persons equal to me, without any distinction between us, and what I long ago hoped for has now been fulfilled.”
All the great bodhisattvas, heavenly beings, and others, when they had heard the doctrine of the Buddha and comprehended it, said, “Since times past often we have heard the World- Honored One’s preaching, but we have never heard this kind of profound, wonderful, and superior Law.”121
The Great Teacher Dengyo comments: “ ‘Since times past often we have heard the World-Honored One’s preaching’ refers to the fact that they had heard him preach the great doctrines of the Flower Garland Sutra and other sutras in the time previous to the preaching of the Lotus Sutra. ‘We have never heard this kind of profound,
wonderful, and superior Law’ means that they had never heard the teaching of the one vehicle of Buddhahood propounded in the Lotus Sutra.”122
They understood, that is, that none of the previous Mahayana sutras— which are as numerous as the sands of the Ganges and include those of the Flower Garland, Correct and Equal, and Wisdom periods, such as the Profound Secrets and Mahavairochana sutras—had ever made clear the great principle of three thousand realms in a single moment of life, the core of the Buddha’s lifetime teachings. Nor had they clarified the bone and marrow of those teachings, the doctrines that persons of the two vehicles can attain Buddhahood and that the Buddha attained enlightenment in the remote past.
F ROM this time forward, the great bodhisattvas, as well as Brahma, Shakra, the gods of the sun and moon, and the four heavenly kings, became the disciples of Shakyamuni Buddha, the lord of teachings. Thus, in the “Treasure Tower” chapter of the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha treats these great bodhisattvas as his disciples, admonishing and instructing them in these words: “So I say to the great assembly: After I have passed into extinction, who can guard and uphold, read and recite this sutra? Now in the presence of the Buddha let him come forward and speak his vow!” This was the solemn way he addressed them. Then, among the great bodhisattvas, it was “as though a great wind were tossing the branches of small trees.”123 Like the kusha grass124 bending before a great wind or like rivers and streams drawn to the great ocean, so were they drawn to the Buddha.
But it was still a relatively short time since the Buddha had begun to preach the Lotus Sutra on Eagle Peak, and what he said seemed to his listeners dreamlike and unreal. The treasure tower had first appeared to confirm the correctness of the theoretical teaching in the first half of the Lotus Sutra, and after that the treasure tower prepared the way for the expounding of the essential teaching in the latter half. The Buddhas of the ten directions gathered in assembly, Shakyamuni Buddha announcing that all of these were emanations of himself. The treasure tower hung in the air, with Shakyamuni and Many Treasures seated in it side by side, as though both the sun and moon had appeared side by side in the blue sky. The great assembly of human and heavenly beings were clustered in the sky like stars, and the Buddhas who were emanations of Shakyamuni Buddha were on the ground, seated on
