Ive heard of vipassana, and not other three. I will have to look that up. I was told the Lotus Sutra, by some, is not even part of the Buddhas actual teachings.
Shamatha-vipashyana is another way of saying Buddhist meditation, in its two aspects of mind-calming and insight. Methods tend to favor one or the other aspect, but most methods feature at least some of both.
As for the other thing, Theravada practitioners are often saying stuff like that. In the Mahayana tradition "words of the Buddha" has a much broader (and more realistic) application. There's no doubt the
Lotus Sutra was set down fairly late, but pretty much all Buddhist scriptures were composed somewhere between 200 BCE and 200 CE, so we're not talking about a big difference in any case. Also, even though we put them in the mouth of Shakyamuni Buddha by convention, people who think the sutras are his literal, verbatim teachings are kidding themselves. They're the products of a living tradition based on his teachings. The
Lotus Sutra in particular shows a very well developed system already in place.
As for the recommendations, they're actually very similar to certain monastic precepts, which makes sense if you know that the early Mahayana was a movement within the monastic community. It's not clear that they expected laymen to be reading the sutra in the first place. Hence the list of behaviors that would be unseemly for a monk but not for a lay practitioner (cf. the
Vimalakirti Sutra). In any case, no, I don't refrain from watching shows or associating with actors or people of non-Buddhist paths. It would be silly and impractical and only end up making Buddhism look like some kooky bunch of shut-ins. I do try to limit my contact with people who hunt and fish and engage in violent behavior generally, as those things are distasteful and morally problematic, but not in the sense that I shun them or treat them as less than equals.
In today's Mahayana there are ten precepts for people who want to walk the bodhisattva path, which is just a bit more than the five that all laymen take. None of them forbid any of those things that one sees in the
Lotus Sutra. However, the additional precepts that monks take do cover most of them. Therefore I'd trace this passage in the
Lotus Sutra back to the original source of dispute among the early schools, which was over the exact content of the monk's code. This passage seems to be arguing in favor of certain precepts that rival schools may not have included.
