THE BUDDHA WRITINGS OF NICHIREN DAISHŌNIN

Part 5:
Kyō

Now we come to the word “sutra”. One of its most common interpretations is “the thread of the discourse”. However, Nichiren in his explanation of Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō, at the very beginning of his The Oral Transmission on the Meaning of the Dharma Flower Sutra (Ongi Kuden), defines it as, “... the realms of dharmas are the sutra”.

Among the many meanings attached to the Chinese ideogram kyō that is equated with the word “sutra”, as well as its Tibetan counterpart “mdo”, this concept includes the warp of a fabric and things running lengthwise such as meridians, etc. It is probably due to the never-ending vertical threads of the warp in weaving that this ideogram acquired a secondary nuance of something that lasts forever, such as a scriptural canon or a philosophical classic.

Be that as it may, if we use this ideogram for sutra in the light of the doctrines of Shākyamuni, then it was at the first council on Spirit Vulture Peak (Ryōjusen, Gridhrakūta) in northern India, not long after the Buddha’s demise into nirvana, that the Venerable Anan (Ānanda) was asked to repeat from memory all the teachings that the Buddha had expounded during his fifty years of preaching. It was because of Anan’s (Ānanda) outstanding memory that he was able to reconstitute these orally transmitted discourses and have people write them down. Each one of these Buddha teachings begins, “As I heard upon a time”. And, since then, this phrase has been used as a token to validate a discourse and call it a sutra.

It is within the Buddha teachings of Nichiren Daishōnin, whose education was almost entirely in classical Chinese – rather in the same way Latin was used in thirteenth century Europe – that we see the profundity of the word sutra extended to a far greater significance than a mere discourse. The way people used to read at the time of the Daishōnin was not like the way we read an Agatha Christie novel in the train. Because the content of the larger part of mediaeval writings had something to do with the meaning of life, readers projected the whole of their psyches into whatever was written, as a part of their search for an inner realisation.

I am firmly convinced that the way Nichiren read all his books was by thoroughly pondering over the significance of each and every ideogram, in whatever text he was examining, as though he was determined to find evidence to confirm his own enlightenment. For Nichiren, Myōhō Renge Kyō were not only five ideograms that made up the title of the sutra of the same name, each ideogram was a word.

A convenient translation would be the “Sutra on the White Lotus Flower-like Mechanism of the Utterness of the Dharma (Myōhō Renge Kyō)”. But a far profounder interpretation of this title would be “the vertical threads of the sutra, into which is woven the filament of the interdependence of cause and effect of the entirety of existence”. In this way, this title becomes the “title and theme” (daimoku).

Remote waterfall on the south end of Buttle Lake, Vancouver Island, BC
© Photo by Gerhard Lenz

Martin Bradley, The Buddha Writings of Nichiren Daishōnin, ISBN: 2-913122-19-1, 2005,
Preface, pp. 75 - 76 (Revised, September 2013)