The Lotus Sutra
On Vulture Peak the Buddha announces that everything he taught before was provisional, a set of devices fitted to what listeners could bear, and that there is in truth only one vehicle: a father coaxes his children out of a burning house by promising three kinds of cart and then gives them all the same finer one, a guide conjures a walled city halfway along the road so that exhausted travelers will rest, and dissolves it when they wake. Bodhisattvas past counting rise up out of the earth, a jewelled stupa hangs in the air with a long-extinct buddha inside it, and an eight-year-old dragon king's daughter is brought forward to show that awakening need not wait on birth or sex or time. The central scripture of Tiantai, Tendai, and Nichiren Buddhism, and the most widely read Buddhist text in East Asia.
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Lineage
- responds to ↑ The Dhammapada
Attributes
Closest analogues
- 52% · 9 shared
- 52% · 9 shared
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- 49% · 7 shared