CHAPTER 4
The most famous ruler in Japanese history is Prince Shōtoku (573–622). His was the period when Buddhism was first being introduced to Japan from Korea, and the prince is depicted as the defender of Buddhism in many legends. The son of Princess Anahobe no Hashihito, at the age of fourteen he is said to have fought bravely in a battle between his own Soga clan and the anti-Buddhist Mononobe clan. Prior to going into battle, he felled a tree, carved small statues of the divine kings of the four directions, and placed them in his topknot, vowing to build a temple in their honor when he emerged victorious. Yet his devotion to Buddhism extends even to an earlier age. In another story, the six-year-old prince is seated at the foot of his mother's throne as an emissary returns from Korea bringing some sūtras. The young prince asks to see them, explaining to his mother that he had been a Buddhist master in China in a previous life.
As with many famous figures in the history of Buddhism, Shōtoku's past lives would be traced back to the time of the Buddha, placing him in the assembly on Vulture Peak when the Buddha preached the Lotus Sūtra. In China, his previous incarnations would include the master Nanyue Huisi (515–577, who inconveniently died after Shōtoku was born), a devotee of the Lotus Sūtra and the teacher of Zhiyi. Thus, the prince himself is described in the legends as a great scholar of the Lotus, even credited with having composed a commentary on the text (an attribution that is doubted by scholars). In another legend, one day when reading the sūtra, the prince found that it lacked one character that he remembered from the copy he had had in China during his lifetime as Huisi. When an emissary sent to retrieve the text returned with the wrong one, the prince went himself, flying there in a magnificent cart hitched to a dragon, a scene often depicted in Japanese art.1
By the eighth century, the Lotus Sūtra was sufficiently revered in Japan that state-sponsored nunneries, called Temples for the Eradication of Sins through the Lotus (Hokke metsuzai no tera), were established by the emperor in each province. Their purpose seems to have been the protection of the royal family and the state; also established at this time were monasteries called Temples for the Protection of the Nation by the Four Divine Kings of the Golden Light (Konkōmyō shitennō gokoku no tera), dedicated to a Chinese apocryphon called the Sūtra for Humane Kings (Renwang jing) and an Indian sūtra, the Suvarṇaprabhāsa or Golden Light. In the seventh chapter of the latter text, the four divine kings, the protectors of the four cardinal directions, promise to come to the aid of countries in times of invasion, famine, and disease if the monks of that land recite the sūtra. As had been the case in China, in Japan members of the nobility would sponsor the copying of the Lotus Sūtra, with the copies sometimes numbering in the thousands.
During this same period, ritual celebrations of the Lotus Sūtra were being held in Japan, not only at Buddhist temples but in the mansions and palaces of the aristocracy and royal family, performed—like so many Buddhist rituals—for the long life of the living and the welfare of the dead; such services are repeatedly mentioned in The Tale of Genji, the celebrated eleventh-century novel by Lady Murasaki of the Heian court. One such event was called the Eight Lectures (hakkōe), so called because the Chinese text of the Lotus Sūtra consisted of eight scrolls; there were also events of ten lectures and thirty lectures. These were elaborate affairs involving dozens of monks organized to perform a variety of roles. There were monks who asked questions, monks who answered questions, monks who decided whether the answers were correct, those who listened to the exchanges, those who chanted verses of praise to the Buddha, and those who punctuated their chanting by shaking their monk's staff (shakujō) so that its metal rings would jingle.2
Offerings were presented on the fifth day, when the monks were about to begin the second half of the sūtra. The first chapter of the fifth scroll is the Devadatta Chapter (Chapter Twelve), which tells how, long ago, a king (the Buddha in a previous life) had made himself the servant of a sage (Devadatta in a previous life), performing such menial tasks as collecting firewood. In that same chapter, the nāga princess achieves buddhahood. This chapter was therefore said to be particularly beloved by great sinners (who could identify with Devadatta) and by women (who could identify with the nāga princess). The fifth day was an occasion to make offerings, and in commemoration of the future buddha's service, gifts were attached to tree branches made of gold and silver. In a description of such a ritual performed in 1008, we read, “It was pleasant to watch the trim gentlemen of the Sixth Rank and guards officers with their firewood and water buckets, and to see the nobles and monks marching in procession, each wonderfully elegant, handsome, and dignified in his own way. The chanting voices seemed a reminder of suffering, emptiness, and non-self, and the murmuring garden stream harmonized with their cadences, as though nature herself were also expounding the sacred doctrine. The elucidation of the Lotus Sūtra drew pious tears from every eye.”3
At the end of the second chapter of the sūtra, the Buddha lists the many ways in which one may attain the path of the buddhas, including drawing an image of the Buddha with a twig, a blade of grass, or even one's fingernail. In addition, “those who joyfully praised the qualities of the buddhas with various songs or even with a single low-pitched sound, have certainly attained the path of the buddhas” (40). Inspired at least in part by such passages, artists, both of words and images, have found myriad ways to place the Lotus Sūtra into their works. This was true in China and especially true in Japan.
The place of the Lotus Sūtra in Chinese and Japanese art is a vast topic that has inspired full-length studies.4 I can only note here that the Lotus Sūtra's praise of the practice of praising the Lotus Sūtra—whether in music, word, or image—the sūtra's constant extolling of the five practices of the preacher of the dharma (preserving, reading, reciting, explaining, and copying the sūtra), and the belief of the pious in China and Japan that every character of the Lotus Sūtra is a living buddha all inspired a wealth of artistic forms, their creativity only matched by their devotion. There are volumes of miracle tales about the Lotus Sūtra, poems about the Lotus Sūtra, songs about the Lotus Sūtra, and all manner of allusions to the Lotus Sūtra in novels and plays. The song of the Japanese warbler is hokekyō, “Lotus Sūtra.” “The Lotus Sūtra is even manifest in the landscape in Japan, where various mountains have been identified as Vulture Peak; the mountain is said to have flown from India to Japan. On the Kunisaki Peninsula, there is a complex of twenty-eight temples, one for each of the chapters of the sūtra. Connecting the temples is a path lined with 69,384 statues, one for each character in the sūtra.
The elaborate rituals for copying the Lotus Sūtra that developed in China also made their way to Japan. The monk Ennin (794–864) was a disciple of Saichō, the founder of the Tendai sect, which saw itself as the Japanese successor to Zhiyi's Tiantai. He is remembered today especially for his detailed account of his nine-year sojourn in China, from 838 to 847. Some years prior to his departure, Ennin made a copy of the Lotus Sūtra. He is said to have grown the hemp himself from which the paper was made. In keeping with ritual purity, no animal products could be used, such as horsehair for the calligraphy brush and the ink that contained glue made from ox skins. Instead, he made his own brushes from grasses and his own ink from graphite. It is said that he performed three prostrations prior to writing each of the 69,384 characters of the sūtra.5 He then had it enshrined in a small reliquary, in keeping with the Lotus Sūtra's own instructions in Chapter Ten, “Wherever this sūtra is taught, read, recited, copied, or wherever it is found, one should build a seven-jeweled stūpa of great height and width and richly ornamented” (169).
And so in Japan we find sumptuous copies of the Lotus Sūtra in which each character is drawn inside in a stūpa, as though enshrined there as a buddha would be. We find copies of the sūtra in which each of the ten scrolls that compose it has a frontispiece on indigo paper depicting the events of the chapter in that scroll, all centered around a gold nine-storied pagoda where the two buddhas sit side by side. When one looks closely, the lines of the pagoda are composed of the characters of the sūtra. In this way, the artist both copied the sūtra and built a stūpa, two deeds extolled in the sūtra itself. Such deeds had gained a particular urgency by the eleventh century, spurred by visions of the end-time.
Beginning in the Kamakura period (1185–1333), the sensibility of Buddhism in Japan was strongly shaped by the doctrine of the disappearance of the true dharma (saddharmavipralopa). According to Buddhist doctrine, a new buddha does not appear in the world until the teachings of the previous buddha have been completely forgotten; until then, because the salvific dharma is still available, it is not necessary that it be taught anew. It is also standard Buddhist doctrine that all conditioned things, including the words of the Buddha, are subject to decay and disintegration. Thus, in Indian Buddhism, there are many predictions of the disappearance of the dharma; such predictions often state how long the process of disappearance will take and what signs will attend the dharma's gradual disappearance. One of the earliest such predictions appears in the traditional account of the Buddha's grudging decision to admit women into the monastic order. He says that had he not admitted women, his teaching would last for a thousand years, but because he has admitted women, it will only last for five hundred.
A variety of other predictions for the decline and disappearance of the dharma appear in various sūtras, with the period of the duration of the dharma ranging from as short as five hundred years to as long as twelve thousand years (in some Chinese sources); other figures include 700, 1,000, 1,500, 2,000, 2,500, and 5,000 years. In East Asia, the most influential version of the doctrine of decline and disappearance consisted of three periods, called the “true dharma,” the “semblance dharma,” and the “decadent dharma” (also known as the “final dharma”). These terms appear in the Lotus Sūtra, but the threefold periodization does not. The term final dharma would be particularly important in East Asia; it is mofa in Chinese and mappō in Japanese. Despite the common translation of this doctrine as “decline of the dharma,” it is not so much the dharma that declines as the capacity of human beings to successfully put it into practice. In the degenerate age of the final period, humans lack the intelligence, diligence, and morality to follow the Buddhist path to its conclusion, a fact reflected in various descriptions of the sad state of the saṃgha.6
During the Kamakura period in Japan, the most prevalent version of this process of decline described the three periods, with the first two each lasting one thousand years and the last one lasting ten thousand years. The first two were also divided into two periods of five centuries each. Thus, in the first five hundred years after the Buddha's passage into nirvāṇa, that is, the first period of the true dharma, many are able to attain enlightenment. In the second period of the true dharma, many still practice meditation, but few are able to attain enlightenment. In the first period of the semblance dharma, beginning one thousand years after the Buddha's passing, many study the sūtras, but few practice meditation. In the second period of the semblance dharma, many build temples, but few study the sūtras. We see thus a regression from enlightenment to meditation to study to temple building and a movement from the salvific mental experience of enlightenment to the verbal practice of sūtra recitation to the physical practice of temple building.
The final age is marked by disagreements and conflicts, with humans incapable of effective meditation or study. In Japan, the dates of the Buddha were generally calculated as 1029 to 949 B.C.E., and the beginning of the period of the final dharma was placed in 1052 C.E., meaning that, for those who accepted this theory, those living in the Kamakura period were already living in the end-time.
Yet different Buddhist thinkers saw different implications in this view of history. It was of little importance to the Zen master Dōgen (1200–1253). It was of central importance to the Pure Land traditions, especially those associated with Hōnen and his disciple Shinran. For Hōnen, because we are living in the final age, it is impossible to gain liberation from the cycle of rebirth through one's own efforts, and it is hubris to attempt to do so. The sole path to salvation lies in reliance on the compassion of the buddha Amitābha, who, according to the sūtra called the Display of the Land of Bliss (Sukhāvatīvyūha), had vowed long ago to appear at the deathbed of anyone who called upon him with a mind of faith, promising to accompany them to his buddha field, the pure land called Sukhāvatī, the Land of Bliss. Thus, Hōnen taught his followers to call upon Amitābha at all times by simply chanting, Namu amida butsu, “Homage to Amitābha Buddha.”
Nichiren (1222–1282, on whom much more below) believed that he was living in the final age of the dharma, specifically at the beginning of the fifth of the five five-hundred-year ages, that is, the first five-hundred-year period of the ten thousand years of the age of the final dharma, a period known as the Age of Conflict (because it would be marked by conflicts between Buddhists). However, he did not conclude that the achievement of buddhahood, in this lifetime and in this world, is therefore impossible. He drew great meaning from the fact that the Buddha taught the Lotus Sūtra during what were, to common sight, the final eight years of his life; the Lotus Sūtra was thus the only effective teaching for the last age of the dharma. And like Shinran, who would declare that the sole purpose of the Buddha appearing in the world was to announce the existence of Amitābha's pure land, Nichiren said that the Buddha appeared in the world to teach the Lotus Sūtra, not for the bodhisattvas in the assembly but for those of future ages, like the physician father in the parable who left the antidote to poison behind. He wrote,
I can say that the Buddha appeared in this world not for the people on Mount Gṛdhrakūṭa during the last eight years of his teaching. The Buddha appeared in this world for the people who live in the Age of the Right Teachings of the Buddha, the Age of the Counterfeit of the Right Teachings of the Buddha, and the Age of Degeneration [i.e., the periods of the true dharma, semblance dharma, and final dharma discussed above]. Furthermore, I can say that the Buddha appeared in this world not for the people who lived in the two thousand years from the beginning of the Age of the Right Teachings of the Buddha to the end of the Age of the Counterfeit of the Right Teachings of the Buddha but for people like me, who live at the beginning of the Age of Degeneration.7
Nichiren's view of the opportunities afforded by the end-time, however, were not accepted by all. Copying of the Lotus Sūtra continued as a safeguard against the dark days to come. The practice developed of copying the Lotus Sūtra (as well as other sūtras), placing them in elaborate stūpa-shaped canisters, and burying them in stone boxes. This practice seems to have begun in the eleventh century. We recall that according to East Asian calculations, the period of the final dharma began in 1052. Because, in the minds of many, enlightenment was now impossible, it was important to accumulate as much merit as possible for future births, whether in the pure land of Amitābha or in the retinue of the future buddha Maitreya, said to be awaiting his advent, as all future buddhas do, in Tuṣita heaven. A number of sūtras were buried, but among them the Lotus Sūtra, sometimes buried alone, sometimes with other sūtras, was by far the most common. The dedicatory inscriptions attached to many of the copies include the usual prayers for an auspicious rebirth for oneself or one's family. However, other inscriptions indicate that the sūtra is meant to serve as a kind of time capsule, buried in the present age of the final dharma to be unearthed in the far distant future when Maitreya achieves buddhahood, an event that will occur, according to a common calculation, in 5.67 billion years. (This purpose is known from sūtra canisters that have been prematurely unearthed and opened, some of which are on display in the Tokyo National Museum.)8
It seems that the Lotus Sūtra was being preserved for Maitreya, so that he could read from it when he became a buddha. Yet this seems odd. The Lotus Sūtra specifically says that all buddhas of the past, present, and future set forth the Lotus Sūtra as their final teaching. Furthermore, Maitreya was in the audience when Śākyamuni taught the Lotus Sūtra, and, as a bodhisattva, he should have an impeccable memory. On the early stages of the path, it is said that bodhisattvas attain something called the “continuous instruction concentration” (sroto'nugato nāma samādhi), which allows them to hear and remember any teaching that they wish. And the Buddha himself says in Chapter Ten that in the future he will personally appear to coach anyone who is having trouble reciting the sūtra. If those who buried the Lotus Sūtra had read it, one wonders why they would bury the sūtra for Maitreya's use. In the Lotus Sūtra, Maitreya is not portrayed as the brightest of bodhisattvas. Thus, perhaps the pious Japanese who copied and buried the sūtra had themselves noticed this and thus sought to ensure that the buddha of the future would be a “preacher of the dharma.”
Yet that is for a time in the far distant future. Among all of the preachers of the dharma of the Lotus Sūtra over the past two thousand years, there has been no one like Nichiren. In the long history of the sūtra in Japan, he is the most famous—and the most infamous. He identified strongly with Viśiṣṭacāritra, the leader of the bodhisattvas who rose out of the earth in Chapter Fifteen and to whom, in Chapter Twenty-Two, the Buddha had entrusted the Lotus Sūtra after his passage into nirvāṇa; in two of his writings Nichiren intimates that he is the reincarnation of the bodhisattva. Some of his followers believed that he was the embodiment of the Buddha himself.
Nichiren was born in 1222 in a fishing village at the tip of the Bōsō Peninsula. It is not far from modern Tokyo, but at the time it was a remote place, far from the political and religious center Kyoto far to the south. Unlike many of the famous monks in the history of Japanese Buddhism, he was of humble origins, perhaps the son of a fisherman; he would describe himself as a caṇḍāla, the lowest of the low in the caste system of ancient India. The thirteenth century was a time of great political upheaval in Japan. In 1185, the Heike clan, protectors of the seven-year-old emperor, was defeated in the famous sea battle of Dan-no-ura. Rather than have the young emperor fall into enemy hands, his grandmother, the Lady Nii, took him in her arms and leapt into the sea, where they drowned. The victorious Minamoto clan established what has come to be known as the Kamakura shogunate, with Japan ruled by a military dictator who made his capital not in the royal city of Kyoto but in Kamakura to the north.
Nichiren began to study Buddhism at age eleven at a local Tendai monastery, being ordained when he was fifteen. “Tendai” was simply the Japanese pronunciation of Tiantai, the school of Zhiyi that held the Lotus Sūtra to be supreme. Its teachings had been brought to Japan in 805 by the monk Saichō (767–822), eventually establishing its headquarters on Mount Hiei outside Kyoto, a mountain that some Tendai monks would identify as Vulture Peak. Like the Tiantai school in China, Tendai held the Lotus Sūtra to be the greatest of all sūtras and derived much of their doctrine from the works of Zhiyi. Unlike Tiantai, through the efforts of Saichō and others, a considerable corpus of esoteric practices became central to Tendai, including rituals also practiced by the more explicitly esoteric Shingon sect of Saichō's rival Kūkai (774–835). Among Saichō's most consequential achievements was his successful petition to the court (granted shortly after his death) to have an ordination platform established at Mount Hiei; unlike the ordination platforms at the old capital at Nara, this was to be a “Mahāyāna platform” for bodhisattvas. Up until that time, Buddhist monks in China and Japan followed the monastic code (prātimokṣa) that had been inherited from India. However, Saichō reasoned that if there is but one vehicle, as the Lotus Sūtra declares, what he pejoratively termed the “Hīnayāna vows” were yet another expedient that no longer pertained.
By Nichiren's time, Tendai had become the most powerful Buddhist sect in Japan. Although it continued to esteem the Lotus Sūtra, its headquarters on Mount Hiei became the site for a wide range of eclectic practices; in addition to esoteric rituals, it was also a site of Pure Land practice. Drawing from the Display of the Land of Bliss, the Tendai monk Genshin (942–1017) had written a famous manual called Ōjōyōshū (Collection of Essentials for Going for Rebirth [in the Pure Land]) on the visualization of the buddha Amitābha. For those unable to do so at the time of death, Genshin recommended the invocation of Amitābha's name, a practice that the Japanese had inherited from China. Indeed, prior to the “single practice” innovations of the Kamakura period, no particular contradiction was perceived between devotion to the Lotus Sūtra and devotion to the Display of the Land of Bliss. Works such as Great Japanese Miraculous Tales of the Lotus Sūtra (Dainihonkoku hokekyōkenki), completed in 1044 by the monk Chingen, contain accounts of devotees who clearly believed that faith in one led to rebirth in the other. One of several anthologies of miracle tales about the Lotus, this collection includes rather standard Buddhist stories of miracle cures (a blind woman regains her sight by reciting the Lotus), divine retribution (a man who ridicules a reciter of the Lotus loses his voice), and deaths attended by heavenly fragrances, beautiful music, and auspicious dreams. In one story, a monk memorizes the first twenty-five chapters of the Lotus but, despite repeated efforts, is unable to memorize the final three. He eventually learns in a dream that in a previous life he had been a grasshopper who perched in a temple room where a monk was reciting the sūtra. After reciting the first seven scrolls of the sūtra (which contain the first twenty-five chapters), the monk rested before beginning the final roll. He leaned against the wall and inadvertently killed the grasshopper. The grasshopper was reborn as a human as a result of the merit he received from hearing the first twenty-five chapters of the Lotus. When he became a monk, however, he was unable to memorize the final three chapters because he, as the grasshopper, had died before he heard them.
The most famous story in the collection became the basis for the famous Nōh play Dōjōji and the Kabuki play Musume Dōjōji. It is the 129th and final story in the anthology. When a young monk spurns the affections of a widow, she turns into an eighteen-foot snake and pursues him to the temple of Dōjōji, where the monks hide him inside a large bell. The snake breaks down the doors of the temple and encircles the bell, its venom causing the bell to catch fire, burning the priest alive. The snake then departs in tears. Later, another snake appears to a monk in a dream, telling him that he is the young monk who was killed. He has been reborn as a snake and is now the mate of the snake who killed him. Although he had been a devotee of the Lotus Sūtra, his devotion was not enough to release him from this fate. He therefore implores the monk to copy Chapter Sixteen, “The Lifespan of the Tathāgata,” and perform a service to release both snakes from their serpentine forms. The night after the monk does so, he has another dream in which a priest and a woman appear to him and thank him for his efforts before ascending into the sky.9
Despite such inspiring stories, the Tendai monk Hōnen (1133–1212) turned away from the Lotus Sūtra and toward the Display of the Land of Bliss, arguing that in the degenerate age, the only possible path to salvation was to rely on the power of Amitābha by calling his name: Namu amida butsu, “Homage to Amitābha Buddha.” This was enough to ensure rebirth in his pure land at the moment of death, when, amid celestial music and the fragrance of incense, Amitābha himself would descend to the deathbed of the faithful, escorting them to his western paradise. In a letter written in 1272, Nichiren says that as a young monk he was himself a Pure Land devotee and mocked those who extolled the Lotus Sūtra. But he would soon come to denounce the various Tendai deviations from the Lotus Sūtra, expressing especial contempt for Hōnen and his followers; in a work written in 1242 he called Hōnen a devil. According to a story, Nichiren's suspicion of Pure Land practice was confirmed when one of his first teachers, a Pure Land practitioner, died writhing in pain.
After a short period of study in Kamakura, in 1243 Nichiren went to the Tendai headquarters on Mount Hiei, although he had not yet committed himself to the Lotus Sūtra as the supreme teaching of the Buddha. He seems to have arrived at this conviction through something of a process of elimination, but only after a serious survey of the Japanese sects of the day. He began with the belief that the word of the Buddha was superior to that of the various Indian Buddhist masters, such that one's allegiance should be to a sūtra rather than to a treatise (śāstra). This immediately eliminated five of the six “Nara schools” of Buddhism, which were based on various Madhyamaka (Sanron), Yogācāra (Hossō), and Abhidharma treatises (Kusha and Jōjitsu), as well as on (in the case of Ritsu) the monastic code (vinaya). Among the Nara schools, that left only Kegon, based on the Flower Garland Sūtra, which Nichiren rejected. He already had an antipathy for Pure Land, but he was attracted to Shingon, famous for its doctrine that it is possible to “achieve buddhahood in this very body” (sokushin jōbutsu), that is, during the present lifetime. He found what would prove to be for him a more compelling doctrine in the Tendai sect, which, based in part on Zhiyi's famous doctrine of “the three thousand realms in a single thought,” proclaimed that all beings are endowed with original enlightenment (hongaku). Nichiren eventually decided that the Tendai sect, with its conviction that the Lotus Sūtra was the Buddha's highest teaching, was the superior form of Buddhism, although he felt that in the centuries since its founding, its purity had been diluted by the admixture of other practices, especially devotion to Amitābha. For Nichiren, this apostasy from the Lotus had not only weakened Tendai; it had threatened the islands of Japan. In 1253, he set out to remedy the situation by proclaiming the unique supremacy of the Lotus Sūtra over all other Buddhist scriptures and sects that promoted them. Those sects, by holding other sūtras to be equal or superior to the Lotus Sūtra, were guilty of the grave sin of slandering the dharma. Nichiren took it as his task to rescue the devotees of other texts from this sin, whether they liked it or not.
“Slandering the dharma” (saddharmapratikṣepa; hōbō in Japanese) is a phrase that is used throughout the history of Buddhism with a range of meanings but most often referring to the rejection of the truth of the Buddha's teachings or the rejection of a particular text as having been spoken by the Buddha. It is considered a grave sin, often appended, especially in East Asia, to the list of the five most heinous sins in Buddhism: killing one's father, killing one's mother, killing an arhat, wounding the Buddha, and causing dissension in the saṃgha. These “deeds of immediate retribution” result in rebirth in Avīci, the most horrible of the hells, upon death in the lifetime in which the deed is done (hence “immediate retribution”). Nichiren gave new meaning to the phrase “slandering the dharma”: it meant devotion to any Buddhist text other than the Lotus Sūtra. As he wrote, “One who discards even a single character or dot [of the Lotus Sūtra] commits an offense greater than killing his father and mother a thousand or ten thousand times over or drawing blood from the bodies of the Buddhas of the ten directions.”10
Those disciples of the Buddha who practiced his other teachings prior to his revelation of the Lotus Sūtra at the end of his life were not guilty of the crime; nor were those who lived in lands where the Lotus Sūtra had not yet appeared. But in Japan, in a time long after the Buddha taught the Lotus Sūtra and in a place where the Lotus Sūtra was well known, the other forms of Buddhism, which in Nichiren's view were all provisional teachings, had no purpose. It was now time for all of them to dissolve into the great ocean of the Lotus Sūtra, so thoroughly that even their names would be forgotten. Thus, all those who failed to abandon other forms of Buddhism—and in some of his writings this seemed to include the entire population of Japan—were guilty of the sin of slandering the dharma and were destined for rebirth in the Avīci hell. Indeed, Nichiren wrote that anyone who failed to denounce those who slander the dharma would be unable to achieve enlightenment, even if they had copied the Lotus Sūtra ten thousand times or mastered the profound contemplation of “three thousand realms in a single moment of thought.”11
In Indian Buddhism, there had been the idea that the monarch and the kingdom benefit from their support of Buddhist monks, the notion being that by providing material support for the saṃgha (as long as it is composed of monks who scrupulously keep their vows), the state would generate great merit, creating a kind of force field that would protect the land and its people, both from natural disasters such as earthquakes, droughts, and epidemics and from invading armies. This view, found in a number of Mahāyāna sūtras, became especially important in China, where it was even given a name: “state protection Buddhism” (huguo fojiao); apocryphal sūtras, such as the Sūtra for Humane Kings (Renwang jing), were composed to promote it, and rituals to protect the state were regularly commissioned by the emperor. The idea also became influential in Korea and Japan. Indeed, when new forms of Buddhism were imported from China to Japan, their advocates often promoted their powers to protect the state. When the monk Eisai first presented Zen to Japan's rulers, he did not extol it as a special transmission outside the scriptures able to bestow sudden enlightenment; he wrote a treatise in 1198 entitled The Promotion of Zen for National Defense (Kōzen gokokuron).
Thus, when Nichiren claimed that Japan's tumultuous present and perilous future were the direct result of the country's failure to uphold the Lotus Sūtra, he was engaging in a well-established tradition of Buddhist discourse. What was unusual was not so much the message but the medium. Nichiren adopted an approach called shakubuku in Japanese, a word translated somewhat euphemistically as “conversion.” The two characters literally mean “break” and “subdue” and refer to a vociferous form of denunciation in which another person's wrong views are directly attacked and repudiated. Nichiren contrasted this with a more gentle form of conversion, called shōju, literally “embrace and receive,” in which others were gently led by stages to embrace the teachings of the Buddha by first setting forth the provisional teachings. For Nichiren, who saw shōju in Chapter Fourteen (“Ease of Practice”) of the Lotus, such an approach was suitable when teaching those who had no knowledge of Buddhism, as had been the case in the period of the true dharma and the period of the semblance dharma. However, this was the final age of the dharma, where those to be converted were not ignorant of Buddhism. Instead, they were active proponents of its provisional forms, forms that were no longer valid when the definitive and final truth of the Lotus Sūtra had long been revealed. Hence they were slanderers of the dharma. In such a setting, shakubuku, which Nichiren saw in Chapter Twenty of the sūtra (“Bodhisattva Sadāparibhūta”), was the only proper approach.
And so he did not mince words. A statement commonly attributed to him is “Nembutsu followers will fall into the Avīci hell, Zen followers are devils, Shingon will destroy the nation, the Ritsu are enemies of the state.”12 Such statements would get Nichiren into serious trouble, including assassination attempts, exile, and a death sentence, trouble that in many ways he would welcome. He wrote that he was the greatest man in Japan because he was the man in Japan most hated and persecuted for his devotion to the Lotus Sūtra.13
Nonetheless, from Nichiren's perspective, shakubuku was a compassionate act. It is standard Mahāyāna doctrine that, in working for the welfare of others, the bodhisattva not only benefits sentient beings but speeds his own path to buddhahood. The many forms of self-sacrifice in the jātaka tales, the stories of the Buddha's former lives, reiterate this again and again, as Prince Mahāsattva throws himself off a cliff so that his corpse can feed a starving tigress and her cubs, as King Śibi cuts off his own flesh to save the life of a dove, as Prince Vessantara gives away his children and then his wife. For Nichiren, during the final age, salvation comes only through the Lotus Sūtra. In order to cause others to recognize this most crucial fact, harsh methods must be used to convince the confused, regardless of their social stature. If the devotee must suffer as a result of what Nichiren regarded as the most vital case of speaking truth to power, that suffering will incinerate negative karma accrued in the past and thus hasten one's own enlightenment. Nichiren would often describe his own rejections and punishments in these terms, calling such trials shikidoku, “reading [the Lotus Sūtra] with the body.”
At the end of Chapter Thirteen, the Buddha predicts that after he passes into nirvāṇa, the devotees of the Lotus Sūtra will suffer all manner of indignities, being reviled, maligned, slandered, and beaten with sticks and swords. Nichiren declared that the Buddha made these prophecies specifically about him and that if these prophecies had not come true in the form of Nichiren's travails, the Buddha's prediction would have been false. There is great power in discovering one's own story in a sacred text.
Denouncing both Pure Land and Zen in Kamakura, Nichiren made enemies, but he also began to win followers. There he wrote his famous Treatise on the Establishment of Righteousness for the Peace of the Nation (Risshō ankokuron), presented in the form of a dialogue between a traveler and a master, with the master presenting Nichiren's view. In the treatise, which he sent to the powerful former regent Hōjō Tokiyori in 1260, Nichiren displays an impressive command of Buddhist literature on the question of the true causes of natural disasters. He encourages the country's rulers to rely on the teachings of the Lotus Sūtra in order to avert disaster and upheaval, including the conquest of Japan by the same Mongol hordes that had recently conquered China and Korea. The work contains a detailed attack on Hōnen and his teachings and implies that the various calamities (pestilence and famine) that had afflicted Japan in the recent past were the result of the government's patronage of other Buddhist sects, sects that Nichiren considered heretical. This did not go over well. A group of devotees of Hōnen attempted to murder Nichiren. Others petitioned the government to arrest and imprison him; Nichiren was arrested and exiled to the Izu Peninsula in 1261 but was pardoned two years later. He resumed his campaign after being wounded in another assassination attempt.
When word came that the Mongols were threatening to invade, the government instructed the major Buddhist temples to perform rituals for the protection of Japan. Nichiren sent letters to various officials, as well as to some of the temples, telling them that rituals performed by such heretics would only speed the invasion, that protection of the islands should be entrusted to him. This led to further charges against him by other Buddhist groups. When he was arrested, he told the soldiers, “I, Nichiren, am the pillar, sun, moon, mirror, and eyes of the ruling clan of Kantō.” When he was brought to trial, he freely admitted that he thought that those Buddhist temples that did not extol the Lotus Sūtra should be burned down and that their head monks should be beheaded. Nichiren was again sentenced to exile, not in nearby Izu but on remote, and cold, Sado Island, off the western coast of Honshu near Niigata. This was the public sentence, but it was apparently decided that he would be executed en route. Under the cover of darkness, guards took him to the execution grounds of Kamakura, ominously called Tatsunokuchi or “Dragon's Mouth.” According to the story, as the executioner raised his sword to behead Nichiren, a brilliant orb of light flashed across the sky, terrifying the guards. At that moment, horsemen arrived carrying a reprieve of the death sentence. Today, the site of Nichiren's divine salvation is the temple Ryūkōji, where pilgrims can see the cell in which Nichiren was held and the spot where he knelt to be beheaded. It is a place of pilgrimage not only for the miraculous event but for Nichiren's understanding of it. He would write that he was in fact beheaded that night, that his body died, and that it was his soul that had traveled to Sado Island, where he would spend the next three years.
Arriving there in the dead of winter in 1271, Nichiren was told to live in a dilapidated hut in a graveyard. Sado Island was considered the most brutal of the several places in Japan where enemies of the state were exiled; those sent there were not expected to return. But Nichiren remained unbowed. He wrote in a letter shortly after his arrival, “When an evil ruler in consort with priests of erroneous teachings tries to destroy the correct teaching and do away with a man of wisdom, those with the heart of a lion king are sure to attain buddhahood. Like Nichiren, for example. I say this not out of arrogance, but because I am deeply committed to the correct teaching.”14
Sado Island was the place where several of Nichiren's major works were written. He was a sophisticated exegete and was well versed, not only in the Buddhist canon but in the Chinese classics and the great Chinese Buddhist commentaries. From these, he inherited the notion of immanence, expressed in the doctrines of original enlightenment, the three thousand realms in a single thought, and the eternal Buddha as revealed in the last half of the Lotus Sūtra. As we have seen, there was already a highly developed tradition in China of commenting at length on the title of the Lotus Sūtra, finding deep meaning in each of the five characters. Nichiren would assert that the entire meaning and purpose of the sūtra was present in its title, such that one need only chant it in order to achieve buddhahood.
It was during his time on Sado Island, on the twenty-fifth day of the fourth month, 1273, that Nichiren would complete what would come to be regarded as his most important work, the Kanjin honzon shō. Its full title is Nyorai metsugo go gohyakusai shi kanjin honzon shō (Contemplation of the Mind and the Object of Worship First Revealed in the Fifth of the Five Five-Hundred-Year Periods Following the Nirvāṇa of the Tathāgata). Central to his argument is Zhiyi's doctrine of the “three thousand realms in one moment of thought” (ichinen sanzen), discussed in the previous chapter, according to which all things are present in a single moment of thought as elements of an interdependent reality. Nichiren goes to some lengths to explain why such an important teaching does not appear clearly in the Indian canon. He says that it had only been understood by three people in history up to that point: Śākyamuni Buddha, Zhiyi himself, and the Japanese Tendai founder Saichō. The great Indian masters Nagārjuna and Vasubandhu knew about it but did not mention it in their writings. And Nichiren concedes that it is only taught between the lines of the Lotus Sūtra and only in the second half: “The Lord Teacher of the second section is not Śākyamuni, the World-honored One, who attained enlightenment in his historical life. The teaching of the Buddha is as different from that given in the first section as heaven is different from earth. In the world of the eternal Śākyamuni Buddha, eternal life is also given not only to the living beings of the ten realms but also to the world itself. Therefore, we can say that the teaching of ‘three thousand realms in one moment of thought’ is expounded between the lines of the main part of the second section.”15
Nichiren understood the radical implications of “three thousand realms in one moment of thought” for Buddhist practice. Those things that are so commonly seen as mutually exclusive—cause and effect, subject and object, an enlightened buddha and a benighted sentient being, a pure buddha field and an impure human world—are in fact mutually inclusive, simultaneous, and present in each moment of thought. All of this is clear in the works of Zhiyi. However, Nichiren called this “three thousand realms in one moment of thought in principle.” He would teach “three thousand realms in one moment of thought in actuality.”
One of Nichiren's innovations was to argue that sentient beings living in the final age of the dharma were incapable of understanding “three thousand realms in one moment of thought” and incapable of practicing the “contemplation of mind,” the form of meditation that Zhiyi had set forth. For Nichiren, a different method of contemplation was required. It was chanting the daimoku, the great title, Namu myōhō renge kyō, “Homage to the Lotus Sūtra.” As we saw in the previous chapter, Zhiyi had extracted great meaning from the title of the sūtra, a tradition continued in Japanese Tendai. There had long been a practice of chanting the title in Japan. However, Nichiren infused the title of the Lotus Sūtra with particular power and particular meaning. As he writes at the end of the Kanjin honzon shō, “For those unable to discern the three thousand realms in one thought-moment, the Buddha, arousing great compassion, wrapped up this jewel within the five characters and hung it from the necks of the immature beings of the last age.”16
For Nichiren, those five characters (in Chinese and Japanese) contain within them all the practices that Śākyamuni undertook over the long bodhisattva path and all of the qualities he possessed after his achievement of buddhahood. Nichiren writes, “To impose my own interpretation may slight the original texts, but the heart of these passages is that Śākyamuni's causal practices and their resulting virtues are perfectly encompassed in the five characters myō hō ren ge kyō. When we embrace these five characters, he will naturally transfer to us the merits of his causes and effects.”17 As a consequence, those who chant the daimoku are able to achieve buddhahood in this lifetime, their world transformed into a buddha field.
The Display of the Land of Bliss, the central text for the “Pure Land” traditions of East Asia, describes a buddha of the distant past named Lokeśvararāja, living in a distant universe, who taught a monk named Dharmākara. This monk would go on to achieve buddhahood as Amitābha and establish his pure land, far to the west, called Sukhāvatī. But Śākyamuni had achieved buddhahood in our world, he had taught the dharma in our world, and he made his buddha field in our world, in this sahā world, on Vulture Peak in India, where he taught the Lotus Sūtra and where he still abides. Nichiren taught that through upholding the Lotus Sūtra and specifically by reciting its title, one can understand—again because of the implications of “three thousand worlds in a single moment of thought”—that this sahā world is a buddha field: “Now the Sahā world of the original time [of the Buddha's enlightenment] is the constantly abiding pure land, freed from the three disasters and transcending [the cycle of] the four kalpas [formation, abiding, decline, and nothingness]. Its buddha has not already entered nirvāṇa in the past, nor is he to be born in the future. And his disciples are the same.”18 For Nichiren, this holds true for even the least among us; even they will be reborn among the eternal audience on Vulture Peak after their death. As stated in an essay attributed to him, The Ten Suchnesses (Jūnyoze ji):
Those of lesser faculties do not advance in any way and seem to be blocked, yet because enlightenment is certain within this lifetime, when such a person approaches the hour of death, then—just as one wakens from the various dreams that have appeared to him and returns to the waking state—the twisted logic and the false conceptualizations and distorted ideas of birth and death that he has held until this moment will vanish without a trace, and he will return to the waking reality of original enlightenment. Gazing around at the universe [dharma realm], he will see that it is all the Buddha's Land of Tranquil Light, and that his own person, which he has habitually despised as base, is the tathāgata of original enlightenment endowed with the three bodies in one.19
It was also in the Kanjin honzon shō that Nichiren described the importance of the honzon (object of devotion), the calligraphic representation of the scene at Vulture Peak when the entire assembly rises into the air to view Śākyamuni and Prabhūtaratna seated side by side in the stūpa. Again, because “three thousand realms in a single moment of thought” collapses the duality of mind and matter, a physical object, in this case Nichiren's representation of the scene, is the manifestation of Śākyamuni's eternal buddhahood and thus is the object of the meditator's contemplation. The daimoku is the meditator's mind; the honzon is the object of contemplation. As Nichiren describes it:
Above the sahā world of the original teacher [Śākyamuni], the jeweled stūpa resides in empty space, and within the stūpa, Śākyamuni Buddha and the buddha Prabhūtaratna appear to the left and right of myōhō renge kyō. Śākyamuni is attended by Viśiṣṭacāritra and the others of the four bodhisattvas [leading those who emerged from the earth], while four bodhisattvas [of the provisional teachings] including Mañjuśrī and Maitreya take lower seats as retainers. All the bodhisattvas of the great and lesser vehicles, whether they are disciples of the Buddha in his provisional forms or have come from other worlds, are like commoners on the ground gazing up at lofty nobles. The various buddhas of the ten directions likewise remain on the ground, showing that they and their lands are provisional traces [of the original buddha and his land].20
The honzon also includes other bodhisattvas and śrāvakas who appear in the sūtra, as well as various deities, including the Japanese gods Amaterasu and Hachiman. Two historical figures also appear, Zhiyi and Saichō, the Chinese and Japanese founders of the Tiantai and Tendai, the sects that esteem the Lotus Sūtra above all others.
Nichiren began making these honzon (which he also called daimandara or “great maṇḍala”), of slightly varying design, for his followers during his exile on Sado Island and would continue to make them for the rest of his life; more than a hundred survive. At the bottom he would write, “This is the great maṇḍala never before revealed in Jambudvīpa during the more than 2,200 years since the Buddha's nirvāṇa.”21
These would be installed on altars as objects of particular devotion in the centuries that followed. However, Nichiren also advocated the use of other icons, including representations of Śākyamuni (or Śākyamuni and Prabhūtaratna) attended by the four leaders of the bodhisattvas who emerged from the earth. Indeed, after his death, his followers would be divided as to whether Nichiren's great maṇḍala or a statue of the eternal Buddha should form the focus of worship of the Lotus Sūtra.
For Nichiren, the second half of the sūtra is a special teaching for those living in the final age, not for those living in an age of the distant past. It is a special teaching for those living in this sahā world, not in a faraway universe. And it is a special teaching for bodhisattvas of this world; the Buddha entrusted it to the bodhisattvas who emerged from the earth of our world, bodhisattvas who are superior to such famous bodhisattvas as Mañjuśrī, Maitreya, and Avalokiteśvara, who are not competent to teach the true dharma during the final age. He notes that at the beginning of Chapter Fifteen, the bodhisattvas who have arrived from other worlds offer to preserve the Lotus Sūtra after the Buddha has passed into nirvāṇa. However, the Buddha declines their offer, saying that there are ample bodhisattvas in this sahā world capable of doing so. It is at that point that the bodhisattvas emerge from the earth. Nichiren interprets this to mean that the bodhisattvas in the assembly at the beginning of the sūtra and the bodhisattvas who arrived from other worlds are not capable of teaching the five characters of the title of the Lotus Sūtra, the essence of the second half of the sūtra, during the final age. Only the bodhisattvas who emerged from the earth of this world in order to hear the second half of the sūtra can do so.22
Nichiren would further specify that the recent natural disasters in Japan had not been omens of doom but, rather, harbingers of a new age, when the bodhisattvas who had emerged from the earth would appear in Japan to proclaim the message of the Lotus Sūtra. They would be led by the bodhisattva Viśiṣṭacāritra, appearing in Japan in the form of Nichiren himself:
[This object of worship was not previously revealed] because it was entrusted to the countless bodhisattvas from the earth. Having received the Buddha's command, they have been waiting near at hand beneath the great earth. They did not appear in the True or Semblance [dharma ages], but if they failed to appear now, in the Final Dharma age, they would be great liars, and the prophecies of the three buddhas [Śākyamuni, Prabhūtaratna, and the emanation buddhas], mere empty froth. In this light, we should consider the great earthquake, comet, and other recent disasters, such as never occurred in the True and Semblance [dharma ages]. These are not the activities of garuḍas, asuras, or dragon deities; they can only be signs heralding the advent of the four great bodhisattvas.23
Among Nichiren's most important innovations, therefore, was his vision of the Lotus Sūtra, an Indian text, as uniquely intended for his time, his country, and his person. His period of Japanese history—with many, and competing, visions of the true Buddhist path—was an ideal setting for the Lotus Sūtra because there were so many heretics to be rebuked and converted. Thus, although it was the time of the decline of the dharma, this was not a reason for despair and self-denigration because enlightenment was no longer possible in this world. It was a time of celebration. The fact that the Buddha waited until the last period of his life to reveal the true teaching meant that the final period of the dharma was the perfect time for its realization. Japan was the ideal setting for the epochal event, the transformation of a land filled with heretics and strife, abandoned by its own gods, into the pure land on earth revealed in Chapter Sixteen of the Lotus Sūtra.
This transformation would not be possible without the kind of preacher of the dharma that the Buddha had described in Chapter Nineteen. Thus, it was also in works written during his Sado Island exile that Nichiren inserted himself into the narrative of the Lotus Sūtra, seeing in his persecution the fulfillment of the Lotus Sūtra's prophecies of how after the Buddha's passage into nirvāṇa the preachers of the dharma would be mocked and beaten; Nichiren had been mocked just as Sadāparibhūta had been. Such suffering, however, required a karmic explanation. As he wrote in a later work, “In the past, we opposed practitioners of the true Dharma. Now we have come to embrace it ourselves, but because of the offense of having hindered others [in the practice] in the past, we should by rights fall into a great hell in the future. However, because the merit of practicing the true Dharma in this life is powerful, the great sufferings of the future are summoned [into the present] and encountered in lessened form.”24 That is, in the past, he had been a slanderer of the dharma, creating negative karma that would have condemned him to hell. However, because he later came to recognize the truth of the Lotus Sūtra, the negative karma has been diluted, taking the form of sufferings in the human realm.
However, Nichiren's new sense of identity also had a triumphant element. It was also on Sado Island that he began to identify closely with Viśiṣṭacāritra, leader of the bodhisattvas who had emerged from the earth and the one who had vowed to Śākyamuni that he would protect the Lotus Sūtra in the future.
Sado Island is relatively large, some three hundred square miles, and it had its own Buddhist temples. The local priests, followers of the Pure Land teachings that Nichiren so despised, were no match for his erudition and eloquence, and he gained many followers there. One reason for his pardon in 1274 was that the local priests requested that he be removed, describing him as a madman who went to the peak of the highest mountain and screamed at the sky. By the time Nichiren returned to Kamakura, it was believed that a Mongol invasion was imminent, and he was requested to perform rituals to repel the invaders. Nichiren explained that such rituals would not be effective until the government stopped commissioning other Buddhist sects to perform similar rites, something it was reluctant to do.
Nichiren left the city and established himself on Mount Minobu, about one hundred miles west of Kamakura. The tall mountain was a symbol for him of Vulture Peak, where the Lotus Sūtra had been preached. Despite the remote location and difficult living conditions, he made this his center, attracting disciples and continuing to write. The long-feared Mongol invasions came, first in 1274 and again in 1281. Each time the enemy ships were destroyed by typhoons, which the Japanese called divine winds (kamikaze). The various Buddhist sects that had performed rituals to protect Japan were able to claim victory. Nichiren died in 1282 at the age of sixty-one.
It is easy to suppose that because of the drama of his life and the eloquence of his words, Nichiren permanently established exclusive rights to the Lotus Sūtra and its meaning. This was not the case. By the usual measures of power in Buddhism—royal patronage—Nichiren had been a failure. Even the schools that he had excoriated continued to read, comment upon, and pay homage to the Lotus Sūtra. Nichiren's contemporary Dōgen (1200–1263) of the hated Zen sect cited the Lotus Sūtra more than any other sūtra in his voluminous oeuvre, devoting a chapter to it in his Shōbōgenzō, where he writes, “Compared with this sūtra, all the other sūtras are merely its servants, its relatives, for it alone expounds the truth.”25 It is said that in his final days he would pace around his room, which he had named Lotus Sūtra Hermitage, reciting passages from Chapter Twenty-One, “The Transcendent Powers of the Tathāgata.”26 The Zen master Hakuin (1687–1768, known in the West for coining the kōan “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”) wrote about his disillusionment at age sixteen at finding nothing extraordinary in the Lotus Sūtra after hearing it praised so highly during his childhood: “If this sūtra had all these virtues, then surely the six Confucian classics and the books of the other schools must be equally effective. Why should this particular sūtra be so highly praised? My hopes were completely dashed.”27 But sixteen years later, after an experience of awakening, he wrote, “One night, after some time, I took up the Lotus Sūtra. Suddenly I penetrated to the perfect, true, ultimate meaning of the Lotus. The doubts I had held initially were destroyed and I became aware that the understanding I had obtained up to then was greatly in error. Unconsciously I uttered a great cry and burst into tears.”28
But Hakuin was writing in the eighteenth century. Nichiren's mission would continue to that time and beyond. Before his death, he assigned six of his disciples to propagate his teachings in their respective regions of Japan. Disputes arose almost immediately over a number of issues, including whether offerings should be made to local gods by lay disciples of Nichiren, who were often powerful noblemen. Nichiren had said that the gods had abandoned Japan because the nation had abandoned the Lotus Sūtra. The opponents of offerings therefore said that to make offerings at Shinto shrines was futile because the gods were absent. Proponents of offerings said that the gods would return to accept offerings of devotees of the Lotus.29 The former group, led by the monk Nikkō (1245–1332), feeling that Nichiren's teachings were being ignored, departed from Mount Minobu and established itself at the foot of Mount Fuji. In the realm of relations with the laity, the question of the proper attitude toward the local gods, whose worship was such an important part of Japanese village life, remained a point of contention, with some creating a list of thirty gods and assigning each the responsibility of protecting the Lotus Sūtra during one day of the lunar month.
For the content of the Lotus Sūtra itself, two factions remained: those who held that the two halves of the sūtra were of equal value (called itchi) and those who held that the latter half was superior to the former half (called shōretsu). This latter group in turn split into several groups, divided over what parts of the second half of the sūtra were superior to the first half. Some held that it was the entire second half; others held that it was only that portion of the eight chapters of the second half when the assembly is levitating above Vulture Peak; yet others thought that it was Chapter Sixteen, on the lifespan of the Tathāgata alone; and yet others added to Chapter Sixteen the last half of Chapter Fifteen and the first half of Chapter Seventeen.30
Disagreements would also arise over the identity of Nichiren himself. Many of his later disciples identified him with Viśiṣṭacāritra, the leader of the bodhisattvas who rose out of the earth in Chapter Fifteen and to whom, in Chapter Twenty-Two, the Buddha had entrusted the Lotus Sūtra after his passage into nirvāṇa. The Fuji sect (which in the twentieth century would rename itself Nichiren Shōshū, the “Orthodox Nichiren School”) noted that what Nichiren called the “three great secret doctrines” (sandai hihō)—the honzon or object of devotion, the daimoku or great title, and the kaidan or platform (to be discussed in chapter 6)—do not explicitly appear in the Lotus Sūtra. Rather than being seen, therefore, as Nichiren's innovations, they were seen as in fact prior to the Lotus Sūtra and thus the teachings not of Śākyamuni but of the original and eternal Buddha (referred to as Hon'inmyō no kyōju, “Master of the Teaching of the True Cause,” and as Musa no honbutsu, the “Unproduced Original Buddha”), who appeared in India as the bodhisattva Viśiṣṭacāritra and in Japan as Nichiren himself.31 It is this buddha who was the teacher of Śākyamuni and who is the buddha of the period of the final dharma, a time when the teachings of Śākyamuni are no longer effective. Indeed, Śākyamuni's purpose for appearing in the world was to reveal to the world the existence of the Buddha of the True Cause, that is, Nichiren.
Regardless of their position on Nichiren's true identity, many sought to emulate the founder in the practice of shakubuku, regardless of the consequences. The third-century Christian theologian Tertullian argued in works such as Scorpiace (Antidote for the Scorpion's Sting) and De Fuga in Persecutione (On Running from Persecution) that martyrdom is commanded by God and must be faced. Nichiren argued that the devotee of the Lotus Sūtra must suffer great hardship, as he himself had done. And like early Christian martyrs who actively sought martyrdom and taunted Roman soldiers as they were tortured, followers of Nichiren continued the practice of shakubuku even when threatened with punishment, ready to die for the Lotus Sūtra.32 Particularly famous was the monk Nisshin (1407–1488), who, while awaiting execution, took the bamboo saw that was to be used for his beheading and began banging it on the floor of his cell. When the executioner asked what he was doing, he said, “If you cut off my head with a sharp swordlike blade such as this, it will be altogether too easy. Because my life will be discarded solely in the order that I may offer my body to the Lotus Sūtra and widely benefit others, I would wish the suffering to be longer and more intense. That is why I am trying to dull this sharp blade.”33 His life was spared, but a red-hot pot was placed over his head, and the tip of his tongue was cut off. Thereafter, his shakubuku was delivered with a lisp.
Despite its various schisms, in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, the several Nichiren sects and subsects began to grow, swelled in part by the rule that when one member of a family converted, the entire family and servants must also convert. Many merchant families converted, so that by the early sixteenth century much of the population of Kyoto—especially among the merchants, artisans, and samurai who lived in the southern half of the capital—were supporters of some twenty-one Nichiren temples based in the city. This was a time when many of the major Buddhist monasteries in the city had their own armies of warrior monks (sōhei), augmented by merchant militias in times of conflict. The period from 1532 to 1536 saw the so-called Hokke ikki or “Lotus [Sūtra] rebellions.”
With the growing inability of the Ashikaga shoguns to maintain order, locally based leagues (ikki) sought to assert their interests, often by force. In these struggles, different social groups often had different religious affiliations: the Ikkō (Jōdo Shinshū) forces represented farmers, the Tendai stronghold on Mount Hiei represented the old landed aristocracy, and the Nichiren Hokkeshū (“Lotus Sect”) represented the city's merchant class.34 With temples sometimes serving also as fortresses, they became targets of attacks and counterattacks. After Ikkō forces attacked the Nichiren temple Kenponji in the port city of Sakai and burned Kōfukuji in Nara, rumor spread that Kyoto was next. Preparing to defend the capital, Nichiren forces allied themselves with the shogunal deputy Hosokawa Harumoto and attacked the Ikkō stronghold at the Yamashina Mido (Yamashina Honganji).
The Hokkeshū governed Kyoto until 1536, when a conflict took place between the Nichiren and Tendai armies; one of the points of contention was which deserved to call itself Hokkeshū, the “Lotus [Sūtra] school.” According to traditional accounts, it all began with an argument.
A lay devotee of Nichiren, named Matsumoto Shinsaemon Hisayoshi, was sightseeing in Kyoto when he heard a Tendai priest giving a lecture on how one can become a buddha through the recitation of mantras. (As noted above, the Tendai school in Japan, although originally focused on the Lotus Sūtra, also included elements of esoteric Buddhism that its founder, Saichō, had brought from China.) After listening for some time, Matsumoto began interrupting, perhaps heckling, the Tendai monk, asking why a devotee of the Lotus Sūtra, as all Tendai monks must be, would be teaching something other than the Lotus Sūtra. This led to an extended debate, which Matsumoto apparently won. Angered by Matsumoto's rudeness and chagrined by his apparent victory, the Tendai monks sought revenge.
There had been years of violence and animosity between the Nichiren and Tendai factions, and there were many points of contention beyond a doctrinal dispute. At the end of five days of fighting between tens of thousands of warrior monks, all twenty-one of the Nichiren temples had been destroyed by Tendai troops (allied with local aristocracy), and the southern district of Kyoto, the Nichiren stronghold, had been destroyed by fire.35
But alliances could shift rapidly. Many Tendai monks joined the Nichiren temples (or lineages) when their headquarters on Mount Hiei was burned to the ground (and thousands of monks were slaughtered) by thirty thousand troops of the shogun Oda Nobunaga in 1571, some of whom were armed with the newly introduced harquebus. No longer the persecuted minority, the Nichiren sects faced the question of how to relate to the other Buddhist sects and how to relate to the state. Should they continue to denounce other Buddhist sects as slanderers of the dharma? Should they continue to admonish the ruler (kokka kangyō) to uphold the Lotus Sūtra and reject all others?36 Some of the temples developed the doctrine of fuju fuse (literally, “no giving, no receiving”), in which Nichiren monks refused to participate in state rituals with monks of other sects and refused to perform ceremonies (such as funerals and memorial rites) for patrons who were not devotees of the Lotus Sūtra. Followers of fuju fuse would be persecuted for centuries, with the doctrine eventually being outlawed in 1669, not to be legalized until 1876.
In the nineteenth century, and especially after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, a number of so-called new religions began to appear in Japan. The reasons for their appearance are debated by scholars; the significant changes in Japan, and the attendant social and political upheaval, are commonly cited, a point supported by the fact that so many of the new religions arose in the period of 1920–1970, the period leading up to and following World War II. The new religions vary greatly in their origins, beliefs, and practices. Most, however, were lay organizations, without an ordained priesthood, and many gave a leading role to (and some were founded by) women. Some derived, either directly or indirectly, from Shinto and Japanese folk religion; others derived from Buddhism. Among those that derived from Buddhism, by far the most important scripture was the Lotus Sūtra.37
One of the most important of these new religions is Reiyūkai, the Society of Companions of the Spirits, founded in 1925 by Kubo Kakutarō (1892–1944) and his sister-in-law Kotani Kimi (1901–1971). On September 1, 1923, Kubo was reading the passage in Chapter Two of the Lotus Sūtra that says, “In the troubled worlds of the five kinds of defilement, sentient beings are only attached to various desires, and ultimately do not seek the path of the buddhas. In the future the impure will hear the Buddha teach the single vehicle, but they will be confused and not accept it. They will reject the dharma and fall into troubled states of being” (46–47). At that moment, the earth began to tremble. It was the Great Kanto Earthquake, which devastated much of Tokyo and claimed more than 140,000 lives. Like Nichiren, Kubo believed that natural disasters were the direct result of the sins of the Japanese people. However, he did not ascribe this only, as Nichiren had, to the general neglect of the Lotus Sūtra; he had a more specific explanation.
The Lotus Sūtra makes reference to the “five kinds of defilement.” This is one of the standard Buddhist lists, appearing often in descriptions of the degeneration of the world in the period after the Buddha's passage into nirvāṇa. Also translated as the “five degradations,” they are (1) the degradation of the life span, because the human life span becomes shorter; (2) the degradation of views, because wrong views are rampant; (3) the degradation of afflictions, because negative emotions such as desire and hatred become stronger; (4) the degradation of sentient beings, because the beings of the world become mentally and physically weaker; and (5) the degradation of the age, because the world and the environment decline.
Throughout the history of the tradition, the establishment of Buddhism in a country was marked by the founding of the first monastery and the ordination of the first local males as monks; the presence of Buddhism is traditionally marked by the presence of monks, and the absence of Buddhism was marked by their disappearance. Indian prophecies of the disappearance of the dharma often refer to the saffron robes of Buddhist monks turning white, the color of a layman's robes in ancient India. The disappearance of the distinction between a monk and a layman is typically depicted as a sign of the end-time and a reason for despair. For Kubo, it was a call to action.
The status of the monk had already changed significantly in Japan. In 1872, the new Meiji government had issued a decree that allowed monks to marry, to eat meat, to grow their hair, to use their family name (rather than their ordination name), and to wear lay dress except when performing ceremonies.38 Nonetheless, these monks (typically referred to in English as “priests” because they no longer kept the monastic vow of celibacy) continued to perform (as they do today) ceremonies, especially ceremonies for the dead, which provided their chief source of income.
The doctrinal basis for the performance of funerals had a long and venerable pedigree. One of the most famous stories in Buddhism tells of the monk Maudgalyāyana, foremost in magical powers among the Buddha's disciples. He goes out in search of his departed mother, finding her reborn as a hungry ghost. When he tries to feed her a handful of rice, it turns into flaming coals. When he asked the Buddha why this happened, the Buddha replies that no one, not even an eminent monk, is able to offer food to their departed ancestors. Instead, offerings must be made to monks, who would then transfer the merit of the virtuous deed into sustenance for the departed.39 The community of monks, therefore, was long seen, from the time of Buddhism in India, as the only effective conduit for the “transfer of merit.” And Japanese monks, often with royal sponsorship, had performed rites for the transfer of merit based on the Lotus Sūtra (a tradition they had inherited from China) since the ninth century.40
However, Kubo believed that Japanese monks no longer deserved the offerings of the laity; their abandonment of celibacy and vegetarianism had rendered them unworthy and impotent. Indeed, he was quite critical of the Buddhist clergy, saying that they served no purpose apart from guarding the bones of the dead (typically interred on the grounds of Buddhist temples).41 He thought that temples should be turned into kindergartens. (In this he displayed a gift of prophecy; in the late twentieth century, many Buddhist temples, unable to support themselves entirely on funerary rites, opened day care centers.)
In this degenerate age, the ancestors were not receiving offerings and instead were being reborn in hell or as ghosts that haunted the nation, leading to political, social, and personal disharmony. It was therefore necessary in the degenerate age for family members, those with direct lineal ties to the dead, to take responsibility for their salvation, including the performance of funerals. Kubo instructed his followers to keep a death registry, not only of the husband's family but also of the wife's family and of family friends. He further instructed his followers to give posthumous names to their departed ancestors. As part of the traditional Japanese funeral ceremony, the deceased is ritually ordained as a monk or nun and given an ordination name. This ceremony, and the naming, is traditionally done by a Buddhist priest, who is paid for his services. Kubo wished to take that grave responsibility away from the priests and give it to his lay followers.
Indeed, one of the innovations of Reiyūkai is that the new name is given by the family members, with no need for a priest. Through the family members' recitation of a selection of passages from the Lotus Sūtra (to which are added prayers for the transfer of merit and for repentance—assembled in what is called the Blue Sūtra because of its blue cover) as well as the recitation of its sacred title, the ancestors not only are saved but are able to achieve buddhahood. It was then that they would have the power, and the inclination, to protect the people and nation of Japan. This is not the only benefit, however. Through repentance, the recitation of the Lotus, and proselytizing others to do so, one's own sins will be purified, and peace will reign throughout the nation, transforming Japan into a buddha field.
Yet danger still loomed. Like Nichiren, Kubo felt that the majesty of the royal family derived from its long devotion to the Lotus Sūtra and argued that that devotion must continue if Japan was to emerge victorious from the coming war. Writing in the 1930s, Kubo, also like Nichiren, believed that he lived at a pivotal moment in human history, a world plunged deep into the degenerate age yet poised to ascend to a millenarian transformation into a pure land on earth. Among Kubo's writings are such titles as The Lotus Sūtra in the Shōwa Era and the Bodhisattva Never Disparaging (Shōwa no Hokkekyō to Jōfukyō bosatsu) and The Buddha Never Dies (Hotoke wa messhitamawazu). In these works, he echoed the teachings of Nichiren that the present degenerate age was not a period of decline but a period of fulfillment, that the fact that the Buddha had made the Lotus Sūtra his final teaching meant that it was the appropriate teaching for the final age. For Kubo, this time corresponded specifically to the Meiji and Shōwa periods (from 1868 into the reign of Emperor Hirohito, that is, the present day for Kubo), a time when compulsory education had given everyone the ability to read the Lotus Sūtra, obviating the need for priests. Indeed, Kubo described this period of universal literacy, in which there was no longer a distinction between monk and layman, as the time of the “great undifferentiating wisdom.”
Kudo directed his appeal not simply to the Buddhist laity but to ordinary people, those who held menial positions and lacked the privileges of high position, whether in the government, business, or the academy. As he wrote, “If it is not a method that even a child of seven or eight can practice, then even human beings will not easily be saved, and advocating ‘great undifferentiating wisdom’ and so forth would be no more than a grand delusion. But since this practice was accomplished with ease by Sadāparibhūta in accordance with the words of the Buddha, it is finally time for the real thing. From now on ordinary people will have their own way.”42
One of the hallmarks of the degenerate age is said to be schisms in the Buddhist community. Despite their institutional freedom from the many traditional sects and subsects of Buddhism in Japan, schisms would also occur among the new religions; more than two dozen groups would branch off from Reiyūkai. In 1938, one of the leading evangelists of Reiyūkai, named Niwano Nikkyō (1906–1999), left the organization to found Risshō Kōsei Kai (“Society for Establishing Righteousness and Peaceful Relations”). Although he had initially been attracted to Reiyūkai when his infant daughter recovered from an illness after he began to practice its version of ancestor worship, he eventually left the group after he and another Reiyūkai follower, Naganuma Myōkō (1889–1957), were criticized for leading discussions of Lotus Sūtra doctrine. Again, we see the anxiety of the Lotus Sūtra. Is it impossible to understand (as the Buddha himself declares at the beginning of Chapter Two), such that its title need only be chanted? Or is there benefit to be derived from its study and analysis? Reiyūkai had its own explanation for Niwano's departure, saying that he left after being criticized for his excessive interest in divination. Indeed, Niwano's cofounder Naganuma Myōkō was a spirit medium who was able to commune with the departed ancestors who would be saved by their family members' devotion to the Lotus Sūtra. After her death in 1957, Niwano declared that the period of “skillful means” (here meaning reliance on spirit mediums) had ended and a new period of devotion to the Lotus Sūtra and to the eternal Śākyamuni had begun; the female cofounder had been relegated to the “trace” half, the first half, of the sūtra. Niwano's organization (he was succeeded by his son) would eventually come to exceed Reiyūkai in membership.
The most famous and successful of the Japanese new religions, however, was Sōka Gakkai, the “Value Creating Society,” to be discussed in chapter 6. But first, the Lotus Sūtra goes to Boston.