This is the first installment in a six-part series focusing on the importance of revering buddha nature in Rissho Kosei-kai. Inspired by Never Disrespectful Bodhisattva, members emulate his practice daily. Unlike traditional Buddhist rituals focused on nature or deities, Rissho Kosei-kai’s practice uniquely centers on revering other people. This social practice awakens awareness of the inherent dignity of human life and aims to transform both oneself and others toward the realization of buddhahood.
Making offerings to thousands of millions of buddhas is given as a condition for attaining buddhahood. We might think that this is a long shot for us. But we have been given a concrete example to follow—Never Disrespectful Bodhisattva’s practice of bowing in reverence to others. Never Disrespectful revered each and every person he met, treating even those who were violent or abused him as buddhas.
Nikkyō Niwano, Kaiso zuikan 10, 108–9
Emulating Never Disrespectful Bodhisattva
A Historical Prelude: The Quest of the Monk Sōō to Practice Revering Buddha Nature
The “marathon monks” of Japan are one of the iconic images of Japanese Buddhism, familiar to people the world over. These monks walk excruciating mountain circuits on Mount Hiei near Kyoto and Mount Kinpu in Nara Prefecture for a summer retreat of one hundred days. A handful in the postwar period have performed the insufferable thousand-day version of this retreat, and also completed additional ascetic practices to gain the title of Great Ācārya. Having achieved the humanly impossible, they are sometimes referred to as living buddhas.
Hagiographic sources tell us that the founder of this practice, the Tendai monk Sōō (831–918), was motivated to seek enlightenment when as a novice monk he studied the part of the Lotus Sutra that tells the story of Never Disrespectful Bodhisattva. Sōō set his heart on emulating Never Disrespectful’s way of practice, walking about making obeisances to other people as future buddhas. Unfortunately, Sōō’s responsibilities to look after his teacher, and the daily task of going into the mountains to harvest anise-tree leaves for the offerings at the monastery’s central hall, prevented him from dedicating himself solely to the reverence of other people’s buddha nature. According to tradition, however, Sōō’s daily forays into the mountain became the origin of today’s marathon-monk practice, in which ascetic monks revere the shrines of Buddhist deities and places where Japanese divinities abide in the mountains. It is often said that the marathon monk’s true object of reverence is the buddha nature of the natural world.
The Lotus Sutra’s Never Disrespectful Bodhisattva is an archetype of respect for the inherent dignity of sentient beings. As told in chapter 20 of the Lotus Sutra, one time in the past there was a monk who did not practice by chanting sutras but instead went around making obeisance to every person he met, telling them, “I would never dare to disrespect you, because surely you are all to become buddhas!” As the reader can probably anticipate, the Lotus Sutra tells us that Never Disrespectful was oftentimes ridiculed, even physically attacked, but he bore it all patiently and through this practice not only purified his mind and body but also transformed the hearts and minds of the people around him. The Lotus Sutra tells us that performing this practice leads to quickly attaining the Buddha Way.
Continuing the Tradition of Revering Buddha Nature in Rissho Kosei-kai: Putting the Focus on People
Although Sōō became an eminent monk in his own right, it is said that his fame and responsibilities prevented him from doing what he most wanted: following the example of Never Disrespectful Bodhisattva. Even today, many Buddhists are inspired to undertake Never Disrespectful’s “practicing only reverence” (tangyō raihai) because they believe that it encapsulates the ethos of the Lotus Sutra within a single practice. Reverence is a simple act, but as the sutra explains, it holds incredible power to transform oneself and others to quickly achieve buddhahood. In addition to marathon-monk practice, Never Disrespectful is said to be the inspiration for the related practice of mountain asceticism (Shugendō), as well as the custom of making hundreds or thousands of consecutive prostrations to buddhas or bodhisattvas. It goes without saying that Never Disrespectful Bodhisattva is also an exemplar for members of Rissho Kosei-kai.
I think one of the most interesting aspects of Rissho Kosei-kai practice is that whereas the immediate object of reverence in the practices described above is nature, or a Buddhist deity, Rissho Kosei-kai returns the focus to reverence of the buddha nature of other people, making it an intensely social and intersubjective practice. Members of Rissho Kosei-kai emulate Never Disrespectful Bodhisattva by endeavoring to revere other people’s buddha nature in their daily lives. Revering another’s buddha nature develops one’s own innate “buddhaness” by drawing attention to and revealing the buddha nature in others, making them aware of their own intrinsic human dignity and their ability to realize their full potential. In terms of specific ritual practices at Rissho Kosei-kai Dharma centers, this translates into the religious discipline of “standing reverence” (ritsurei) performed by greeters at the entrances, who, as Sōō sought to do in antiquity, embody the archetype of Never Disrespectful by respectfully bowing to everyone who comes to the center.
Before we look at revering buddha nature in Rissho Kosei-kai in greater detail, we must first define buddha nature. Readers should be aware that given the diversity of Buddhist traditions and the large number of texts that treat buddha nature, our examination will invariably only scratch the surface. We must also take a short detour in order to explore the controversy of whether buddha nature appears in the Lotus Sutra. We will then be ready to explore revering buddha nature in Rissho Kosei-kai, first looking at how revering buddha nature is practiced in daily life through one’s relationships with other people, and then delving into how Rissho Kosei-kai members follow the example of Never Disrespectful by performing standing reverence—greeting people at the entrances to Rissho Kosei-kai Dharma centers with a deep and reverent bow.
Buddha Nature in a Nutshell
Just what exactly is buddha nature? Answering this question from the standpoint of the historical study of Buddhism is no simple task—numerous studies have been written on the subject, yet so much work remains to be done. Buddha nature has also been contested within Buddhism, and remains so today. Various sutras and commentaries describe buddha nature differently, and this has contributed to sectarian variations in understanding buddha nature. There are even contemporary scholars who hold that buddha nature is un-Buddhist. Having given these caveats, I can say that the most common and simplest definition of buddha nature is “the capacity of people to become buddhas.” Buddha nature is also explained in contemporary humanistic terms as the inherent dignity of human life, or the creative human potential that individuals possess to develop and actualize themselves.
Our English word buddha nature is derived from the Chinese foxing, which is most commonly thought to have been a translation of the Sanskrit term buddha-dhātu. The word dhātu can mean a fundamental component or building block, such as the elements of earth, water, fire, and wind, which were thought of as the basic components of all reality. It could also refer to the remains of something, such as a physical relic of the Buddha. We can understand buddha-dhātu to mean “the elementary component of the Buddha” or the “essential nature of the Buddha,” which facilitates the attainment of buddhahood. The highly influential Nirvāṇa Sūtra asserts that all sentient beings possess buddha nature and also associates buddha nature with the One Vehicle teaching of universal buddhahood.
Buddhist sutras and commentaries treat buddha nature as a synonym of several other terms, such as tathāgata-garbha, which was understood variously as the “matrix,” “storehouse,” “womb,” “element,” or “seed” of the Tathāgata, as well as buddha-gotra, the “lineage of the Buddha,” and buddha-kula, the “family of the Buddha,” among others. Buddha nature is also identified with the concept of the original purity or luminosity of the mind. These terms facilitate different allegorical ways to depict the capacity of sentient beings to become buddhas, and consequently, they open avenues for doctrinally developing the concept of buddha nature in various directions.
According to Michael Zimmerman (2002, 34), the Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra, the earliest sutra explicitly devoted to the notion of a buddha nature, teaches that the tathāgata-garbha is a tathāgata (buddha) contained within sentient beings but hidden by defilement. This unseen buddha is endowed with the qualities of the Buddha, such as buddha insight (tathāgata-jñāna-darśana), which, complete in themselves, need only to be manifested. The Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra illustrates this using nine similes that a nonspecialist in India would have easily understood. Some of the most memorable similes of the matrix of the tathāgata within ordinary sentient beings include fully formed buddha icons sitting on the calyx of yet-to-blossom lotus flowers, a gold nugget encased in excrement, a statue of a buddha wrapped in rags, a seed of a great tree, and the child of a wheel-turning king in the womb of a woman of low-class origins.
The buddha nature teaching brought a message of great hope and encouragement but also posed several questions to Buddhists. Is buddha nature something that is immanent, needing only to be discovered and uncovered? Does disinterring buddha nature require arduous practice, or is it only a matter of realizing that people are already buddhas but simply don’t know it? Or must buddha nature be nourished and developed in order to be brought to fruition, as two of the similes in the Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra could be taken to suggest? How could the idea of an inherent buddha nature be reconciled with core Buddhist teachings of nonself, impermanence, causation, and emptiness? Even today, several Japanese scholars argue that the way buddha nature is often understood runs afoul of causation and other bedrock Buddhist principles (see Hubbard and Swanson, 1997). Buddhism is a religion of great diversity, so it is natural that the various traditions have answered these questions in differing ways.
One conclusion many Buddhists reached was that while similes like those above are powerful soteriological tools, we should not overly reify buddha nature into a “thing” but instead understand it as the flip side of the emptiness of things. All phenomena are “empty” because they are constantly changing (the truth of impermanence) insubstantial entities made to exist and sustained through a myriad of causes and conditions (the truth of nonself). While “impermanence” or “nonself” may sound like life-negating, pessimistic concepts, Buddhism argues that it is precisely because of impermanence and nonself that we are not forever stuck in our present identities as the people we are today and that given the right causes and conditions (that is, religious discipline), we can improve ourselves, even so far as to become buddhas. Thus “buddha nature” can be thought of as a way of expressing the inherent dynamism of emptiness—of impermanence and nonself—with affirmative language in order to grasp it as a cause of buddhahood and harbinger of all the merits and virtues of a buddha. This conclusion is implied by a passage of the Nirvāṇa Sūtra in which Shakyamuni Buddha teaches that buddha nature is dependent origination.
Another interpretation was to identify buddha nature with suchness (Skt., tathatā), the ineffable nature of reality, the only thing that truly “exists.” Suchness is sometimes described as being like the “water” of an ocean of all that exists, with concrete forms and living beings such as ourselves being the waves that travel through the water, always changing, mutually interacting, and never remaining the same. Suchness is said to come into view when one transcends conceptualization or subject-object dualism, or alternatively, when one’s way of seeing the world brings together the two perspectives of things as existing, that is, their distinctiveness, and of all things as empty, their sameness or equality. Because suchness is the nature of all phenomena (Skt., dharmatā; Chn., faxing), it is shared by the Buddha and sentient beings, and nonsentient existence as well. This is why some Buddhists have maintained that even nonsentient things have buddha nature. Buddha nature-as-suchness may also be identified with Buddha as ultimate truth, or dharma-kāya, which some buddha nature texts tell us is inseparable from all phenomena. These texts tell us that when dharma-kāya is sullied with defilement or delusion, it appears as sentient beings, but when freed from such obstructions, it manifests as a buddha.
Like many in the Lotus Sutra tradition, Rev. Nikkyō Niwano subscribed to the teaching of threefold buddha nature (Chn., sanzhong foxing; Jpn., sanshu busshō). This understanding avoids reifying buddha nature by incorporating causation and emphasizing the contingency of practice. It sees buddha nature as a mutual coproduction of three types of interdependent functioning, each of which can be seen as partial causes of buddhahood. First, buddha nature as the primary cause: a basic transformative potential common to all phenomena, which Rev. Niwano identified with suchness. Second, buddha nature as conditions: the practice of spiritual disciplines that take advantage of this transformative potential and develop it. Third, buddha nature as realization: the wisdom that can become aware of buddha nature as the primary cause.
When these three aspects reinforce one another in a virtuous cycle, people transform in the direction of buddhahood. Without the original potential, the primary cause, there could be no self-transformation, but this potency can be uncovered and polished only because of conditions—the practices of spiritual discipline. Practice also assists realization—the wisdom that discovers the original potential, which becomes the person’s deepening awareness of buddha nature. The increasing clarity with which one can see buddha nature in turn motivates the continuation and intensification of spiritual discipline, and so on. The cycle can begin from any point because of the interrelationship among these three aspects of buddha nature. By the same token, neglecting any one of these, such as failure to practice assiduously, can diminish the others. These three aspects of buddha nature work together as an integrated whole, and their interdependence shows that buddha nature is not a thing but essentially action, as Sally King (1991, 150) describes, based upon what is initially a promise (the primary cause), a promise that must be manifested, she writes, in our mental and physical acts.
To be continued.
Dominick Scarangello, PhD, specializes in early-modern and modern Japanese religions. He has taught at the University of Virginia and was the Postdoctoral Scholar in Japanese Buddhism at the Center for Japanese Studies, University of California, Berkeley (2013–14). Currently, he is an international advisor to Rissho Kosei-kai and coordinator of the International Lotus Sutra Seminar, a Rissho Kosei-kai-sponsored series of academic conferences exploring the Lotus Sutra and the religious traditions associated with it.
