Tiantai

Now, at the beginning of the Latter Day of the Law, I, Nichiren, am the first to embark on propagating throughout Jambudvipa the five characters of Myoho-renge-kyo, which are the heart of the Lotus Sutra and the eye of all Buddhas.

During the 2220 or more years since the Buddha's passing, not even Mahakashyapa, Ananda, Asvaghosa, Nagarjuna, Nanyue, Tiantai, Miaolo, or Dengyo has propagated them.

My disciples, form your ranks and follow me, and surpass even Mahakashyapa and Ananda, Tiantai or Dengyo.

If you quail before the threats of the ruler of this little island country and abandon your faith, how will you face the even more terrible anger of Yama, the lord of hell? If, while calling yourself the Buddha's messengers, you give way to fear, you will be the most despicable of persons.

While the regent's government could not come to any conclusion, the priests of the Nembutsu, the observers of the precepts, and the true Word priests, who realized they could not rival me in wisdom, sent petitions to the government.

Kobo, in his treatise on the 10 stages of the mind, states that the Lotus Sutra is inferior to the Flower Garland Sutra.

In his Precious Key to the Secret Treasury, he claims that the Shakyamuni Buddha of the lifespan chapter of the Lotus Sutra is an ordinary person.

And in his comparison of exoteric and esoteric Buddhism, he calls the great teacher Tiantai a thief.

So I limited myself to Chinese herbal preparations, chiropractic and homeopathy, and allopathic conventional medicine.

And so holistic for me became what tools out of the toolbox can I use on this particular patient? What's going to work? What's going to be effective? Well, for those of you who might have been here a few weeks ago, I talked about a fellow by the name of Venerable Shi Yi in the 500s, a Chinese philosopher and Buddhist monk who actually became known as one of the fathers of Tiantai Buddhism.

He was a... extreme student of the Lotus Sutra.

And remember I said there was a monk in the 200s in India by the name of Nagarjuna, monk philosopher, who had said there are two truths.

You cannot tease it apart.

You can't tease it apart.

And so that just opened up a whole new world of seeing Buddhism and Buddhist practice.

And There is, and I happen to mention how, because if you walk into a Korean San temple, like ours right here, or you go over to Korea and you walk into a Korean San temple, they're entirely different than walking into a Japanese Zen temple.

That small typographic flinch shows the whole problem in miniature.

Two, what response? Four images carry this teaching across the Tientai and Nichiren literature.

They are usually presented as four ways of saying one thing.

They are not, and the difference between them is not what everyone assumes.

Uniform emission, conditioned reception If none of the four images contains a chooser, one hard problem remains.

And it is the one that has driven most attempts to sneak an agent back in.

Skillful means The Tientai account insists that help arrives in accord with the receptivity of beings, and the Lifespan chapter has the Buddha perceiving the particular strength of each being's faculties.

Something that meets this being in the form this being requires appears to be doing something indistinguishable from choosing, and mechanism cannot discriminate.

And Hanshan was, um...

This mountain was also a part of Tientai mountain range, which was home of the Tientai Buddhist school.

Those, uh, those monks in that school, um, studied the Lotus Sutra.

And so, so the Tientai school, um, Buddhism was started right around Hanshan, Cold Mountain.

And, uh, well, Hanshan lived off, um, the herbs and the flowers and the berries of the mountains.

Sometimes he went to a temple, a Buddhist temple, which was, uh, which was at least within a day's journey.

who wasn't satisfied with the answers about Buddhism he was getting at the time.

There was an established Buddhism, mostly Tiantai Buddhism, also some Rinzai Buddhism.

And young upstart Dogen, he was quite young when he headed off to China, wasn't satisfied with the answers, with the understanding he was getting.

So he made the, at the time, dangerous journey to China to try to get some real answers.