The Lotus sutra demonstrates a conception of literary expression based on the Buddhist idea of non-self. Its ideas of text and reader are quite different from those derived from Western traditions. They may provide new theoretical grounds for the interpretation of Chinese fiction. The sutra designates its dharma as inexpressible，but at the same time proceeds to express it. This attempt to express the inexpressible determines various textual structures all pointing to the coincidence of expediency and truth, the dialectical recursion of metaphor within dharma and dharma within metaphor. The sutra denies that phenomena possess self- substance，but it also denies that there is transcendent truth beyond phenomena. Rather，dharma exists nowhere except in the multiplicity of the metaphor. Furthermore，since all phenomena are empty，and all beings possess buddhahood，this conception must be regarded as a claim that all acts of reading can be explained in this way. According to this conception，the problematic of reading consists not in the encounter of subject (reader) with object (meaning)，but in the history of textual mutations within the determinations of the phenomenal world. Reading，in this sense，is both the formation of personal destiny out of the reader's particular historicity，and the transformation of received wisdom within the historical course of transmission and praxis. This conception of reading emphasizes the contextual adaptation of readability and the nondifferentiation of validity in interpretation.
