妙法蓮華經文句 6.54

6.54

From 'He then summoned his son' onward is the second: assembling the crowd. That is, the disciples who received transformation under twenty thousand billion buddhas are called 'sons'; those whose great capacity had matured gathered like clouds from the ten directions. This refers to the fourfold assembly surrounding him mentioned above. 'And brought together his relatives': ancient masters said that the emanated bodies are like the relatives, the ten stages are like the king, the ninth stage is like the ministers, the eighth stage is like the kṣatriyas, and the seventh stage is like the householders. Masters of the north took the emanated bodies as relatives, Prabhūtaratna as the king, the ten stages as ministers, the eighth stage as kṣatriyas, and the thirty minds as householders. If so, when the Dharma was preached in the trace approach, neither the emanated bodies nor Prabhūtaratna had appeared yet; how could this refer to them? Their explanation was: it was precisely when Śāriputra harboured doubt and had not yet generated faith in the Lotus Sūtra that Prabhūtaratna and the emanated bodies came simultaneously to bear witness. If, once doubts were removed, faith and understanding achieved, and prediction conferred, Prabhūtaratna were used again, what would he bear witness to? Therefore, one knows that at the time of the preaching of the Dharma, Prabhūtaratna had already emerged, but the transmitter of the sūtra did not place the words redundantly, arranging them in order after the cause approach. I now say that this is merely human conjecture, lacking any basis. Preaching the proximate matters of the trace approach does not employ ancient witnesses; if preaching the distant matters of the origin approach, one must first bear witness to the past. Now we do not use their explanation, but rely on the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka-sūtra (and so on). Now we clarify: the dharmakāya bodhisattvas of the ten directions who exert an influencing presence are the relatives. The crowd of the influencing presence mostly consists of Śākyamuni's former fellow practitioners; together with the Tathāgata, under twenty thousand billion buddhas, they jointly opened and transformed them, standing toward him in the position of uncles; therefore, these are taken as relatives. As for the 'king': in all the gradual and sudden sūtras, the truth they explicate is invariably called the 'king of sūtras'. Benefiting beings according to capacity, they have their times of flourishing and declining; being different from section to section, they are called 'countries', and all being proclaimed supreme, they are 'kings'. Moreover, this sūtra integrates and penetrates all teachings; how is it not an assembly of kings? Thus, in the Anantanirdeśa, they were already collected beforehand: it says there, 'First I preached the Four Truths and the twelve links of dependent origination; next I preached the Correct and Equal twelve divisions of scriptures; next I preached the Mahāprajñā and the Avataṃsaka's ocean-emptiness.' This broadly gathers all sūtras, harmonizing and unifying the gradual and sudden into this scripture; hence it is called 'assembling the kings'. The great bodhisattvas such as Maitreya are all at the level of equal awakening, serving as the ministers. From the first stage to the ninth stage are the kṣatriyas, born into the lineage of the Dharma King. The thirty minds are the householders. All of these received transformation from Śākyamuni.