The Lotus Sutra

"That’s correct. It is particularly famous in East Asia, but it was very important in India (where it was composed) and Tibet as well. We sometimes think of a religion as having a single sacred text, whether it is the Bible or the Torah or the Koran. And for those traditions that don’t have a single text, we sometimes think of a signature text such as the Bhagavad-Gita for Hinduism or the Tao Te Ching for Taoism. Buddhism doesn’t really have such a text. There are thousands of texts that are considered canonical by one or another of the Buddhist traditions of Asia. But if I had to choose one sutra it would be The Lotus Sutra . A sutra is a discourse attributed to the Buddha himself, something that he is supposed to have taught. Yet The Lotus Sutra appeared four or five hundred years after the death of the Buddha. He probably died around 400 BC and nothing was written down until four centuries after his death. Then, for reasons that are not entirely clear, in the first and second centuries of the Common Era, texts started to be written that claimed to be the teachings of the Buddha. It is generally believed that tensions developed between a more conservative monastic element and groups that had a different view of the person of the Buddha and the nature of the path that he taught. This latter group, which came to be called the Mahayana or ‘Great Vehicle’, also included monks and nuns, as well as members of the laity. The Lotus Sutra is the most famous of the Mahayana sutras, proclaiming that all beings will eventually achieve buddhahood and declaring that the Buddha did not pass into nirvana at the age of 80 but has a lifespan that is immeasurable. Despite the fact that it is teaching something that does not appear in the earlier tradition, it has ingenious ways of presenting itself as the Buddha’s highest teaching. It does this through the use of a number of famous and often moving parables. It also contains a rather strange and charming self-referential quality, constantly proclaiming itself to be the supreme of all the Buddha’s teachings. Many Buddhists across Asia over the subsequent centuries would come to see it as just that."