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“the five practices of the preacher of the dharma (preserving, reading, reciting, explaining, and copying the sūtra)”
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“Lotus Sūtra's own instructions in Chapter Ten, “Wherever this sūtra is taught, read, recited, copied, or wherever it is found, one should build a seven-jeweled stūpa of great height and width and richly ornamented” (169).”
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“in Japan we find sumptuous copies of the Lotus Sūtra in which each character is drawn inside in a stūpa, as though enshrined there as a buddha would be.”
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“We find copies of the sūtra in which each of the ten scrolls that compose it has a frontispiece on indigo paper depicting the events of the chapter in that scroll, all centered around a gold nine-storied pagoda where the two buddhas sit side by side. When one looks closely, the lines of the pagoda are composed of the characters of the sūtra. In this way, the artist both copied the sūtra and built a stūpa, two deeds extolled in the sūtra itself.”
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“The practice developed of copying the Lotus Sūtra (as well as other sūtras), placing them in elaborate stūpa-shaped canisters, and burying them in stone boxes.”
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“It was also in the Kanjin honzon shō that Nichiren described the importance of the honzon (object of devotion), the calligraphic representation of the scene at Vulture Peak when the entire assembly rises into the air to view Śākyamuni and Prabhūtaratna seated side by side in the stūpa.”
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“Two historical figures also appear, Zhiyi and Saichō, the Chinese and Japanese founders of the Tiantai and Tendai, the sects that esteem the Lotus Sūtra above all others.”
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“The Zen master Hakuin (1687–1768, known in the West for coining the kōan “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”)”
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“The Lotus Sūtra makes reference to the “five kinds of defilement.”
“(1) the degradation of the life span, because the human life span becomes shorter; (2) the degradation of views, because wrong views are rampant; (3) the degradation of afflictions, because negative emotions such as desire and hatred become stronger; (4) the degradation of sentient beings, because the beings of the world become mentally and physically weaker; and (5) the degradation of the age, because the world and the environment decline.”
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“The brilliant Japanese scholar Tominaga Nakamoto (1715–1746) was among the first scholars in the world, whether Asian or European, to offer what would be considered today a “historical” analysis of the development of Buddhism. He saw the great variety of Buddhist sūtras as a sign of discord, with competing factions composing their own sūtras after the Buddha's death but ascribing their favored sūtra to the Buddha in order to claim his authority.”
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