UnMind 34. Lotus Sutra Quartet 2: Springing Up out of the Earth

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Rising on command,
who were these bodhisattvas?
In truth they were us.

This whole sutra may amount to the longest succession plan in history. Amongst the strangest claims made comes in the chapter titled “Springing Up out of the Earth.” The first line states:

At that time the bodhisattva-mahasattvas who had come from other lands, numerous as the sands of eight Ganges, arose in the great assembly, and with folded hands saluted and spoke to the Buddha, saying: “World-honored One! If the Buddha will allow us, after his extinction, diligently and zealously to protect and keep, read and recite, copy and worship this sutra in this saha-world, we would preach it abroad in this land.

For the uninitiated, sattva means “being”; bodhi and maha mean “wise” and “great” respectively, loosely translated. So this is not the peanut gallery, the cheap seats. These are front-row delegates from other lands, also translated as other “worlds,” so they are mucky-mucks who mean what they say, and can carry through on their promises. That there are as many as sands in eight Ganges rather than grains of sands in the one lonely Ganges river running through India at the time, raises the bar on an already inconceivably great number. Talk about being obsessed with crowd size.

The bit about rising and saluting with folded hands is boiler-plate ritual behavior, found in all records of encounters with Buddha, showing due respect to the world-honored one. Honored on more than one world, by implication (again, all the contemporaneous flat-earthers appear to have resided in Europe at that time). This is all a bit like kissing the ring of the Pope, or that of the local mafia Don.

But Buddha basically says never mind, thank you very much, but we’ve got that covered right here on Earth, from our own staffing resources:

Enough! My good sons! There is no need for you to protect and keep this sutra. Wherefore? Because in my saha-world there are in fact bodhisattva-mahasattvas [numerous] as the sands of sixty thousand Ganges; each one of these bodhisattvas has a retinue [numerous] as the sands of sixty thousand Ganges; these persons are able, after my extinction, to protect and keep, read and recite, and preach abroad this sutra.

So I’ll see your eight, and raise you sixty thousand Ganges. These inconceivably numerous bodhisattvas are then called up from the earth, in one of the few miracles Buddha is claimed to have performed, but it’s a doozy:

When the Buddha had thus spoken, all the earth of the three-thousand-fold-great-thousandfold land of the saha-world trembled and quaked, and from its midst there issued together innumerable thousand myriad kotis of bodhisattva-mahasattvas.

So here is another talk-me-on-a-trip moment. The audience that was there must have been agape at the vision, but this record was obviously made for another audience, namely you and I. And just as obviously, this ostensible reporting was written down much later, as these live performances were not recorded at the time. The dead giveaway is the claim that “these persons are able…to…read and recite, copy…this sutra.” At the time, reciting may have been an option if you were a quick study, but reading and copying any of Buddha’s sutras became possible only after some centuries had passed.

Today this scene would present a worthy challenge for the special-effects team, Oscar material for Buddha’s Last Sermon: The Movie. The digital gurus would transform a relatively normal view of the landscape, applying their magic, suddenly a great roar, a trembling sound, comes through the loud speakers, the earth opens and all these costumed extras step forth, shrugging off realistic soil and detritus, as they seemingly emerge from under the actual ground itself. Like the Predators arriving for the intergalactic council. Fantasy made reality, at least in terms of projected images.

When we consider this phantasmagorical scene, we are given to wonder how those hearing this at the time, direct from the authentic throat of Buddha, must have been affected. Maybe a form of mass hypnosis? Viewing Leni Riefenstahl’s 1930s propaganda films for the Nazis, pre-special-effects era, it is clear that if a production is large enough, with over-the-top “production values,” it can have a hypnotic effect on the gathering. And without benefit of drugs, though they surely had their own pharmacopeia in early India. A kind of mob hysteria, perhaps, where, overtaken by the sheer magnitude of the event, one might indeed enter into that kind of la-la land where anything seems possible. Drunk on psychic potential, or the power of numbers, or something else, like some of today’s political rallies.

For us today, these florid descriptions of transporting visions come off as a bit quaint, however compelling the backstory. There is no doubt that this last teaching of the historical Buddha had had great, and lasting, impact. When discussing this particular passage with students, and its import for our practice today, I ask them who they think these bodhisattvas of the future were, and are? I say they are us! That’s right, you and me, baby! As Master Lung-ya says, quoted by Master Dogen in his famous Vow:

“Buddhas and ancestors of old were as we; we in the future shall be buddhas and ancestors.”

You don’t have to pay Ancestry.com to find that out for you.

This last teaching officially attributed to Buddha seems to contradict some of his earlier teachings, such as that, actually, there is no Path as such — when the First Sermon made a major point of following the Nobel Eightfold Path in daily life. Or that we don’t need no stinking teachers, as is testified to in the brief, closing Sutra on Meditation. We will get into more detail on these points in the following segments of the quartet.

Let me leave you with an example of the curious custom, or habit, that the Buddha himself, and apparently his followers, had of suddenly launching into versifying. Four Bodhisattvas in the crowd, each named after one or another kind of “conduct,” namely: Eminent, Boundless, Pure, and Steadfast, after kindly inquiring as to the health and general welfare of their aged teacher, recapped in verse:

Is the World-honored One at ease,
With few ailments and few troubles?
In instructing all the living beings,
Is he free from weariness?
And are all the living
Readily accepting his teaching?
So they cause the World-honored One
Not to get tired?

So here is blunt recognition that the Buddha’s lifelong mission of bringing this teaching to the multitudes for over fifty years or so, was not a bowl of enlightened cherries, free of weariness occasioned by the abject resistance of the great unwashed to his message. It is said that he fully realized from the beginning that his teaching would not be popular, going against the grain, as it did, of such contemporary, hopeful beliefs as that of the atman, an imagined eternal soul, which he disputed, in no uncertain terms.

He knew he would not reach everybody, especially those who had a heavy investment in the conventional wisdom of the day, either on a professional or personal level. If memory serves, he was said to have said, before the presentation of another teaching to an unimaginably vast audience, upon being told that some pundits had come to debate, something like, “They are free to go.”

Another tale relates his reminding a rather demanding wannabe student — who insisted that he answer the 10 eternal questions (such as how did it all begin, how will it all end, et cetera) or he could not consider Buddha his teacher — that the young man was under no obligation to be his student, and he, the Buddha, was under no obligation to be his, the student’s, teacher. Would that contemporary education would recognize this truth.

So, been there, done that. Anyone who teaches anything quickly learns that there are students who are disinterested and demanding, distracted and disrespectful, intransigent and willfully ignorant, et cetera, ad nauseum. But there are always those few sincere seekers who make it all worthwhile, and more than make up for the difficult and disgruntled. Please do your best to be one of the latter.