Chapter 23: Former Affairs of the Bodhisattva Medicine King

In response to a question from the Bodhisattva Star Constellation King Flower, the Buddha recounts the former life of the Bodhisattva Medicine King. In a past age, under the Buddha Sun Moon Pure Bright Virtue, there was a bodhisattva named Gladly Seen by All Living Beings. After receiving the Lotus Sutra from that Buddha, he practiced strenuously for twelve thousand years, attaining the samadhi of manifesting all physical forms. Filled with gratitude for the sutra and the Buddha who taught it, he resolved to make the supreme offering.

He ingested fragrant oils and resins for twelve hundred years, anointed his body with perfumed oil, wrapped himself in divine robes, and set his own body ablaze. The light illuminated worlds equal in number to the sands of eighty Ganges Rivers, and the Buddhas in all those worlds simultaneously praised him, declaring this to be the true practice of the Dharma, surpassing all offerings of flowers, incense, robes, and material goods. His body continued to burn for twelve hundred years before being consumed. After his death he was reborn in the same Buddha's land and, learning that the Buddha was about to enter nirvana, received the Dharma in trust and built eighty-four thousand stupas to enshrine his relics.

Still unsatisfied, the bodhisattva burned his own arms as an offering before the stupas for seventy-two thousand years. This act of supreme sacrifice inspired countless beings to aspire to supreme enlightenment. The chapter is both an expression of the intense devotion the Lotus Sutra inspires and a teaching about the nature of true offering -- giving not merely one's possessions but one's very self for the sake of the Dharma. The Buddha declares that the merit of one who upholds even a single verse of the Lotus Sutra exceeds the merit of vast material offerings, for the sutra itself is the supreme treasure.