Maesus Sutra Essay

At the beginning of this semester we focused on hermeneutics and the reader’s personal interpretations and biases when reading a text. The Protestant bias is one bias that anyone who grows up in a western culture is likely to have. A protestant bias is a bias one can have regardless if they are actually a protestant. A protestant bias is a bias comes from the fact that the majority of westerners are most familiar with and base their assumptions about scripture on one particular scripture -- the Christian Bible. Whether an individual is a Christian or not, most westerners have been exposed to Christianity, and the Bible is often the first book that comes to mind when “scripture” is mentioned. People generally have negative associations with the word “bias” that are usually connected to the idea of closed mindedness. When actually considering biases

Many westerners often think of scripture as an authoritative guide that is to be taken literally while other scriptures are meant to be interpreted in many different ways. The Lotus Sutra is honestly a perfect example of a text that can be interpreted a countless number of ways. Rather than there being one “right” way of understanding a scripture, other scripture are meant to be interpreted and understood by different individuals in different ways.

These different factors of the Protestant bias definitely could interfere with one’s study of the Lotus of the reader is not aware of the bias. I feel like the protestant bias will most affect someone’s study of the Lotus Sutra in regard to the interpretation of scripture. Rather than one interpretation being authoritative, the Lotus Sutra produces an endless number of interpretations. Interpretations of the Lotus Sutra are made based off a person’s background and personal experiences and are not considered invalid because different from someone else’s