Human beings who reach enlightenment awaken through themselves
the whole surrounding world. This is a daring elevation to
its ultimate meaning of an older tenet of Buddhism.

For much more than a century now, an unfading cliché in the Western appreciation of Japanese culture has been the idea that there is a special relationship between the Japanese people and nature. It is only fair to acknowledge that this cliché, wherever it came from at the beginning, has been carefully cultivated by wide circles of Japanese intellectuals and distilled through endless repetition. I remember that when I first resided in Japan from 1972, there was a commercial catchword on television that seemed to me rather bizarre. It said something like "Only the Japanese can understand the profound meaning of the four seasons" (shiki no kokoro). I've forgotten what kind of product it was supposed to glorify, but I wondered then how it was possible to be so parochial minded, especially in Japan, where Western culture was so pervasive and you could hear extracts from Vivaldi's Four Seasons interminably playing in department stores, surely some evidence for the fact that even Europeans took notice of the changing seasons and that they found a meaning in each of them. This feeling of discrepancy was vividly reinforced much later, in the mid-1980s, when I took a party of Japanese scholars, who had come to Paris for an international conference on Japanese studies, to the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, not too far from Paris. When we entered a large reception room heavily decorated with florid paintings and the guide explained that each corner of the ceiling was decorated with pictures representing the four seasons, a colleague who is a specialist in Japanese history literally gasped: "You mean the French had a notion of the four seasons?" I had to explain that the French had very little to do with that, as the theme of the four seasons had been a very common motif for room decoration since at least Roman times. He seemed not a little bemused, and I couldn't but think that the mentioned commercial message had had a damning and lasting influence. Well, of course, that CM, as they say in Japanese, was not the cause but only an effect of a deeply rooted belief in the singularity of the link between nature and the Japanese mind.

Another experience taught me not a little about the Japanese worldview. A number of years ago, I happened to attend another international conference, in Rome, devoted to the Lotus Sutra. Here I met a Japanese specialist in Buddhism, and as we were discussing some point of the sutra, I was quite surprised when I heard him asserting without ambiguity that the Lotus Sutra taught explicitly the awakening of grasses and stones, of the plant and the mineral worlds. As far as I know, there is no such teaching in this sutra, and he listened very incredulously to me when I told him so. I could almost feel how sorry he was for my lack of understanding, and it was quite clear that all I could say only appeared as a superficial, raw reading of the scripture, without empathy for its deeper meaning. I was very intrigued by this episode in mutual misunderstanding, and it made me reflect on the way the idea of the awakening of the inanimate world could get to be so deeply rooted in Japanese Buddhism as to be a prism through which even the Lotus Sutra was read.

One of the most evident and important ways through which this peculiar understanding of the Lotus Sutra has been widely diffused to this day in Japanese culture, well beyond religious circles, is to my mind the literary subgenre known as shakkyo-ka, that is, "Japanese poems on Buddhist themes." There is no significant difference between a "Japanese poem on a Buddhist theme" and a literary waka, those short poems in five lines and thirty-one syllables that are considered the classical and perennial form of Japanese poetry. The main characteristic of a poem on a Buddhist theme, especially of the kind called homon-ka, or "poem on a dharma text," is that it is written under a caption usually taken from a Buddhist sutra. Not unnaturally, the Lotus Sutra plays a major role in this category, not only on account of its central place in Japanese Buddhism, for the Pure Land scriptures were very popular as well, but also for its intrinsic literary value, as exemplified by the wealth of its comparisons and metaphors, which without doubt stimulated poetic creativeness. The skillful interaction between scriptural quotations in Chinese and their poetical expansion in Japanese left room for a multitude of images that brought about a certain understanding of the scriptures. Through repetition and elaboration among generations of poets, this understanding became a tacitly acknowledged commentary. It must be added that the poets who most indulged in shakkyo-ka writing were not merely poets but, in their overwhelming majority, monks, and monk-scholars to boot, so that their poetical developments were deeply motivated by scholastic erudition. Their poetic imagery was in fact a cleverly devised doctrinal code.

A most concrete example of this application of dogmatics to poetics can be seen in pieces written by the famous monk and scholar hailing from the Tendai school but who was a decisive figure in the spread of Pure Land doctrines in Japan, Genshin (d. 1017). We are lucky enough to have at least two poems he wrote summing up the gist of the chapter on medicinal herbs of the Lotus Sutra, and the interesting thing is that the two poems are widely divergent in their tenor. Let me quote this one first:

Though rain as it falls
From the vastness of the sky
Does not discriminate,
The plants it moistens
Grow in their diverse ways
(Senzai Waka-shu)

We have here a most orthodox, even if a bit dull, embroidery on the sutra: it is the same rain, that is, the Buddha's teaching, that falls on all sentient beings in their diversity and all of them profit differently, according to the keenness of their faculty, from its beneficence. We can be sure that an Indian monk contemporary of the Lotus Sutra would not have been surprised by this poem, had he had a chance to hear it.

This other poem, now, from the hand of the same Genshin, opens quite unexpected vistas (I chose here one of two versions):

Since it is a rain
Of the very same savor
That falls upon them,
Plants and human beings
Will ripen into buddhahood
(Shokugoshui Waka-shu)

Here, quite astonishingly, we have the opposite view from the former poem: the plants do not grow any longer each one according to its species but, together with human beings, their common destiny is to become buddhas. It is very interesting to notice that the same argument, namely, the uniformity of the rain falling on earth ("does not discriminate" in the first poem, "of the very same savor" in the second one), leads to contradictory conclusions: diversity in one case, unity in the other. Of course, everybody even moderately familiar with Tendai teachings will understand that the first poem stands on the side of the conventional, or "vulgar," perception of things ("truth"), while the second alludes to the "supreme" truth, the "very same savor" of the poem (in Japanese "one taste") standing for the One Vehicle. The composition of such poems, unwearingly repeated along the ages, no doubt gave the Japanese reader fitting spectacles to read the teaching of the awakening of the plant and mineral worlds into the text of the Lotus Sutra.

This literary practice had such a powerful impact that we can see it attaining near-perfection in the works of a poet as masterful as Jien (1155-1225), monk, scholar, and poet, who gave us the first collection of a hundred poems devoted to the Lotus Sutra. It is easy to see that he had wholly integrated the idea of the awakening of nonsentient beings, as is shown in this poem in the collection, Shugyoku-shu, four of which I will site:

Even a faint flower,
If we focus our mind
On its contemplation,
Is as ourselves a servant
In Buddha's abode

Here again we have, clearly expressed, the idea of a common destiny of plants and men. Moreover, in Jien's time, this idea had become so deeply rooted that the plant imagery could work both ways, and the physiology of plants can explain the development of buddha-nature, although, to be fair, some Chinese Buddhist poems had already hinted that way:

Since trees and grass
Grow roots, and twigs and leaves
Are sprouting,
How much more will it be true
For the seed in the human mind?

The seed (tane) here is the seed of buddhahood lying at the core of our nature, the possibility for every human being to awaken to buddhahood. The idea of this precious seed is put to rich use by Jien, as we can see from this piece:

In this summer pond,
Since from the beginning
A seed is lying,
Pure and immaculate,
Will it blossom into a flower?

I cannot give here a full account of the intricate meanings that are crammed into this deceivingly simple piece, but it will have been clear to all monkly readers that the poet had in mind the teaching of the Original Awakening (hongaku). The pond being a very common metaphor for the heart, and the blossom of the lotus flower for the awakening of mind, there would have been no doubt as to the meaning conveyed.

But then, the scale of the metaphor can change and take us from the simple image of the mind as flower to a grander vision of the whole world as animated. Here again, Jien has a very telling piece:

At Iwashimizu,
In their truth do flow
Along the stream
The leaves of words
He is now speaking

His collection of one hundred poems on the Lotus Sutra was offered by Jien to the Japanese deity Hachiman in his shrine at Iwashimizu (a toponym that can be punningly understood as "I shall not speak") near Kyoto; as an embodiment of the well-known conception known in medieval Japan as "original basis and its emanations" (honji-suijaku), this Japanese Shinto war god was considered, according to a preface written by Jien, to be the embodiment of Maha-Vairocana, Sakyamuni, and Amitabha. The adverb of time now (ima) in Lotus poetry mostly means the age when the sutra had been preached by the Buddha. It is therefore the age when the reality of things was disclosed to all of those who can understand and uphold this scripture. Thus, as often happens in Jien's Buddhist poetry, the poem is divided into two periods: the period when the Buddha has not yet exposed the truth (Iwashi = iwaji, "does not speak") and the "now" of the Lotus Sutra. Jien then makes a most skillful use of the very old Japanese term for word, (koto no ha = kotoba), which can be understood to mean "leaves of words," from which naturally rises the poetic image of leaves flowing down a mountain stream. Thus the word of the Buddha is relayed through the ancient Japanese gods (kami), and their means of transmission is the natural landscape. This poem thus appears as a telling image of the doctrine called "the inanimate preaches the dharma" (mujo-seppo): nature itself in its entirety explains the same teachings as the sutras.

But is nature itself really inanimate? Is it inorganic---soulless, in more Western parlance? Jien gives us very discreet hints in his poems, which are ours to discern and understand. We find thus twice in the corpus I translated (nos. 150 and 169) the well-known poetical expression munashiki sora, meaning literally "empty skies" and usually describing the sky where the moon has not yet risen. If we follow a very common practice in Japanese poetry derived from Chinese verse and transpose the pure Japanese words munashiki sora, which are not written in Chinese characters, into the usual kanji characters with which they are usually written, we are surprised to discover a very important word of the Buddhist vocabulary: koku, meaning "empty space" (ko = munashi; ku = sora).

Now, there is a work very highly considered in Tendai dogma in which both the word and the concept koku play a most important role: it is the concise but rewarding treatise brought from China to Japan by Saicho at the beginning of the ninth century, written by the sixth patriarch of the Chinese Tendai (T'ien-t'ai) school, Chan-jan (Tannen, in Japanese), and somewhat cryptically entitled The Adamantine Lancet (Kongobei-ron, in Japanese). Under the form of a dialogue held in a dream between an honest Buddhist follower with a philosophical bent and a rough-looking hermit, the idea of the "inanimate having (buddha-) nature" is scrutinized from a variety of angles, starting from a decisive quotation taken from the Sutra of Perfect Nirvana (Nehan-gyo): "The buddha-nature of sentient beings is just like space; it is neither interior nor exterior. If it were interior or exterior, how could it be called ?all-pervasive'?" To state it rather bluntly, inasmuch as it is possible to give a definite interpretation to a text that its author himself is careful to present as a dream talk, inanimate objects of the outside world such as trees, grasses, and stones do possess buddha-nature and thus can awaken, in the measure that they have an inalterable relation with the mind of a Buddhist adept.

The human beings who reach enlightenment awaken through themselves the whole surrounding world. This is a very daring elevation to its ultimate meaning of an older tenet of Buddhism: the distinction between direct and indirect karmic retributions (eho and shoho), meaning that an individual must assume his or her own karmic burden, which will materialize as an individual body endowed with a certain social status, a fair or ugly appearance, good or bad health, and so on, but that a group of individuals who share the same world they live in would have a karmic responsibility in the constitution of this world. We who live in our common world at the beginning of the twenty-first century and enjoy, or bear, our modern environment, are in some way the makers of this environment. This refers not only to direct action (the daily production of refuse, for example) but, more deeply, to moral action: our past deeds, good or bad, did their share in the world we have to assume now. Starting from this, Chan-jan proceeds gradually to demonstrate that there is no object independent from mind and that there is therefore no distinction to be made between animate and inanimate: the inanimate therefore possess buddha-nature, as it is an emanation of the One Mind.

It is thus fairly obvious that the integration of the outside world as an organic being, which is, as will now be easily understood, firmly based in Tendai doctrines, is not a mere literary conceit forced on the Lotus Sutra but is the result of a contemplative reading of the sutra that must be viewed in its own right as a valid exegetical method. There is no doubt that it can be an inspiration for an environmentalist interpretation of the Lotus Sutra.

Jean-Noël Robert is teaching in the Department of History of Religions at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sorbonne, Paris) and is a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Gishin, the second patriarch of the Japanese Tendai school. He recently published a translation of four short treatises on Tendai, Quatre courts traités sur la Terrasse Céleste (Paris, 2007), and a commentary on Jien's Buddhist poems, La Centurie du Lotus de Jien, will be published this year.