Before diving into the highlights, let’s quickly have an overview of what is Lotus Sutra.
The Lotus Sutra is a Buddhist scripture with profound teachings on Buddhism. It uses various parables (stories) and metaphors to convey its messages, encouraging readers to think deeply and contemplate the nature of reality.
The Lotus Sutra was popular not just because of its dramatic literary quality or the tantalizing rewards it promised, but also because it proffered an easy path of practice.
Here are some of the highlighted or key ideas from the book that help understand the creation, inspiration, and making of the Paintings of the Lotus Sutra:
1. The Lotus Sutra has long been the most popular scripture in the Buddhist canon of more than five thousand fascicles. Among the “new” religions of Japan that originated in the twentieth century, several take the Lotus Sutra as their chief text. It has had cultural influence beyond the walls of the temples as it affected East Asian literature, drama, and art. It provided the basic religious framework for people, offering images and parables that were incorporated into their literary creations, and it even inspired political action.
2. The first idea presented in the sutra is that a wide variety of expedient means, (expedient: convenient and practical although possibly improper) each designed to be appropriate for believers of different characters and abilities, makes enlightenment attainable to everyone.
3. The paintings of the Lotus Sutra must be understood within the framework of the message of the text of the Lotus sutra, but they must also be placed within the context of the rituals and religious practices for which they were produced.
Relationship between the paintings and the accompanying text is shifting with the rituals. This relationship unfolds in three stages: (1) art in relation to the text used as discourse; (2) art in relation to the text used as an artistic device; and (3) art in place of the text. In this last stage, the written text is omitted and the pictures are meant to be “read” as text.
4. The ten worlds or states of existence mentioned in the text are: hell, hungry ghost, animal, human, asura, god, sravakas, pratyekabuddhas, bodhisattvas, and buddhas.
5. The ordinary layperson, was usually not greatly concerned with textual analysis or doctrinal profundity of the text. He or she was attracted to the Lotus Sutra by the benefits it promised to faithful practitioners.
6. First great Parable (story) from the Sutra, called the Burning House narrated by Sakyamuni: Imagine, he says, a rich and powerful man whose house is large but dilapidated and has only one gate. The man’s sons are playing inside when a fire breaks out. Wondering how to entice his sons outside since they refuse to heed his pleas to leave, the rich man calls out that he has wonderful play-things for them—three carts, one drawn by an ox, one by a deer, and one by a goat. Delighted, the sons run through the narrow gate and are saved. The rich man then gives each an elaborate cart driven by a great white ox. The lie that the rich man told about the three carts was not an actual falsehood but only an expedient means to save the children’s lives.
7. The idea of the pervasiveness of the dharma: The Buddha relates that just as a thick rain cloud spreads over the earth and waters grasses, trees, shrubs, and medicinal herbs, so too does the Buddha’s dharma pervade the world, sustain all things, and is taken by each being according to their ability to absorb it. He then draws parallels between the various kinds of plants and the various paths that beings take to realize the truth.
8. Fourth great parable narrated by Sakyamuni: A group of travellers carrying valuables along a steep and dangerous road become tired. Their leader, wishing to encourage them forward, conjures a beautiful city and leads the people there, where they can rest and feel safe. Then the leader dissolves the city and leads the people to their final destination. Nirvana is explained as a means to encourage people, but it is not the final goal.
9. Fifth great parable narrated by Arhats: A man went to a rich friend’s house, drank, and fell asleep. While asleep his rich friend sewed a priceless jewel in his garments and left. When awakened, the man set out on a difficult journey fraught with hardships. He had little food and suffered greatly. Finally, he met once again the rich man, who asked why he was so destitute when there was a jewel hidden in his clothing. This man, say the arhats, is like us, who were satisfied with petty knowledge but now realize that we possess the precious jewel of enlightenment.
10. Sixth great parable: Only when the sage-king is truly victorious, he can give away the precious jewel in his topknot just as the Buddha can now reveal the precious teachings of the Lotus Sutra.
11. Sakyamuni proclaims that he is eternal—limitless in time and space. He says that he is like the wise physician, a comparison which forms the Seventh great parable: The wise physician had many sons who once drank poisonous medicines while their father was absent. The father-physician returns to find his sons in agony, but although he mixes medicine for them, the sons have lost their sanity and refuse to take the antidote. Thereupon the wise physician announces to his sons that he is going off to die. After his departure he sends back a servant to announce his death. The remorseful sons then take the antidote and are cured. Only then does the physician return. This good and wise physician, announces Sakyamuni, is like the Buddha, who has not lied but used expedient means in order to save all.
12. There are three types of Lotus Sutra-related paintings: (1) illustrations based on the content of one or more of the twenty-eight chapters, (2) mandalas symbolizing the sutra based on ritual manuals (giki) of Esoteric Buddhism, and (3) paintings accompanying the text of the Lotus Sutra but having no apparent relationship to the content of the sutra.
The elimination of the text as discourse is as much a break from the past as it is an evolution of it.
13. The Japanese had a phrase—jinzen jimbi, “supreme virtue through supreme beauty,” which they applied to beautifully copied and decorated sutra scrolls. While the text remained dominant in the copying tradition, the ideal of supreme virtue through beauty was achieved by devoting great attention to the aesthetic appeal of the textual portion of the handscroll and by adding either decorative paintings that evoked the text without directly illustrating it or by literal representations.
14. The bond established between the Buddha and the practitioners or beneficiaries of a meritorious activity was made more personal by the inclusion of hair with the paper fibers when paper was produced for a sutra scroll. The finished sutra was known as a mohatsu sukiiri kyo. At a memorial service in 1137, for example, a sutra was copied on paper made with hair that had been cut when the beneficiary had become a nun shortly before her death. It was, therefore, as if the deceased had intimately participated in the meritorious copying of the sutra.
15. In addition to sprinkled gold, the text of the Lotus Sutra was also written over underdrawings (shita e). Underdrawing, which could be either a coherent narrative scene or irregularly placed motifs of birds, flowers, and other small designs painted in colors, gold, or silver, was more frequently used in sutra art. With the use of underdrawings, the total decorative effect of a sutra worked through three layers: dyed paper, underdrawn designs, and calligraphic text written in special inks. The same layered effect was achieved using figured silk instead of paper.
16. The layered effect can also be seen in the hogu sutras, sutras written on paper that had previously been used for other purposes and was already decorated with paintings or writing that had no connection to the contents of the sutra. Like sutras written over underdrawings, the text of the hogu sutras was superimposed over pictures or text.
To employ previously used paper for sutra copying established a connection between the original owner of the paper and the benefits to be accrued by copying the sutra. Most often the owner of the paper was dead and his friends and family copied the sutra onto paper he had owned. It was as if the deceased participated in the copying of the sutra by donating the paper, or as if the paper bearing his handwriting represented his presence in the act. A wide variety of paper was used: old letters, journals, poem sheets, and even illustrated scrolls of secular stories that were favorites of the deceased.
17. The subjects of the frontispiece paintings in the decorative tradition fall into one of the following five groups: (1) paintings that interpret and transform the contents of the chapter into contemporary scenes or symbols; (2) paintings that are based on poetry about the Lotus Sutra rather than on the text of the sutra itself; (3) paintings that use religious images and are often similar in content but not in style to paintings in the literal tradition of frontispiece illustrations; (4) paintings that borrow themes and stories from sources other than the sutra, but which are connected in some way to the ideas or deities of the Lotus Sutra; or (5) paintings that have no connection to the content of the sutra.
18. In a frontispiece to the “AvalokiteSvara” chapter (plate 6), a series of gently rounded hills rise behind a lotus pond. Above the hills is a large, golden sun. Chinese characters which repeat the following three lines from the chapter are placed within the landscape:
Muku shojo ko The spotlessly pure ray of light
E nichi hashoan The sun of wisdom that banishes all darkness…
Fumyo sho seken And gives bright light to the world everywhere
The excerpt is from a longer passage in which Avalokitesvara is likened to the sun.
19. By transforming the contents of the sutra into familiar contemporary figures, landscapes, or objects, the decorative tradition of illustration maintained a link to the meaning of the sutra but personalized the representations and, in the process, the text itself.
20. In the “Medicinal Herbs” chapter, the Buddha explains that he and his teachings can be likened to a cloud that sheds its blessed rain on all things. A poem based on this teaching from Draft of Poems for the Empress (Choshu Eisd, 1178) by Fujiwara Shunzei (1114- 1204):
Harusame wa The spring rains
Kono mo kano mo no Soak this face and that face,
Kusa mo ki mo The grass and the trees,
Waka[t]zu midori ni Dyeing them all green
Somuru narikeri Without distinction.
21. The fan sutra (semmen kyo) has been called the pinnacle of Japanese sutra art. It combines completely secular pictorial themes, in the form of underpaintings, with an elegantly written text of the Lotus Sutra (plates 21-24).
It is surmised that the fan sutra was once the possession of a woman because of the covers that were made for the booklets. They depict a rakshasa in Japanese court dress. Rakshasas were protective deities associated with Samantabhadra and with the salvation of women.
Whenever transformative artworks inspired by the Sutra were created over a period of various centuries and by a generation of artists - The text was always there, and the freedom with which the artists embarked on their imaginative explorations stemmed perhaps from their awareness that a safe harbour—a solid mooring of meaning—was always waiting for them in it.