Listing the Successors of the Buddha’s Teaching Chapter1

When I examine the matter, I find that in the preface to Great Concentration and Insight, which is found in the first volume of this work, the Great Teacher Chang-an speaks of the stage of practice attained by the Great Teacher T’ien-t’ai as follows: “T’ien-t’ai calmly entered meditation and then passed away. He had mastered the five stages of practice. And the sutra says that even if a person were to present each of the people of four hundred ten thousand million nayuta worlds with seven kinds of gems, and instruct and enable them to gain six transcendental powers, he would still not match a person at the first stage of hearing the sutra and responding with joy,¹ not even to one part in a hundred, thousand, ten thousand.² How much truer must this be, then, of one who has mastered the five stages of practice! A passage from the sutra states that such a person ‘is the envoy of the Thus Come One. He has been dispatched by the Thus Come One and carries out the Thus Come One’s work.’³”

The Great Teacher Dengyō says of the Great Teacher T’ien-t’ai, “Now the founder of our school, the Great Teacher T’ien-t’ai, preached the Lotus Sutra and interpreted the Lotus Sutra in a way that placed him far above the crowd; in all of China, he stood alone.”⁴ He goes on to say, “One should clearly understand that he was a messenger of the Thus Come One. Those who praise him will receive blessings that will pile up as high as Mount Calm and Bright, while those who slander him will be committing a fault that will condemn them to the hell of incessant suffering.”

But let us set these matters aside for the moment. From the first day after the Buddha’s passing through the two thousand years of the Former and Middle Days of the Law there have been twenty-four envoys of the Buddha. The first was Mahākāshyapa; the second, Ānanda; the third, Madhyāntika; the fourth, Shānavāsa; the fifth, Upagupta; the sixth, Dhritaka; the seventh, Mikkaka; the eighth, Buddhananda; the ninth, Buddhamitra; the tenth, Pārshva; the eleventh, Punyayashas; the twelfth, Ashvaghosha; the thirteenth, Kapimala; the fourteenth, Nāgārjuna; the fifteenth, Āryadeva; the sixteenth, Rāhulabhadra; the seventeenth, Samghanandi; the eighteenth, Samghayashas; the nineteenth, Kumārata; the twentieth, Jayata; the twenty-first, Vasubandhu; the twenty-second, Manorhita; the twenty-third, Haklenayashas; and the twenty-fourth, the Venerable Āryasimha. These twenty-four men are described in the Buddha’s Successors Sutra, which records the golden words of the Buddha. They were envoys entrusted with the mission of propagating the Hinayana and provisional Mahayana sutras, however. They were not envoys entrusted with the task of propagating the Lotus Sutra.