Fahua Wenju - Reading One Line Four Times

Why Another Commentary

By the time Kumarajiva's Chinese translation of the Lotus Sutra had circulated for a century and a half, commentaries on it were plentiful. Yet in 587, at Guangzhai Temple in Jinling, Zhiyi (538 to 597) lectured on the sutra again. His disciple Guanding took down the lectures and later edited them into the ten fascicles known as the Fahua Wenju, the Words and Phrases of the Lotus.

Three of Zhiyi's works are known together as the three great Tiantai treatises: the Fahua Xuanyi, the Fahua Wenju, and the Mohe Zhiguan. The Xuanyi begins from the sutra's title and builds the meaning of the teaching as a whole. The Mohe Zhiguan lays out the practice of sitting. The Wenju walks through the text line by line.

Line by line commentary was nothing new. What Zhiyi added was not content but a way of reading. There was more than one way to read a line in layers. The Five Commentaries on the Diamond Sutra, which seats five commentators side by side under the same line, does the same work across voices rather than inside one head.

Reading One Line Four Times

The Fahua Wenju reads each passage from four angles. These are the four modes of interpretation: causes and conditions, doctrinal classification, trace and origin, and contemplating the mind.

Causes and conditions

The first mode asks why this line appears here at all, and answers in terms of what passes between a Buddha and living beings.

A being reaches for what is true, and a Buddha responds to that reaching. The meeting of the two is called sympathetic resonance. Read this way, a line of scripture is a record of that meeting. Who asked what, so that these words were spoken, and where were the words meant to carry the listener.

Doctrinal classification

The second mode reads the line against the Tiantai map of the teachings.

Tiantai sorted the Buddha's teaching by period and by character: five periods and eight teachings, among which the fourfold classification of content is the storehouse, shared, distinct, and perfect teaching. This mode first locates the passage on that map, on the view that the same words were spoken at different levels depending on the capacity of the listener.

Trace and origin

The third mode divides the reading between trace and origin.

Trace means footprint. It points to the Buddha as he appears in history, born, awakened, and teaching. Origin is the ground that left the footprint. This mode asks whether a given line speaks of the trace or of the ground beneath it.

Contemplating the mind

The fourth mode reads the sutra in one's own mind.

Describing what contemplation looks like, the Fahua Wenju says that one relies on one's own mind and works out precepts, concentration, and wisdom as three parts of it. The events, figures, and parables in the sutra are not left outside as things that happened elsewhere. The reader asks what each corresponds to in the mind reading it now.

If the first three modes are about grasping the meaning as doctrine, the fourth turns that understanding into something undergone. This is where Zhiyi's reading of the Lotus Sutra parts from the readings of other masters.

Cutting Twenty-Eight Chapters in Half

The trace and origin mode did not stay a technique. It restructured the sutra.

Tiantai divides the twenty-eight chapters in two. The first fourteen, from chapter one to the chapter on peaceful practices, form the trace gate. The last fourteen, from the chapter on bodhisattvas emerging from the earth to the final chapter on Samantabhadra, form the origin gate.

The trace gate deals with what appeared. Here the three vehicles are opened and shown to be one, and here anyone is declared capable of becoming a Buddha. The origin gate turns to the question of who left that trace. The answer is that the Buddha did not first awaken under the bodhi tree but attained it in the immeasurably distant past.

Opening the trace to reveal the origin is the name Tiantai gives to this move. A reader who reaches chapter fifteen, where the ground splits open and countless bodhisattvas rise out of it, often feels the narrative has broken. The Tiantai division says the break is not a break but a change of gate.

Skillful Means Is Not Discarded

The passage that most often catches a reader of the Lotus Sutra is skillful means. If the three vehicles were provisional and only one is real, were the provisional ones lies?

After working through the relation between skillful means and the provisional across several layers, the Fahua Wenju arrives at the position that skillful means is itself the real. The provisional is exactly skillful means, not two things and not different. The carts used to call the children out of the burning house are not a record of a trick. The calling itself was already the way the real works.

This pairs with the Lotus Sutra's own teaching of the one vehicle. What the sutra declared, the commentary caught in doctrine.

What the Fourth Mode Left Behind

The fourth mode drew criticism later. Drawing out what the sutra does not say by holding it against the reader's own mind leans toward the subjective.

Still, the path it opened is clear. Reading no longer stopped at grasping the meaning correctly. A route appeared by which the meaning became the reader's own. Doctrinal analysis and actual sitting met inside one system, and that meeting runs on into the vast practice manual of the Mohe Zhiguan.

The Tiantai threefold truth, seeing emptiness, provisional existence, and the middle together in a single mind, lies along the same path. It is why the middle way here is not a compromise between two positions but a place from which three are seen at once.

For a Reader Today

Reading the Fahua Wenju end to end is a specialist's task. One thing is portable, though: the method.

When you meet a line of scripture, ask four questions. Whose question is this an answer to. At what level was it taught. Does it speak of the trace or of the ground. And what is it in my mind right now.

The first three end when the book closes. The fourth does not. Ganhwa seon, sitting with a single question, would later do the same work from a different direction, and the root they share is a refusal to separate reading a sutra from watching the mind.