Chapter XVI: is considered to be the supreme declaration of the Buddha,

in its Revelation of the eternity of his life. It is Śakyamuni, the earthly form of Buddha, who speaks. After telling of his earthly enlightenment, he goes on to say that though his hearers, who have been his disciples during his brief earthly career, may think such enlightenment a comparatively recent event, yet in reality since he veritably became Buddha, infinite, boundless, hundreds, thousands, myriads, kotis, nayutas, of kalpas, or aeons, had passed. In other words, he who on earth was Śakyamuni had already been Buddha, the Enlightened One, through infinite ages. The doctrine bears resemblance to the doctrine of Eternal Sonship in certain forms of Christian theology. This idea of the infinite is shown in meticulous terms, which to the Western mind may seem puerile. The word “infinite” might cover all our needs. But the story-teller knew his hearers. A single word would pass meaninglessly over their minds. To an unlettered audience his method of detailed illustration had greater value.

The Buddha, then, is conceived of in terms of Omniscience and Eternity. His omnipotence also is shown, by his power to call all creatures to his assembly and to shake all creation. While transcendent, he is also in a sense omnipresent, in that he can send his searchlight ray into every world, and can appear anywhere at will. Little stress is laid in this Sutra on his creative and destroying power. This may be taken as assumed, for every Buddha-world springs as a flower, flourishes and perishes, only to be resurrected in some other form. In this sense the Eternal Buddha is creator, destroyer, and eternal re-creator of worlds.

Perhaps the most interesting reference to the character of the Tathagata, or Buddha, in his power of spiritual omnipresence, is seen in the beautiful saying in Chapter X, “The Dwelling of the Tathagata is the great compassionate heart within all living beings; the Robe of the Tathagata is the gentle and forbearing heart; the Throne of the Tathagata is the spirituality of all existence”. Again: “Though I am in another domain, yet will I reveal myself from time to time to the preacher of The Lotus. If he forgets any detail of this Sutra I will return and tell him, so that he may perfectly possess it.”

II. Not only is there an Eternal Mind behind the All, but Mahayanism goes further. It places this Eternal Mind, or Eternal Buddha, in the relationship of Father. The Lotus in Chapter II says that the Buddha is “the Father of all worlds, who forever brings to an end all fear, despondency, distress, ignorance, and enveloping gloom, and brings to perfection boundless knowledge, strength, and courage. He is born in the world to save all living creatures from the fires of birth, age, disease, death, grief, suffering, infatuation, darkness, and the three poisons, and teach them to obtain perfect enlightenment”.

III. The Eternal Buddha limits his omnipotence by the freewill of his offspring. He may not, for instance, use force to save them. In the parable of the Burning House, in Chapter III, though the lord of the house is strong in body and limb he may not carry out his children. They must come out of their own will. This is shown again in Chapter IV, in the parable of the Prodigal Son, who leaves his father, and runs away. For long he wanders and the father seeks him in vain. After a vain search, the father settles in a certain city, builds a palatial home, amasses great wealth, and is surrounded by innumerable servants and every luxury; but still he is sore at heart, mourning his lost son. The son meanwhile wanders from town to village and village to town, all his money gone, clad in rags, and hiring out his services for a wretched meal. At last, one day, his travels lead him to his father’s mansion and grounds, where he sees his unrecognized father surrounded with honour and glory. Fearing lest he be seized as a slave he turns hastily away, but not before his father has seen and known him. Then comes the account of the son’s arrest, his terror, his liberation, his being persuaded to undertake work, the most menial work, his gradual rise to be major-domo, and the climax when he is declared as son and heir.

One feature clearly evident in this parable is that the freewill of the son is recognized, persuasion being the only method the father might use.

IV. In the above parable the relationship of sonship is clearly shown. To summarize the long and detailed reply of the disciples, the rich lord is the Buddha and we are all the Buddha’s sons. The Buddha has always declared us as his sons. We, too, have wandered away and gone through all the miseries of life, being attached to lower things, but now the Buddha-wisdom is revealed to us, and we know that we are Buddha-sons. No longer must we hanker after the smaller vehicles, the hinayana, for now we are in the Great Vehicle, the mahayana; no longer are we, so to speak, struggling children of earth, but sons of the Omniscient. The Great Treasure of the King of Truth unsought has come to us, and we have obtained all the inheritance of Buddha-sons.

V. Again, the love of the Buddha to all creatures is equal and universal. This finds expression in various places, as, for instance, in the Parable of the Trees and Grasses in Chapter V. On these the Buddha-rain falls impartially, as does his saving truth on all creatures. His truth and his salvation are equally for all beings universally.

VI. Karma and Anatman are fundamental doctrines of original Buddhism. To the Buddha there was no such entity as the atman, which may be expressed as the eternal, individual soul. Personality during life was recognized. It was, however, only a bundle of sensations; at death when these sensations ceased for lack of organs, the bundle or person ceased to exist as such. But there remained karma, or the deeds done, which may in a sense be described as character without a rigid personality; this remainder entered into a new bundle linked, even consciously, with the past.

“The Karma—all that total of a soul
Which in the things it did, the thought it had,
The self it wove—with woof of viewless time.”

_The Light of Asia._

Therefore, it might be said that the sinner suffered, while the saint rose to the condition of nirvana, or extinction, though whether annihilation of existence or merely cessation of reincarnation was meant is disputed. In Mahayanism, however, the atman or immortal soul is restored, and is no longer karma or character without continued personality, merely the progressive resultant of all previous deeds in infinite past existences. While cause and effect remain in the ethical realm, factors of saving power and even of something resembling works of supererogation are introduced. These are not opposed to the law of causation but fulfil it vicariously, or by a process of substitution. Moral good and evil remain essential to life, but they can be attained without struggle and effort by the process of faith. Faith can thus change the entire aspect and force of karma. Instantaneous conversion of the whole nature is assured by faith and invocation, through the medium of a new relationship. Old infrangible determinist bonds snap like tow under the liberating influence of a new personal relationship with a personal, all-loving Buddha-Father. The likeness to the doctrines of the Fatherhood of God and Salvation by faith of the Four Gospels and the Johannine Epistles is even more remarkable than is the Buddhist ritual to the Roman rite, that “invention of the devil to embarrass Mother Church”. The fundamental truth in the Mahayanist texts, as in Christian dogma, has been of course decked out with trappings ill suited to its original simplicity.

VII. The Bodhisattvas, throughout The Lotus, are shown as Enlighteners and Saviours. That is their office and, in consequence, every true disciple becomes a bodhisattva, a being of enlightenment. A distinction is made between Great Bodhisattvas in the spirit world, and ordinary bodhisattvas in this and other similar worlds. The past transmigrations of certain of the more prominent Bodhisattva-disciples, as well as their future, are told; but, in the main body of the narrative, we are spared the more extravagant and even repulsive stories of self-sacrifice by Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Something of it occurs in the apocryphal chapters about the imaginary Bodhisattvas, such as the Lord of Healing and Kwan-yin. The fact of their mention in Kumarajiva’s Chinese version is evidence of the existence of their cult early in our era. The Bodhisattvas are qualified to enter the bliss of the Buddhas, but delay for themselves this privilege by the vow they make to save every living being in the Buddha-realm in which they dwell. The one who is most famous in the Far East is Amitabha, of Eternal Light and Eternal Life, possibly a conception derived from Western Asia; his name does not appear in The Lotus. Maitreya, a name suggestive of a Mithraic origin, is foretold in The Lotus as the next earthly Buddha. It may be mentioned here that every earthly Buddha-period is of limited duration. It is said to last through three stages, that of the true law, that of semblance of the true law (or formalism, the form without the power), and that of final decadence and disappearance, after which a new Buddha with a new Buddha-period appears. Maitreya, or in Chinese Mi-le Fo, is the Bodhisattva who is to appear as the Buddha of the new period, and he is constantly invoked now as the Coming Buddha, the Messiah who will restore all things.

VIII. Salvation by Faith or Invocation. According to the teaching of The Lotus, while the earthly Buddha did, until near his end, teach the law of salvation by works, it was only because his disciples were earth-bound and their spiritual eyes were not yet opened, nor as yet could be opened. The author knows well that he is introducing a revolution in Buddhism. He sees clearly that the new doctrine of salvation by Faith as the ultimate, indeed the only way, or vehicle, is a very different method from that which in India was accepted as the doctrine of Śakyamuni. The clearest evidence that can be offered of this fact, indubitable to all but the interested, lies in the repudiation of the new doctrine by the Orthodox school, as a contradiction of the essential teaching of the Founder. The “Northern” School may dub it Hinayana, if they wish; it prefers to stand by the documents, and to be fundamentalist with its Master, Śakyamuni, than universalist dependent on pious fiction. The author himself realizes that he is confronted with serious difficulty in defending his apocalyptic Buddha from the charge of deception and lying, terms he himself uses. He labours hard with statement and parable to show that the Buddha had not been guilty of falsehood, but had given his disciples such glimpses of truth as they were temporarily able to realize, until they could bear the full light. Consequently, he declares salvation by works to have been but a tactical and temporary teaching, in preparation for the revelation of the doctrine of universal salvation by faith, especially by faith in The Lotus Sutra. The Mahayanist admits all the Hinayana texts and honours them, though they are to him but an interim ethic; in addition he has his own vast treasury of sutras and other works. It is the teaching of these, of which this Sutra is to most the chief, that revelation is made of the All-truth which brings liberation, liberation not by works of the law, but by faith. Salvation by faith is then the foundation doctrine of the Mahayana School. This doctrine easily degenerated into Salvation by invocation through the teaching of the Sutra itself. Such teaching is seen in Chapter X. It produced a degeneration which reduced Buddhist prayer, or rather invocation, to machine-like repetition. It is often literally machine-made, as witness the prayer-wheels or rotatory prayer-drums, large and small, stationary or portable, of the Lamaistic sect. Indeed, invocation flags float in every breeze in the fields of China in protection of the crops. The rosary—is it parent or child of the Western rosary?—is carried by monks and nuns and by the devout, and Namo Amitabha is repeated millions of times daily. The Buddhist rosary is perhaps as useful a mode of emptying the mind and reaching the “void” as any other, if we may judge by results. Here is a quotation from Chapter X of The Lotus on the value of invocation and especially of the repetition of the Sutra:

“The Buddha addressed the Lord of Healing saying: ... if there be any who hears but a single verse, or a single word of the Wonderful Law-flower Sutra, and by a single thought delights in it, I also predict for him complete and perfect enlightenment. And let there be any who receive and keep, read and recite, or expound and copy even a single verse in the Lotus Sutra, or devoutly look upon the Sutra with reverence as if it were the Buddha, or make offerings to it in various ways with flowers, perfumes, garlands, sandal-powder, perfumed unguents, incense for burning, silk-canopies, banners, flags, garments, music, or even revere it with folded hands; know, Lord of Healing, (this is evidence that) such people have already (in past transmigrations) paid homage to ten myriad kotis of Buddhas and under those Buddhas performed their vows. (Hence they are born among men and) these are the people who will certainly be first to become Buddhas in future worlds. These are the people to be honoured even now, for they have recognized the infinite value of The Lotus Sutra. If such people should be able even by stealth to preach to one person but one word of the Sutra, they reveal thereby that they are Tathagata messengers sent by the Tathagata to perform Tathagata deeds. Any one who sins other grievous sins, even blasphemy against the Buddha, is only a light sinner compared with him who with a single ill word defames the devotee of this Sutra (for that is the sin so to speak against the Holy Ghost). The preacher of the Lotus should be honoured above all men and gifts showered upon him, for the Lotus is the Treasury of the mystic secret of all Buddhas, guarded by all Buddhas and seldom divulged. Wherever it is preached, there a stupa of precious materials should be erected, which should be served with all kinds of flowers &c., &c., music and hymns.”

The supreme value of The Lotus is shown in Chapter XIV, in the parable of the King who, to reward his brave soldiers, shares with them everything he possesses, only reserving to himself the superb jewel on his brow. At last, seeing the splendid deeds of his soldiers, he decides to give them also even this supreme gift. So is it with the Tathagata; seeing his followers fight so bravely against the hosts of Mara, he at length gives them the greatest reward of all—the entry into Salvation by faith and sonship in the priceless Jewel of his forehead, The Lotus Sutra, the Sutra which can only be preached once in a Buddha realm. The obtaining of this jewel will bring infinite enlightenment, ultimate wisdom, the full and complete Way of the Buddha.

IX. It has already been shown that a permanent personal soul has taken the place of the Buddha’s anatman, or no-soul. The bundle of sensations is no longer a temporary organism dissolved at death, but an entity personal and lasting. To the school which postulates Nirvana as the final extinction of existence, the Mahayanist opposes the doctrine of eternal life. Transmigration and the hells remain, for, as seen in Chapters I and VII, the projection of the Buddha-ray reveals the hells of every world with their suffering creatures; nowhere are the appalling sufferings in hell portrayed more realistically than in Mahayanist temples. A universalist doctrine logically requires that the hells of every world shall come to an end in the ultimate salvation of all its creatures, especially when they hear and respond to the proclamation of The Lotus gospel. The hells and transmigrations through all grades of existence, whether gods, devils, men, or creatures of every species, are still necessary in every world, though all may escape on responding to the good news of The Lotus. Their escape is not to extinction, but to the glories of other Buddha-realms, which in this Sutra are shown to be infinite in variety, number, and splendour. While all will attain to perfect enlightenment and happiness it is given to some to progress to even higher offices. During infinite time in infinite worlds there are infinite Buddhas and Buddha-realms. The most exalted positions therefore are open to those who have the spiritual capacity for them. Take, for instance, the prediction in