Questions and Answers on the Object of Devotion Chapter10-3
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The school known as True Word is one great fabric of lies. But because it has gone to such lengths to conceal its origins, people of shallow capacity have difficulty in perceiving this fact. Thus for many years now they have been deceived and misled by it. To begin with, there is no school called True Word in India, although the proponents of True Word claim that there is. If so, they should produce proof to support their claim.
In any event, the Mahāvairochana Sutra has been transmitted to Japan. If we compare it with the Lotus Sutra and ask what are their relative merits, we find that the Mahāvairochana Sutra ranks seven levels lower than the Lotus Sutra. The proofs are clearly seen when we put the two sutras side by side.18 (I will not bother to cite them here.)
Despite all this, some proponents of the True Word school claim that the Mahāvairochana Sutra is thrice the sovereign the Lotus Sutra is, and some claim that it is twice the sovereign. This is an absurdly mistaken view. It is like the case of Liu Ts’ung who, though a person of lowly station, forced Emperor Min to lead his horse for him.19 Or like Chao Kao who, though a mere subject, unjustly usurped the throne. Or again it is like the Great Arrogant Brahman of India who fashioned a dais with a statue of Shakyamuni Buddha as one of its legs and used it to sit on.
Yet for the past more than four hundred years, there has been no one in China who realized all this, and no one in Japan who doubted these claims of the True Word school.
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Notes
18. The proofs for the statement that the Mahāvairochana Sutra ranks seven levels lower than the Lotus Sutra are described in On the Relative Superiority of the True Word and Tendai Schools (p. 364).
19. Emperor Min was the fourth ruler of the Western Chin dynasty. When his uncle, Emperor Huai, was killed in Lo-yang by Liu Ts’ung, the third ruler of the Former Chao, he escaped to Ch’ang-an and then became emperor in 313. But he was captured by General Liu Yao, a subject of Liu Ts’ung, in 316, and the following year, one year after he had been forced to work as a menial laborer, he was killed.