#mastodharma Separately from that observation of the metaphor of medicine, I have been reading lately a lot about the emergence and history of Mahayana Buddhism because I've been very interested in the story of the gender transition of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara to Guan Yin. (Been reading "Kuan Yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokitesvara" by Chun-fang Yu to find out more.)

Avalokitesvara (shape shifting and genderfluid- wait til chapter 25) is depicted in almost exclusively masculine forms in the Pali Canon and early Mahayana sutras, but they slowly take on more and more feminine forms and eventually are depicted almost exclusively as a female being within East Asian lay Buddhism over the course of centuries. This is interesting, because of the gender transition seeming to have a significance to an emerging trend within Mahayana Buddhism and 11th century Taoism against gender discrimination in the temple. You can see the ripple of this proto-feminism in Eihei Dogen's "Raihai Tokuzui."

In a separate essay I'd read from the citations, The Consecration Sutra by Michael Strickmann about an esoteric Buddhist texts, I learned of a long, ongoing, and very fiery discourse in the 6th century about the legitimacy of various translated sutras in China. Many of them were considered "suspect" and regarded as Mara or false dogma. Mahayana sutras were written a long, long time after the extinction of the historic Buddha, in a different place by different people...
but importantly, the Pali canon was too! The Buddha and his posse in his lifetime didn't write anything down. His legacy was written by transcribing verbal history that people had kept by repetition in what we call the Pali canon about three hundred years later.

The Lotus Sutra is a sutra written many hundreds of years after that, and it emerged from discourse. It seems to be speaking of itself here: as a seed that was watered by the Buddha, but which took many, many generations to sprout.