teaching.

The central claim that strains credulity in the Lotus is that though Buddha may appear to live only for a relatively normal lifetime of 80 years, as the story goes, the truth of his lifespan is much less prosaic:

But, my good sons, since I veritably became Buddha [there have passed] infinite, boundless hundreds of thousands of myriads of kotis of nayutas of kalpas.

A kalpa is an inconceivably long time, and this way of enumerating how many, exactly, the Buddha has actually lived, begins with hundreds, which most of us can begin to conceive; then proceeds to raise the ante to thousands, easily exceeding our conceptual grasp. Then myriads, an indeterminate number; then escalating to kotis and nayutas, indicating the even bigger, unimaginable sweeping scope and scale of eternal time. Compare to the Big Bang, or other Western creation myths.

Because his audience was apparently extremely devoted, in thrall to every word of the Buddha, the “fully-awakened one,” they would have been disinclined to question this claim to a virtually infinite life span. More cynical audiences today might consider it just another whopper, meant to delude and gull the hoi polloi into accepting whatever the charismatic leader of the day wants them to believe.

But Buddha had no reason to deceive, nothing really to gain or lose, by lying to his followers. He was near the end of his life, and he knew it. So it seems his only concern here was his legacy, and whether or not it would be misconstrued by his dharma heirs. It requires a leap of faith to consider what these flagrantly flamboyant passages really mean, and what they must have meant to his audience at that time. They were not under the influence of theories of the Big Bang, placing the age of the universe in the realm of some 14 billion years or so. That would amount to a couple of kalpas, at least.

We will twirl the Lotus further in the next three episodes in this quartet. The immediately preceding chapter is entitled “Springing Up Out of the Earth,” so brace yourself for another wild ride into the far reaches of the frontier of buddha-mind.