Nichiren

Nichiren (1222–82). Founder of the Nichiren-shū school during the Kamakura period in Japan. Born in 1222 in the seaside town of Kominato in Awa province to a family of fishermen, he is the only founder of one of the new sects of Kamakura Buddhism not to come from the central provinces around the capital and not to be from an aristocratic family, a factor that some scholars believe accounts for his hard-hitting and uncompromising style of religion. At the age of 12, he entered religious life at the Kiyosumi-dera, a Tendai temple near his family home, and studied Tendai nembutsu practice there with his master. Fully ordained at 16, he went to the capital in 1239 to study at the eminent temples in Kamakura and Kyoto, where he no doubt encountered discrimination and derision due to his rustic speech and manner. Perplexed by the complexity and lack of consistency in the doctrines of various schools, he determined during this period of study that the Tendai school needed to return to its teachings, given by Chinese T'ien-t'ai founder Chih-i (538–97) and Japanese Tendai founder Saichō (767–822), promulgating the Lotus Sūtra as the Buddha's definitive teaching, and relegating all other teachings to a provisional status. However, unlike his predecessors and others in the history of east Asian Buddhism who assigned some value to these provisional teachings as expedient devices designed to reach those not prepared to accept a full revelation of the truth, Nichiren decided that these other teachings were of no account whatsoever and were to be abandoned as heretical. Returning to his home district in 1253, he took the new religious name Nichiren (Lotus of the Sun) and began promoting his views and attacking the teachings of the other schools openly. He went so far as to blame a series of calamities such as earthquakes, epidemics, and typhoons in the eastern provinced between 1257 and 1260 on the popularity of other sects, notably zen and Pure Land, and promised the shōgunate that such disasters could be averted by returning to the true faith of the Lotus Sūtra. He set forth his recommendations to the government in a tract composed in 1260 and presented to the regent, Hōjō Tokiyori, entitled Risshō ankoku ron (Treatise on Establishing the Right for the Protection of the Nation). He experienced exile and persecution for his efforts, but accepted it as fulfilment of a passage in the Lotus Sūtra itself that said proponents of the true teaching would be persecuted in the Age of the Final Dharma (Jap., mappō).

In terms of religious practice, Nichiren wanted people to place their faith in the power of the Lotus Sūtra, expressing this faith by reciting the daimoku, or ‘great title’: Namo myōhō renge kyō, ‘I take refuge in the Sūtra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Dharma’. For those lacking in time or ability to read the scripture, this simple declaration of faith in the sūtra's efficacy and truth gained salvation, and this simple means to liberation itself was provided by the Buddha Śākyamuni himself as a means for those living in the time of mappō. His unrelenting practice of shakubuku, or direct confrontation with heretical teachings, continued to earn him persecution and attack. In 1268, an envoy arrived in Japan with a message from the Mongol leader Kublai Khan (see Mongolia) demanding tribute and vowing to attack Japan if it were not forthcoming, and Nichiren heightened his call for national conversion to faith in the Lotus Sūtra. However, the attack did not materialize immediately, and Nichiren was sent into exile on Sado Island in 1271, where he remained for three years. These were productive years, and mark a turning point in Nichiren's thought in several ways. First, he wrote several more treatises there, in which he made a break with the Tendai school and began styling himself simply as ‘a priest of Japan’. Second, he created the Daimandara, or ‘great maṇḍala’ there, in which he created a map of the cosmos with the words of the daimoku springing out of the earth and connecting it with the heavens, surrounded by the Buddhas Śākyamuni and Prabhūtaratna (both prominent in the sūtra) and four Bodhisattvas. Third, he began to identify himself as an incarnation of the Bodhisattva Jōgyō, or ‘Eminent Conduct’, who appears in the Lotus Sūtra as the protector of the scripture. Significantly, this Bodhisattva leads all the others in Nichiren's maṇḍala. Fourth, he began turning his energy from the conversion of the nation as a whole to be effected by direct appeal to the government to conversion of individuals one at a time.

After his release from exile in 1274, Nichiren returned briefly to Kamakura. Many in government felt that the threatened Mongol invasion was then imminent, and requested him to perform rituals for the protection of the nation. However, they balked at his demand that only he be engaged to perform these rituals and that all other schools of Buddhism be barred, and the success of another group's rituals in producing rain damaged his case to exclusive efficacy. Discouraged, he finally retired from the world and repaired to Mt. Minobu in Kai province, a high and almost inaccessible peak, where he built a small hermitage in which he and his followers would await the coming of the Mongols. They fully expected the utter destruction of Japan for its failure to place its faith exclusively in the Lotus Sūtra. The invasion did indeed arrive late in 1274, but both this first wave and the much larger second wave that arrived in 1281 were destroyed in Hakata Bay by typhoons, and ritual specialists of the Shingon school claimed credit for having produced these storms through their rites. Nichiren spent his last years on Mt. Minobu, tending to the flock of residents whose swelling numbers gradually transformed his residence from a crude hermitage to a temple, and in the composition of further works detailing his theology, notably the Hokke-shuyō-shō (Treatise Selecting the Essentials of the Lotus School). The disappointments of life and hardships of the mountain proved severe, and he died in 1282 at the age of 60.

Some scholars have pointed out that both the simplicity of the practice that Nichiren advocated and the vehemence with which he set his views forth stemmed from his humble beginnings and the discrimination he experienced as a young rustic monk thrust into the company of aristocratic scions. However, Nichiren was also a subtle thinker and the originality of his reshaping of Tendai theology deserves attention. From the beginning of the school in Sui-dynasty China, the T'ien-t'ai and Tendai schools have always asserted that the Lotus Sūtra is the highest Buddhist scripture and the one in which the Buddha states his teachings most directly, and that the essence of the scripture is contained in its title. Furthermore, the Tendai school had always understood enlightenment (bodhi) to be both a goal and an immanent part of human nature. It was precisely because of innate original enlightenment (Jap., hongaku) that one had any real hope of working toward the attainment of acquired enlightenment (Jap., shikaku). Nichiren, unlike other thinkers in Buddhist history who were willing to grant a place to expedient or indirect teachings as a means of reaching beings unable to assimilate a full and direct exposition of the truth, sought to eliminate all expedient or gradual approaches altogether, and make available to common followers a direct access to the absolute. The Lotus Sūtra, as the scripture that directly revealed the totality of Buddhist truth, provided a door, and since its essence was contained within its title, the chanting of this title could, by itself, unlock the enlightenment that was always already part of the makeup of the human being. With this practice in place, all other expedient means and theoretical speculations could be nothing more than distractions from the path, and so Nichiren sheared away everything in his Tendai heritage that represented idle philosophizing and compromise with other paths in order to provide his followers and the nation with the most direct means of liberation.