Real Life with Ryuei

A Book on the Lotus Sutra you might want to read

For anyone interested in Dogen and/or the Lotus Sutra Visions of Awakening Space and Time: Dogen and the Lotus Sutra by Taigen Dan Leighton is a must have. Too many people think that Zen eschews the sutras, but this actually not the case. In this book Taigen Dan Leighton (a Zen Master and translator of Dogen’s Eihei Koroku and other writings) shows that Dogen not only valued the Lotus Sutra but modeled his rhetorical style on it and, as the name of this book indicates, found in chapters 15 and 16 of the sutra inspiration for his visions of time and space (and earth) as intrinsically involved in our own awakening experience. It is not that we awaken at a certain time and in a certain place on this earth. Rather, earth, time, and space are all dynamically expressive of awakening and our own awakening is a part of this universal awakening. The nodualistic vision of Dogen and the Lotus Sutra has many deep implications for ethics and ecology that Taigen brings out by the end of the book. Though this is a very scholarly book (this is not by any means Zen Lite) it is also a book written by a practitioner with an eye towards how Dogen and the Lotus Sutra can inspire the actualization of awakening in our own lives.

Taigen does not restrict the book to Dogen, however, but also discusses the greater Mahayana context for the view of time, space, and earth shared by Dogen and the Lotus Sutra. He also provides a review of how several seminal East Asian Buddhist teachers have been inspired by the Lotus Sutra - notably Daosheng, Zhiyi (Great Master T’ien-t’ai), Zhanran (aka Great Master Miao-lo), Saigyo, Myoe, Ippen, Nichiren, Hakuin, Ryokan, and Shunryu Suzuki. Also, many of the points made in this book about the interpretation and meaning of chapters 15 and 16 of the Lotus Sutra that describe the emergence of the Bodhisattvas of the Earth and Shakyamuni Buddha’s attainment of awakening in the unquantifiably remote past would be of great interest to anyone studying or, better yet, practicing East Asian Mahayana Buddhism. Though the focus is on Dogen, this book addresses issues that would be relevant to a wide range of Buddhist scholars and practitioners.

I would also like to note that for those Nichiren Buddhists who have found Jackie Stone’s Original Enlightenment or Gen Reeve’s anthology A Buddhist Kaleidoscope: Essays on the Lotus Sutra to be helpful will get a lot out of this book as well. There are not a lot of Buddhist books (whether popular or academic) published that address issues important to Nichiren Buddhism, but this is one of the few that does. It gets right to the heart of things with its focus on chapters 15 and 16 and how different Buddhists have understood those chapters. The sections on Zhiyi and Zhanran and the extensive section on Nichiren’s reading of those chapters would of course be particularly helpful. There are also other positive and illuminating evaluations of Nichiren Buddhism throughout the text, connecting it to important themes and forms of practice that emerged in East Asian Buddhism. It is rare to find a non-Nichiren Buddhist scholar/practitioner who gives Nichiren the importance that he deserves in the study of East Asian Buddhism, and even rarer to find someone who writes about Nichiren accurately and sympathetically as Taigen does. Taigen has done a great service to American Buddhism in showing the similarities and differences between Dogen and Nichiren in their respective appropriations of the core story of the Lotus Sutra.

Posted by Ryuei at June 13, 2007 09:42 AM