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=== The Reckoning with Tiantai Doctrine ===
'''A:''' Speaking of “time,” there is another problem. Modern research has drastically changed the dating of the Buddha’s birth.

'''B:''' So it’s no longer three thousand years ago? I remember singing in Sunday school, “Long, long ago—three thousand years ago.”

'''A:''' Today, according to Dr. Takakusu, it was 2,497 years ago, while according to Dr. Ui, it was 2,397 years ago.<ref>Takakusu Junjirō (高楠順次郎, 1866–1945) and Ui Hakuju (宇井伯寿, 1882–1963) were leading Japanese scholars of Buddhism whose historical and philological research contributed to the modern reassessment of traditional Buddhist chronology. Seno’o invokes their differing calculations of the Buddha’s dates to illustrate the incompatibility of modern historical scholarship with the chronology presupposed by traditional Tiantai doctrine.</ref>

'''B:''' Aren’t those just scholars’ arbitrary guesses?

'''A:''' You shouldn’t dismiss scholarship out of hand like that. Those conclusions are the result of research. Whatever the precise answer may be, the Buddha is now generally placed around the fourth or fifth century BCE. And whereas tradition had said that he left home at nineteen, attained enlightenment at thirty, and entered nirvana at eighty,…

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…the accepted view has become that he left home at twenty-nine, attained enlightenment at thirty-five, and entered nirvana at eighty.

'''B:''' Then he taught for forty-five years. That means Tiantai’s system of the Five Periods, which was based on the old account of fifty years of teaching from enlightenment at thirty to nirvana at eighty, becomes questionable too.<ref>The Five Periods (goji 五時) is the chronological scheme systematized by the Tiantai patriarch Zhiyi (智顗 538–597) to classify the Buddha’s teachings into five sequential stages: (1) Kegon (Avataṃsaka, three weeks); (2) Agon (Āgama, twelve years); (3) Hōdō (Vaipulya, eight years); (4) Hannya (Prajñāpāramitā, twenty-two years); and (5) Hokke-Nehan (Lotus and Nirvāṇa, the final eight years). The scheme presupposes the traditional chronology in which the Buddha attained enlightenment at age thirty and taught until his death at eighty. Modern historical-critical scholarship instead dated his enlightenment to approximately age thirty-five and his teaching career to about forty-five years, while also treating the Mahāyāna sutras as later compositions. Seno’o invokes these discrepancies to argue that the traditional Tiantai chronology—and consequently the historical framework inherited by Nichiren—must itself be subjected to modern critical scrutiny.</ref>

'''A:''' There’s no avoiding it. If the ''Lotus Sutra'' was preached for eight years, then the pre-Lotus teachings could only have lasted thirty-seven years, which makes the phrase “for more than forty years the truth had not yet been revealed” unstable. And if the pre-Lotus teachings lasted forty-two years, then the ''Lotus Sutra'' could only have been taught for three years.

'''B:''' Still, we’re talking about events from twenty-four or twenty-five hundred years ago. Even if we calculate things that precisely, how can we really know which account is correct?

'''A:''' India was hardly a country with a strong tradition of historical record keeping, so perfect precision may be impossible. But scholarship still deserves our respect. This is, after all, an age in which science can calculate the numbers of the astronomical world with extraordinary accuracy. At any rate, one fact is unavoidable: Tiantai doctrine must undergo a reckoning, and Nichiren doctrine must therefore also be reexamined. Nor is that all. Modern scholarship has also proposed an account of how the ''Lotus Sutra'' itself was formed. According to this theory, the earliest form of the sutra ran from the “Introduction” chapter through the tenth chapter, “Dharma Preacher.” Later material was added through the twenty-second chapter, “Entrustment,” and then another six chapters were added, producing the present twenty-eight-chapter form.<ref>Seno’o here summarizes a modern historical-critical theory according to which the Lotus Sutra developed in successive stages: an initial text comprising chapters 1–10, a subsequent expansion through chapter 22, and the later addition of six chapters producing the received twenty-eight-chapter version.</ref>

I myself have lectured on the ''Lotus Sutra'' several times, and the breaks in the textual structure certainly can give that impression. In any event, I think we may safely say that it is now virtually impossible to deny that the ''Lotus Sutra'', like the other Mahāyāna scriptures, represents Buddhism in the process of historical development.

'''B:''' Then were the so-called Hīnayāna scriptures actually written by Śākyamuni himself?

'''A:''' No. Those scriptures too were compiled by his disciples after his death.

'''B:''' Then strictly speaking, couldn’t we say that the Hīnayāna scriptures were also “not taught by the Buddha”? And if we are prepared to call them the Buddha’s teaching, why couldn’t we equally call the Mahāyāna scriptures the Buddha’s teaching?

'''A:''' There is something to that argument, and people have made it before. But I think it is sophistry. Shouldn’t we properly distinguish between the Buddha’s immediate disciples gathering together and reciting what remained vivid in their memories, and later generations—disciples of disciples and their descendants—composing scriptures on the basis of those earlier records?

'''B:''' Is there really enough evidence to establish the Mahāyāna as later development?

'''A:''' Scholars have reached that conclusion on the basis of writing, literary style, and many other forms of textual evidence.

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Scholarly conscience leaves us no choice but to acknowledge it.