Donald S. Lopez Jr. - Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side: A Guide to the Lotus Sūtra

All quotations from the Lotus Stra are taken from the translation done by Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuyama. See The Lotus Stra, rev. 2nd ed., trans. by Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuyama, BDK English Tripiaka Series (Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2007). For the readers convenience, we have provided in-text page references to this translation after each quotation. Please note that the pagination of the printed version of the text (used here) differs from the pagination of the version presently available online.

Kubo and Yuyama based their translation on the celebrated Chinese version of the stra produced by the Central Asian scholar-monk Kumrajva in 406. In several places, however, they chose not to follow traditional Sino-Japanese interpretation but have instead consulted the Sanskrit and, in a few instances, the Tibetan versions of the Lotus (see their Translators Introduction, xiv). One way in which their English version departs from Kumrajvas Chinese lies in the handling of proper names. Where Kumrajva translated many names of figures appearing in the Lotus Stra, Kubo and Yuyama give them in the original Sanskrit. We have followed suit, not to give primacy to the Sanskrit text, but for consistency with the Kubo-Yuyama translation. However, some of the longer Sanskrit names can prove daunting to readers unfamiliar with that language. We have accordingly provided in parentheses with the first occurrence of such names the English rendering given by Leon Hurvitz in his translation of the Lotus Stra: Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma (the Lotus Stra), published by Columbia University Press (1976; rev. 2009), or a translation of our own.

We have rendered the daimoku, the invocation of the Lotus Stras title taught by Nichiren, as Namu Myh-renge-ky, which represents the proper romanization for scholarly writing. However, actual pronunciation may vary slightly according to the practice community; some groups collapse the second and third syllables, giving Nam Myh-renge-ky (sometimes written without diacritics in their publications). The difference is not one of correct versus incorrect but simply reflects variations among the traditions of individual Nichiren Buddhist lineages.

Two extensive collections of Nichirens writings have appeared in English translation, both intended for practitioners. One, supervised by Kyts Hori with the assistance of other translators and editors, is Writings of Nichiren Shnin (20032015), now numbering seven volumes, published by the Nichirensh Overseas Propagation Promotion Association (NOPPA). At the time of this writing, limited previews of two of these volumes are available at Google Books. A second collection of Nichirens works in English is the two-volume Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, translated by the Gosho Translation Committee and published by Ska Gakkai. The entirety of this translated collection is available online as a searchable database (http://www.sgilibrary.org/writings.php). During much of the translation process, Ska Gakkai had the assistance of the late Burton Watson, professor emeritus of Columbia University and an accomplished translator of Chinese and Japanese literature. Two volumes of these translations, edited by Watsons colleague, the late Philip Yampolsky, have also been published by Columbia University Press. In translating passages from Nichirens writings for this volume, we have referred to existing translations and sometimes followed them quite closely. Often, however, we have modified them either to meet the demands of the present study (for example, to bring terminology in line with the Kubo and Yuyama