The Lotus Sūtra
in the Twentieth Century
CHAPTER 6
In 1868 in Japan, the shogun was deposed, and the emperor was restored to power. The Meiji government soon established a Shinto-inflected state ideology centered on the figure of a divine emperor. In the wake of government edicts that separated Buddhism and Shinto, violence erupted under the slogan “Abolish the Buddha, and destroy Śākyamuni [Buddha]” (haibutsu kishaku). Buddhism was attacked as a foreign and anachronistic institution riddled with corruption, a parasite on society, and a purveyor of superstition, blocking Japan's entry into the modern world. Thousands of Buddhist temples were closed, and thousands of monks were returned to lay life.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Buddhist intellectuals, reeling from these changes, strove to demonstrate the relevance of Buddhism to the interests of the Japanese nation by promoting a New Buddhism (shin Bukkyō) that was consistent with Japan's attempts to modernize and expand its realm. In these efforts, the various sects of Japanese Buddhism had to cooperate with each other, something that had not occurred in the many centuries of Buddhism in Japan. Despite Nichiren's famed disdain for other schools of Buddhism in Japan, there were devotees of the Lotus Sūtra who took part in these efforts. For example, Arai Nissatsu (1830–1888) creatively reread Nichiren's famous four declarations, which, we recall, were that Nembutsu followers will fall into the Avīci hell, Zen followers are devils, Shingon will destroy the nation, and the Ritsu are enemies of the state. By reading the characters in a different way—for example, zen literally means “contemplation,” avīci means “ceaseless,” and shingon means “true word”—he rendered the statement as “Because we contemplate the Buddha, ceaselessly devils are quieted; because our words are true, traitors who would destroy the nation are subdued.”1 Other devotees of Nichiren would insist on the more literal meaning.
One of the most visible efforts at cooperation took the form of the five-volume Essentials of the Buddhist Sects (Bukkyō kakushū kōyō), a joint work of the Bukkyō Kakushū Kyōkai, the “Buddhist Transectarian Committee.” This group also decided who would constitute the delegation to represent Japanese Buddhism at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 (where the Zen representative, Shaku Sōen, spoke not on the sound of one hand clapping but on the compatibility of Buddhism and science). The role of the followers of Nichiren in each of these endeavors is noteworthy.
A Nichiren priest, Honda Nisshō, was invited to provide a chapter on Nichiren for Essentials of the Buddhist Sects. The text that he submitted contained elements that were not particularly “trans-sectarian”; seeking to accurately represent the tenets of the founder, he included a discussion of Nichiren's famous “four statements” (about Pure Land leading to the Avīci hell, Zen being the work of the devil, etc.) as well as a discussion of “slandering the dharma” (of which, as we have seen, Nichiren accused all other Buddhist sects in Japan of being guilty). The editor-in-chief of the project rejected these two sections, causing Honda to go to court in an unsuccessful attempt to have the decision reversed, delaying the entire publication.2
Three of the editors of Essentials of the Buddhist Sects were also delegates to the Chicago parliament. The entire delegation was a group of six. There were four priests, representing Rinzai Zen (Shaku Sōen), Jōdo Shinshū (Yatsubuchi Bunryū), Tendai (Ashizu Jitsuzen), and Shingon (Toki Hōryū). There were also two laymen, the only members who spoke English, Noguchi Zenshirō and Hirai Kinzō. Noguchi was aligned with Jōdo Shinshū, and Hirai, with Zen; both were members of the Theosophical Society and had played major roles in Colonel Henry Olcott's visit to Japan in 1889. There was no Nichiren representative in the group.
Two Nichiren priests in Japan took it upon themselves to send a letter of protest to John Henry Barrows, the Chicago Presbyterian minister who was the chairman of the organizing committee. In the letter they explained that the teachings of Nichiren were the only true Buddhism and that members of other sects had no right to represent Buddhism at the parliament. They specifically condemned Jōdo Shinshū and Shingon. The letter was in Japanese, and so Barrows asked the Shingon representative to translate it for him, leading to letters being sent to Japan denouncing the Nichiren priests as ignorant fools.3
Although there was no Nichiren member in the official Japanese delegation, a Nichiren devotee named Kawai Yoshijirō was in attendance and listed in the program. Probably because of the letter from Japan, he was not allowed to address the parliament. A translation of his paper was, however, included in the massive two-volume record of the parliament produced by Barrows. Entitled “A Declaration of Faith and the Truth of Buddhism,” it begins, “In the Buddhist church of Japan there are some sixteen sects, which are again divided into over thirty sub-sects, but among these denominations the Nichiren School stands preeminent, owing to its teachings being founded on the true and most excellent doctrines of the Buddhist law as taught directly by the blessed one, Gautama Buddha.”4 The remainder of the essay is a fairly straightforward presentation of the famous “three secrets”: the honzon, the daimoku, and the kaidan (to be discussed below). Regarding the daimoku, Kawai remarks, “That Nichiren became enlightened shows that even the vulgar people of the Last Days of Law can get free from all evils and become Buddhas. To attempt to be a Nichiren ought to be the first motive of any one who believes in the doctrines of our sect.”5
The Meiji project of modernizing Japan extended to the military. Seeing much of Asia under the colonial domination of Europe and America, Japan was determined to avoid such a fate, quickly developing a large and formidable Western-style army (modeled on that of Prussia) and navy (modeled on that of Britain) that would not only defeat Chinese troops and briefly take control of Korea in 1895 but defeat the Russian army a decade later. Japan was not to be colonized; it would become a colonizer. The Buddhist sects of Japan were in general strongly supportive of these efforts, sending priests to serve as military chaplains. It seemed that the Lotus Sūtra was no longer needed to protect the nation from foreign invasion. Yet the Lotus Sūtra would be invoked often in the rise and fall of the Japanese Empire.
When Tanaka Chigaku (1861–1939) was studying to become a Nichiren priest at the sect's main seminary, he was alarmed to see that the faculty was promoting shōju, the gentle approach to conversion that Nichiren had rejected, and discouraging shakubuku, the aggressive confrontation of slanderers of the dharma that Nichiren had demanded.6 The faculty felt that in the current climate, with Buddhism under attack not only by the government but by Shinto and Confucian writers, the prudent course was to avoid alienating one's fellow Buddhists. Tanaka was appalled by this. He was the son of a Tokyo physician who had been a devotee of Pure Land before rejecting it in favor of the teachings of Nichiren. Although his father died when his son was only eight years old, Tanaka would always remember his father's conviction.
One of his early publications was entitled Treatise on Buddhist Married Life (Bukkyō fūfu ron), which he presented to the emperor and empress on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1894. In one sense, it was yet another work from the period that sought to establish the social relevance of Buddhism, in this case, in the domain of family life, where Confucian mores had long prevailed. However, Tanaka also reiterated Nichiren's doctrine on the essential relationship between the Lotus Sūtra and Japan (which, in keeping with the general theme of the treatise, he said were linked like husband and wife). Working together, they could transform the world into a buddha field. Here, in a rather restrained way, Tanaka was engaging in the long Nichiren tradition of admonishing the ruler.
In a series of works published in the first decade of the twentieth century, he argued for the identity of the Lotus Sūtra and Japan, claiming, as Nichiren had done centuries before, that the fate of the latter depends on the promotion of the former. Tanaka wrote, “If even for a single instant, any thought against shakubuku should arise, then the Lotus Sūtra will be dead, and that will be the spiritual death of the nation.”7 For Tanaka, the national essence (kokutai) of the Japanese people is a manifestation of the Lotus Sūtra, the physical form of the Lotus Sūtra is Japan, and the heart of Japan is the Lotus Sūtra.8
Much of the nationalism that developed during the Meiji period was centered on the apotheosis of the emperor, promoted by the government in what would later come to be called “State Shinto,” a cult from which the Buddhist sects were excluded. The reverence paid to the emperor as a Shinto deity was particularly problematic for the followers of Nichiren, where the attitude toward the Shinto gods had long been the topic of divisive debate. Tanaka provided his own solution. Upon the death of the Meiji emperor in 1912, he performed a hakkōe ceremony, the “Eight Lectures” on the Lotus Sūtra, described in chapter 4 above. Here he identified the words and events of the sūtra with the Meiji state. The jeweled stūpa that emerges from the earth in Chapter Eleven is Japan. The heavenly drums that resound spontaneously in Chapter One herald Japan's defeat of China and Russia and the annexation of Korea. The emperor is the noble king who goes to war against the lesser kings in the parable in Chapter Fourteen. The emperor's “Imperial Rescript on Education” of 1890, which all schoolchildren in Japan were required to memorize, was the “subtle teaching” mentioned in Chapter Sixteen. Tanaka declared, “Śākyamuni appeared in this world in order to preach the Lotus Sūtra; the Lotus Sūtra [appeared] in order to preach the ‘Life Span’ chapter; the ‘Life Span’ chapter [appeared] in order to bear witness to the fundamental disciple [Nichiren]; the fundamental disciple [appeared] in order to manifest Japan; and Japan appeared in order to save the world.”9 As early as 1901, Tanaka had declared in a work called Restoration of Our Sect (Shūmon no ishin), “Nichiren is the general of the army that will unite the world. Japan is his headquarters. The people of Japan are his troops; teachers and scholars of Nichiren Buddhism are his officers. The Nichiren creed is a declaration of war; and shakubuku is the plan of attack. … The faith of the Lotus [Sūtra] will prepare those going into battle. Japan truly has a heavenly mandate to unite the world.”10
For Tanaka, this was not a vague dream. In the same work, he set forth a detailed plan, complete with a budget, of goals to be accomplished over fifty years, in ten five-year periods. These included establishing hospitals staffed by nurses who were devotees of the Lotus Sūtra, publishing a daily newspaper, building a steamship line of thousands of ships where passengers sailing across the oceans of the world would hear the Lotus Sūtra, electing followers of Nichiren to seats in the parliament until they controlled the Japanese Diet, and establishing missionary centers around the world so that other religions could realize the error of their ways and embrace the Lotus Sūtra. By the end of the fifty-year period, he predicted that there would be 23,033,250 devotees of the Lotus Sūtra around the world. The mission would be complete when the city of Wellington in New Zealand had been converted.11 He wrote, “Through Japan, the great spiritual pacification of the entire universe and of all humanity is to be accomplished for all eternity.”12 The religion that would unite the world would not be called Buddhism. It would be called Honge Myōshū; myōshū means “wonderful sect,” and honge means “original disciples,” an allusion to the bodhisattvas who, in the fifteenth chapter of the Lotus Sūtra, emerged from the earth to propound and protect the sūtra. In 1914, in an effort to give an institutional basis to his vision of Nichiren's teachings as the foundation for a strong Japanese nationalism, Tanaka founded the Kokuchūkai or “Pillar of the Nation Society,” drawing the name from Nichiren's declaration, “I will be the pillar of Japan.”
Tanaka's patriotism was taken to violent extremes by the self-styled Buddhist priest Inoue Nisshō (1887–1967), who attended Tanaka's Kokuchūkai Academy but found its nationalism too timid. Claiming (falsely) to be a Nichiren priest, he established the Risshō Gokokudō (literally “Temple for Protecting the Nation by Establishing the Truth”), where he brought a number of young naval officers under his influence. In 1930, he formed the so-called League of Blood (Ketsumeidan), which sought to restore supreme power to the emperor and to end Western influence in Japan. The group's sense of their destiny seems to have been secured during a meeting in 1930, where Inoue was reading aloud from Nichiren's important work, composed on Sado Island, Opening of the Eyes (Kaimokushō). When he reached the famous passage “I will be the pillar of Japan. I will be the eyes of Japan. I will be the great ship of Japan. This is my vow, and I will never forsake it,” an earthquake occurred. Inoue's followers took this to be an omen that they themselves were the bodhisattvas who emerge from the earth in Chapter Fifteen, the bodhisattvas to whom the Buddha entrusts the preservation of the Lotus Sūtra.13 On February 9, 1932, members of the organization murdered the finance minister and a prominent business leader (two of the twenty names on their hit list). On May 15 of that year, the prime minister was shot to death by eleven naval officers. They also intended to kill Charlie Chaplin, who was in Japan at the time, but he was attending a sumo match.
As we recall, according to tradition, at the time of his death, Nichiren instructed six of his disciples to propagate his teaching in their respective regions of Japan (one of the six, Nichiji, went to China in 1298 and never returned). This led to the development of many sects and subsects during the centuries that followed. In 1872, four years after the Meiji Restoration, as part of a policy to streamline religious organizations, the government attempted to merge all lineages deriving from Nichiren. The attempt failed. Reorganization was attempted again two years later, this time with more success. The major itchi lineages (who held the two halves of the Lotus to be of equal value) merged to form Nichirenshū Itchi-ha (renamed Nichirenshū in 1876). The major shōretsu lineages (who held the second half of the Lotus to be superior) became Nichirenshū Shōretsu-ha. In 1876, the five major shōretsu lineages each became independent. Among them were eight major temples that traced their lineage back to Nichiren's disciple Nikkō; his followers claimed that prior to his death Nichiren had designated Nikkō as his sole successor. They formed the Nichirenshū Kōmon-ha, renamed Honmonshū in 1899.
One of those temples was Taisekiji, located at the base of Mount Fuji (a sacred site yet far from the urban centers of political and religious power). In 1900, it officially changed its name to Nichirenshū Fuji-ha, the “Nichiren Sect of Fuji.” In 1912, it changed its name again to something more aggressive: Nichiren Shōshū, the “Orthodox Nichiren Sect.” Doctrinally, they differed from the Nichirenshū on two important points, one of which would have significant consequences in the twentieth century. The first was that the larger Nichirenshū asserted that Nichiren, as he himself had intimated, was the bodhisattva Viśiṣṭacāritra, the leader of the bodhisattvas who emerge from the earth in Chapter Fifteen of the Lotus Sūtra. Nichiren Shōshū asserted that Nichiren was the Buddha himself, specifically the eternal Buddha of the second half of the sūtra. The second point had to do with the status of the honzon or gohonzon, Nichiren's inscription of Namu myōhō renge kyō surrounded by the names of various buddhas, bodhisattvas, and deities. The gohonzon at the Nichiren Shōshū head temple, Taisekiji, written on a large piece of camphor wood, is called by them the daigohozon, the “supreme object of devotion.” Nichiren Shōshū asserts that it is superior to all other gohonzon. The other Nichiren sects either reject the claim that it is superior to the many other gohonzon that were made by Nichiren himself or completely reject the authenticity of the Taisekiji gohonzon, saying that there is no evidence to support the claim that it was made by Nichiren.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Nichiren Shōshū was relatively small and insignificant among the Buddhist schools of the day, all still attempting to find a role for themselves in the emerging Japanese Empire in the wake of the Meiji reforms. One of those reforms was of the Japanese educational system. During the Tokugawa period (1600–1867) literacy increased significantly in Japan, with the rise of academies for training government bureaucrats, schools for children of the some two hundred daimyo (feudal lords) in their han or estates, and terakoya or “temple schools” (so called because many had originally been associated with Buddhist temples) where children learned to read and write. These various institutions were either abolished or reformed in the sweeping transformation of Japan's educational system, beginning with the establishment of the Ministry of Education in 1871 and recommendations of the Iwakura Mission, a delegation that over the course of two years visited the United States, thirteen countries in Europe, and seven destinations in Asia, studying their various educational systems. Beginning in 1886, a national system of elementary schools, middle schools, normal schools (for the training of teachers), and state-supported universities was established. This created a huge demand for teachers at all levels, a role traditionally played by samurai during the Tokugawa period. There was spirited discussion of the role of education in Japanese society, especially in light of the Meiji emperor's “Imperial Rescript on Education” (the text that Tanaka Chigaku had claimed was prophesied in the Lotus Sūtra), in which the emperor instructed his subjects to “pursue learning and cultivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers; furthermore advance public good and promote common interests; always respect the Constitution and observe the laws; should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth.”
One of the graduates of the new Japanese normal schools was Makiguchi Tsunesaburō (1871–1944), born the same year that the Ministry of Education was established, who would serve as a primary school teacher and principal in Tokyo. In 1930, he published the first volume of his eventual four-volume work, The System of Value Creation Pedagogy (Sōka Kyōikugaku taikei), which argued, in brief, for a reform of the educational system based on the idea that teaching children how to achieve happiness in their lives through an active form of learning would produce the greatest value for society as a whole.
Two years before the publication of the first volume of his book, Makiguchi and his disciple Toda Jōsei (1900–1958) had converted to Nichiren Buddhism, specifically to the Nichiren Shōshū. Toda was also a teacher, having published A Deductive Guide to Arithmetic in 1930. In 1937, they founded (drawing on the title of Makiguchi's book) the Sōka Kyōiku Gakkai (“Value-Creation Education Society”), which sought to combine Makiguchi's educational theories with the teachings of Nichiren. They called their group a hokkekō, or “Lotus [Sūtra] congregation,” a term that had been used traditionally to refer to the lay associations of Nichiren temples. There were sixty people at the first meeting; many of them were teachers who were attracted to Makiguchi's theories of participatory education. By 1941, Sōka Kyōiku Gakkai had three thousand members.
In 1939, the Japanese Diet passed the Religious Organizations Law, which ostensibly granted a degree of independence to religious bodies, especially new religions, but also gave the state the power to regulate religious organizations. By this time, Japan was already at war with China, and fascist elements controlled much of the government. The new law gave the government the power to disband any religious group judged to be at odds with the cult of the emperor and hence the interests of the state. The following year, the state cult was placed above all religious bodies, enabling the government to mandate compulsory visits to Shinto shrines. Under the Religious Organizations Law, the government sought the consolidation of Buddhist groups, and there were those in the Nichiren Shōshū clergy who urged joining with the larger Nichirenshū to form a single Nichiren sect. Sōka Kyōiku Gakkai, as the lay organization of the Nichiren Shōshū, argued against this.
By 1943, the sufferings of Japan were acute. Sōka Kyōiku Gakkai's challenge to the authority of State Shinto drew the attention of the authorities, who arrested twenty-one members of the organization, including Makiguchi and Toda, on July 6, 1943, despite the fact that Makiguchi was almost seventy-two years old. The specific charge had to do with the worship of a Shinto deity, which, as we have seen, had been a perennial point of contention in Nichiren thought. With the war going badly, the government had ordered that each home and religious institution in the country display a talisman from Ise, the most sacred Shinto shrine, associated with the sun goddess Amaterasu. Makiguchi and his followers refused to do so (although the Nichiren Shōshū was more accommodating).14 Makiguchi died in prison, from malnutrition, the following year.
During his imprisonment, Toda is said to have chanted Namu myōhō renge kyō two million times, after which he had a vision of his destiny as a bodhisattva who would spread the teachings of Nichiren around the world. Toda was released shortly before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With so many of its leaders in prison during the war, the Sōka Kyōiku Gakkai had dissolved. Toda began efforts to revive it under the shortened name of Sōka Gakkai, while expanding the group's mission from a society striving to implement Nichiren's teachings in the realm of education to an organization for the widespread propagation of Nichiren Shōshū.
Toda began an aggressive campaign to recruit new members, using a traditional technique: in 1951 he announced a “great march of shakubuku” to recruit 750,000 families before he died. For this purpose, he prepared a Shakubuku Manual, with summaries of the main points of the Lotus Sūtra and Nichiren's teachings, as well as suggested arguments to use in conversations with potential converts. Some of these conversations were particularly aggressive, with members pressuring people to convert by predicting a terrible fate for them and their families if they failed to do so. Recent converts were horrified when Sōka Gakkai members came into their homes and destroyed the funerary tablets that many Japanese keep in a small shrine to their parents and grandparents. Such tactics led to much negative press and the reputation among many that Sōka Gakkai was a fanatical cult. After an investigation by the Department of Justice, the organization was required to promise to desist from aggressive forms of proselytizing.
As Nichiren and his followers had done for centuries, Toda interpreted the suffering of Japan as punishment for slandering the true dharma of the Lotus Sūtra. Japan's defeat in World War II was such a punishment. The Shakubuku Manual states, “Though this most secret and supreme True Dharma had already been established in Japan, for seven hundred years people did not see or hear it, were not moved by it, and did not seek to understand it. Thus they suffered collective punishment, and the nation was destroyed. … Just as the Japanese once trembled in fear of invasion by the Mongols, so are they terrified by atomic weapons today.”15
In the domain of practice, Toda placed an emphasis on “this-worldly benefits” (genze riyaku), a phrase derived from Chapter Five of the Lotus Sūtra, benefits such as good health, financial prosperity, and harmonious family relations, all of which were sorely sought in a country devastated by war, occupied by a foreign army, and sundered by the loss of so many dead whose spirits needed to find rest. These benefits were to be achieved through kōsen-rufu, literally “spreading far and wide,” a phrase that appears in Chapter Twenty-Three of the Lotus Sūtra, when the Buddha entrusts the chapter to a bodhisattva, saying, “During the period of the five hundred years after my parinirvāṇa you must spread it far and wide in Jambudvīpa and not allow it to be destroyed” (299). Nichiren had used the term to describe his own mission of spreading the true meaning of the Lotus Sūtra. The task would now be taken up by Sōka Gakkai.
Toda worked closely with the Nichiren Shōshū priesthood, relying on them to produce honzon for the faithful, cooperating with them in the publication of Nichiren's complete works, and requiring that all members make a pilgrimage to the sect's headquarters at Taisekiji, all of which contributed significantly to the wealth and visibility of what just decades before had been an obscure Buddhist sect. At the same time, Toda made his own innovations in theology. Perhaps the most important of these was the idea of “life force” (seimei), a term that Toda said had appeared to him in a vision during his time in prison. In one sense, it was his attempt to express ichinen sanzen, “the three thousand worlds in one moment of thought,” in more modern and simple terms. For Toda, this life force was the fundamental force of the universe: it was the name of the Buddha, embodied as sound in Namu myōhō renge kyō and embodied as form in the gohonzon. Thus, to chant Namu myōhō renge kyō is to release this vital force, bringing happiness, and eventually buddhahood, to the individual. He wrote, “When you sit before the gohonzon and believe that there is no distinction among the gohonzon, Nichiren, and you yourself, when you allow this great blessing to permeate your heart and offer thanksgiving, when you chant the daimoku fervently, you enter into harmony with the rhythm of the universe: the great life-force of the universe becomes your own life-force and gushes forth.”16
The events of the war years had demonstrated to even the most nationalistic devotees of Nichiren that the transformation of this sahā world into the Buddha's Land of Tranquil Light could not be accomplished by war. A new stage began, when this transformation was sought through peace. This would not occur, however, without another schism over who the true upholders of the Lotus Sūtra should be.
Nichiren had declared that he had discerned “three great secret doctrines” (sandai hihō) in the Lotus Sūtra. He called them secret because they are not obviously present in the sūtra itself. However, Nichiren saw them in Chapter Sixteen (on the lifespan of the Tathāgata) and made them known to the world. For Nichiren, these were the special teachings that the Buddha had entrusted to the bodhisattva Viśiṣṭacāritra in Chapter Twenty-One; as we have noted, Nichiren identified himself with this bodhisattva, the leader of the bodhisattvas who emerged from the earth. The first two of the great secret doctrines have been discussed above: they are the daimoku, or great name of the sūtra in the five characters myō hō ren ge kyō, and the honzon, or object of devotion, which is the calligraphic representation of the scene on Vulture Peak. The third of the great secrets is what Nichiren called the “ordination platform of the origin teaching” (honmon no kaidan). The “origin teaching” of course refers to the second half of the Lotus Sūtra. The meaning of the term ordination platform is more elusive in this context, and precisely what it meant would have significant consequences in the twentieth century and to the present day.17
In China, the tradition developed of building a wooden platform, which men and women would mount to receive ordination as monks and nuns. This is the “platform” in the title of a famous Chan text, the Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch (Liuzu tan jing), where the sixth patriarch, Huineng, is said to have conferred “formless precepts.” In Japan, where the state wanted to strictly control the process of ordination, ordination platforms could only be constructed with government sanction. In the early centuries of Buddhism in Japan, there were only three platforms, the first and oldest in the ancient capital of Nara, constructed in 754, and two more constructed in 761: one in Shimotsuke Province, northwest of Tokyo, and one in Chikuzen Province, to the south in Kyushu. The country was divided into three ordination regions, with monks and nuns to be ordained at one of these three platforms. One of the goals of the monk Saichō, who brought the teachings of the Tiantai school to Japan, was to have an ordination platform established at his monastery on Mount Hiei outside Kyoto. He argued for the need for a Mahāyāna ordination platform for conferring the bodhisattva precepts, asserting that the existing platforms were only for the conferral of the “Hīnayāna precepts.” The emperor approved his request a few days after Saichō's death in 822. This was a significant sanction for the Tendai sect.
One might imagine, therefore, that Nichiren would have sought imperial support for his own ordination platform, providing state sanction to his teachings of the superiority of the Lotus Sūtra and the importance of its worship for the safety and prosperity of Japan. Although the Tendai platform was Mahāyāna and although the Tendai sect esteemed the Lotus Sūtra above all others, as we have seen, Nichiren was distressed by its tolerance of other sūtras and of esoteric rituals. Furthermore, he regarded the precepts bestowed there as representing only the first half of the Lotus Sūtra. In a work of disputed authorship he writes of a time in the future when the ruler and his ministers will uphold the three great secret doctrines. At that time, “an imperial edict and shogunal decree will be handed down, to seek out the most superlative site, resembling the pure land of Sacred Vulture Peak, and there to erect the ordination platform.” Furthermore, this will “be [the site of] the dharma of the precepts by which all the people of three countries [India, China, and Japan] and all of Jambudvīpa [the world] will perform repentance and eradicate their offenses.”18
However, the various vows of Buddhism, both the monastic vows and the bodhisattva vows, do not figure strongly in Nichiren's thought, despite the fact that he was himself an ordained monk and maintained his vows. For him, the five characters of the title of the sūtra contained all the merit of all the deeds of all the buddhas of the past, present, and future. They also therefore contained all the merit of taking and keeping the various vows. Scholars are therefore unsure what Nichiren meant by the phrase “ordination platform of the origin teaching.” Was it a physical platform, or was it something more abstract? Was it the place where one upheld the Lotus Sūtra, wherever that might be? In the centuries after Nichiren's death, there would be much debate, not only about what the phrase meant but, if it meant a physical platform, about where and when it should be built.
In the twentieth century, part of Tanaka Chigaku's fifty-year plan for the conversion of the world to Nichiren Buddhism was the establishment of a physical kaidan. This would happen after all of the other religions of Japan, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist, had acknowledged the superiority of the Lotus Sūtra (with the followers of Jōdo Shinshū and the Christians being the last to relent). This in turn would bring a majority of Lotus Sūtra devotees to the seats in Japan's Diet, which would pass laws making Nichiren Buddhism the state religion of Japan and establishing the kaidan. Tanaka felt that it should be built at the most sacred place in Japan, the foot of Mount Fuji, serving as the site of a united Nichiren sect.
Toda Jōsei also wrote and spoke about the importance of building what Tanaka called a kokuritsu kaidan, a kaidan established by the state. He also felt that it should be located at the foot of Mount Fuji. However, given his strong allegiance with Nichiren Shōshū, Toda had no interest in unifying the many sects and subsects of Nichiren Buddhism. He envisioned the kaidan at Taisekiji, the headquarters of Nichiren Shōshū. Because, in keeping with the words of Nichiren, the kaidan had to be established by the state, Toda encouraged members of Sōka Gakkai to run for local and national office, so that someday Nichiren Shōshū could become the state religion of Japan and the kaidan at Taisekiji could be built not by imperial decree, as Nichiren had written, but by a resolution of the democratically elected government of Japan.
After Toda's death, Ikeda Daisaku (b. 1928–) became president of Sōka Gakkai. He pursued Toda's goal of political power and social legitimacy for Sōka Gakkai by founding a political party, eventually called Kōmeitō, or “Clean Government Party,” in 1964. Within five years it held forty-seven of the 486 seats in the lower house of the National Diet and was the third largest political party in Japan. The establishment of the ordination platform remained one of its goals. As the influence of the party grew, so did criticism of it, specifically that the ties between Sōka Gakkai and Kōmeitō violated the postwar Constitution of Japan. Drafted in 1946 by Brigadier General Courtney Whitney and Lieutenant Colonel Milo Rowell, two army officers on the staff of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan, Article 20 of the constitution states, “Freedom of religion is guaranteed to all. No religious organization shall receive any privileges from the State, nor exercise any political authority. No person shall be compelled to take part in any religious act, celebration, rite or practice. The State and its organs shall refrain from religious education or any other religious activity.” Thus, the relation between the Lotus Sūtra and the fate of the Japanese nation, so central to Nichiren himself, and to thinkers such as Tanaka, now appeared to be vaguely unconstitutional. In the years after the war, the term kokutai, the unique and eternal character of the Japanese people, so central to state ideology up to 1945, and a term that Tanaka and others had linked to faith in the Lotus Sūtra, had come to be regarded with suspicion. In 1970, Ikeda announced the formal separation of Sōka Gakkai and Kōmeitō and the replacement of Tanaka's by now controversial term kokuritsu kaidan, “platform established by the state,” with the term that was used by Nichiren, honmon no kaidan, “platform of the origin teaching.” Sōka Gakkai, however, did not abandon the goal of a physical structure.
Indeed, by 1965, Sōka Gakkai members had contributed some $100 million toward the construction of a shō hondō, or “grand main hall,” at Taisekiji. It was a massive undertaking, and the resulting structure, completed in 1972, was regarded as one of the architectural wonders of the world, with the world's largest suspension roof and an auditorium that held six thousand. The daigohonzon, the holy of holies of Nichiren Shōshū, was transferred from its traditional temple and enshrined in this wonder of modern architecture, to which millions of pilgrims flocked. For many Sōka Gakkai members, the platform of the origin teaching had finally been built.
The building of a new main hall (hondō) and the installation there of the daigohonzon was an act of enormous symbolic meaning for Sōka Gakkai. Prior to this time, the main hall at Taisekiji had always been considered provisional, despite the fact that it was built in 1522, because the true assembly hall, that is, the ordination platform of the origin teaching, was not to be constructed until the work of “spreading far and wide” was complete, interpreted by the sect to mean the conversion of the entire population of Japan to reverence for the Lotus Sūtra. Furthermore, the daigohonzon was not displayed to the public; it was kept in an (admittedly grand) “storehouse.” Many, both within the priesthood and among other lay organizations of Nichiren Shōshū, protested that the new Shō Hondō could not be the honzon nokaidan; because it had not been built by the state and because it had been built before the work of “spreading far and wide” had been accomplished, it did not fulfill Nichiren's prediction. This caused Ikeda to redefine “spreading far and wide” to mean the conversion of one third of Japan's population, something that he felt was possible in the near future. He also stopped referring to the Shō Hondō as honzon no kaidan.
Still, for many members of Sōka Gakkai, the building of the true assembly hall and the installation there of the daigohonzon was a harbinger of the millennium. The millennium, however, proved to be an apocalypse. On the orders of the chief priest of Nichiren Shōshū, the Shō Hondō was razed in 1999.
The trouble had begun when the chief priest of Nichiren Shōshū was given a tape recording of a speech by Ikeda delivered on November 16, 1990, in which he was critical of the sect's clerics. This led to a long and rancorous exchange of charges and countercharges, with Sōka Gakkai and Nichiren Shōshū each accusing the other of all manner of unethical and heretical behavior. Relations between the Nichiren Shōshū priesthood and Sōka Gakkai, already strained, deteriorated very quickly over the next month. Up until this point, the officers of Sōka Gakkai had been appointed by the head priest (hossu) of Nichiren Shōshū. In Nichiren Shōshū, in contrast to other forms of Nichiren Buddhism, the head priest of the sect is especially powerful, being regarded as the direct successor, and hence representative, of Nichiren himself. At the time of the schism, the head priest was Abe Nikken (b. 1922).
At the end of December, Abe decided to relieve Ikeda and the other officers of Sōka Gakkai of their duties, accusing the organization of a number of financial improprieties. On March 14, 1991, Nichiren Shōshū revoked the Sōka Gakkai's mandate to disseminate the teachings of Nichiren abroad, something that it had done with considerable success to that point. On November 28, 1991, Nichiren Shōshū issued a “Notification of Excommunication” to Sōka Gakkai, charging that by criticizing the priesthood of Nichiren Shōshū, Sōka Gakkai was guilty of “slandering the dharma,” for Nichiren, the gravest of all sins. More worldly sins were also mentioned, including tax evasion. The document read, in part, “Sōka Gakkai has become an organization which greatly vilifies Buddhist Law, which goes against the repeated mercy and guidance of the Chief Priest of the Sect, which is conspicuously changing the creed and the faith of this Sect, and which is destroying Buddhist teachings.”19
The next day, Sōka Gakkai declared “Independence Day of the Soul,” condemning Nichiren Shōshū, which it referred to, using the name of the head priest, as the “Nikken Sect,” and stating that Sōka Gakkai was the true representative of the teachings of Nichiren. Nichiren Shōshū priests were depicted in Sōka Gakkai publications as degenerates interested only in money, cars, geishas, alcohol, and golf. They had violated the sect's own doctrines by placing Shinto amulets in their temples and fraternizing with members of rival Nichiren sects. There were also personal attacks on Abe Nikken and his wife, dubbed “the Imelda of Taisekiji.”20
The controversy was a recent manifestation of a perennial question in the history of Buddhism: What are the three jewels? As every student in Introduction to World Religions learns, a Buddhist is defined as someone who “goes for refuge” to the three jewels: the Buddha, the dharma, and the saṃgha. However, much commentary has been generated across Asia and across the centuries as to what these three terms mean in this context. The Buddha is generally seen to be Śākyamuni, the historical Buddha. The dharma is what he taught, which encompasses a vast literature, regardless of which tradition one accepts; in some commentaries, it is said that the dharma that constitutes the dharma jewel is only nirvāṇa, because this is the only true refuge from suffering. The jewel of the saṃgha, the community, is also widely interpreted. It seems originally to have meant only the “noble community” (āryasaṃgha), those who have achieved one of the four levels of enlightenment. However, it came to refer more broadly to the ordained community of monks and nuns.
Nichiren Shōshū has its own interpretation of the three jewels, one unshared by other Buddhist schools, including other Nichiren sects. The Buddha is Nichiren, according to what is called Nichiren Honbutsuron, “the theory of Nichiren as the original Buddha.” The dharma is the three great secret doctrines: the honzon, the daimoku, and the kaidan. The saṃgha is Nichiren's disciple Nikkō and by extension the lineage of chief priests of the sect, as well as the Nichiren Shōshū priests whom the chief priest leads. In the virulent dispute between Nichiren Shōshū and Sōka Gakkai, Sōka Gakkai disputed this last point, arguing that the priests were not worthy of this designation. Furthermore, Nichiren himself had not made a strong distinction between the status of the monk and the status of the layperson in the final age. The laity, not the priesthood, were the true representatives of Nichiren and his teachings. A newspaper article in 1992 declared, “The Dharma Law of Nichiren is something for the people. … Those who believe in the Buddha Dharma of Nichiren are all children of the Buddha. When these people come together, they form the community of believers, the real sangha.”21
An important point remained to be resolved, however. The central object of worship in Nichiren Shōshū is the gohonzon, and up until the schism, Sōka Gakkai had required its members to receive copies from the headquarters at Taisekiji, copies that were made by the head priest himself in his capacity as Nichiren's direct successor. With the head priest now condemned and the members of Sōka Gakkai excommunicated, another means of access to the daigohonzon had to be found. A substitute was therefore found, with Sōka Gakkai providing its members copies of a gohonzon transcribed in 1720 by Nichikan, the twenty-sixth high priest of Taisekiji and a major scholar of the tradition, and in the possession of one of the few Nichiren Shōshū temples that broke with Taisekiji to side with Sōka Gakkai. At the same time, Sōka Gakkai de-emphasized the icon, citing Nichiren, who wrote, “Do not look for this gohonzon somewhere else. It is nowhere but in the ‘all of flesh’ in our breasts, the breasts of sentient beings who uphold the Lotus Sūtra and recite the Namu-myōhō-renge-kyō.”22 The five syllables would soon be heard in Boston.