Lotus Sutra

Audience

As with all Buddhist scriptures, the Lotus Sutra was initially compiled for the benefit of monastics. Over time, however, owing in no small part to the sutra’s claims to universal salvific power, devotion to the Lotus spread beyond the sangha to lay Buddhists, both literate elites and nonliterate commoners.

The extent to which the Lotus Sutra was intended to “convert” audiences to a particular kind of Buddhism is uncertain. It is clear from the content that the Lotus Sutra is aligned with the Mayahana perspective and that its intention is to persuade its hearers or readers to follow the Mahayana-oriented teachings it provides. But most scholars now believe that there was no such thing as a coherent “Mahayana” movement until centuries after the Lotus Sutra was written, which means that its initial compilers and readers may have not even been thinking of conversion, per se, since the lines between “Mahayana” and “traditional” Buddhists remained vague. (Many scholars believe that they inhabited the same monasteries and engaged in many of the same practices for the first several centuries.) In short, the Lotus Sutra is understood to predate Mahayana but was adopted as a key text in some later Mahayana schools, especially those emerging in China and Japan. Thus, it is probably most accurate to assert that the Lotus Sutra attempts to convert its readers or hearers to the Lotus Sutra, rather than to any group or community called Mahayana.

Although the term Mahayana implies “Great Vehicle” or “Larger Vehicle,” it is unlikely that the monks associated with Mahayana ever constituted a majority of Buddhists until the school began to grow and spread in China and perhaps some parts of West Asia. Schools with clearly Mahayana orientations emerged in China, such as the Tiantai/Tendai and Huayan/Kegon, in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. Through that era, Mahayana triumphed in China, and these schools would provide the basis for East Asian Buddhism in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. Today, Mahayana Buddhism is the dominant—indeed, nearly exclusive—form in these countries, while Theravada, the only surviving major non-Mahayana school, dominates Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia, including Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, and Laos. A third school, Vajrayana, or tantric Buddhism, is the dominant form in the Himalayan regions of Tibet and Nepal and in parts of Siberia and Mongolia. In all, some 60 percent of the world’s Buddhists follow traditions now associated with the Mahayana, while roughly 35 percent follow Theravada traditions and 5 percent Vajrayana.