While working on the Diamond Path of Daimoku project I came to realize that I had a very shallow understanding of what Nichiren taught about the Daimoku.

I was first introduced to the Daimoku through Soka Gakkai’s make-a-wish formulation. Dissatisfied with the concept that Buddhism is all about personal satisfaction, I joined Nichiren Shu. Still unhappy with the practice, I have been promoting the six pāramitās during Higan week, the three days before and three days after the Equinox. I felt  there wasn’t enough focus on being good Buddhists, of acting in ways that showed charity, morality, patience, vigor, meditation and wisdom.

The other day a visitor who had explored the Diamond Path of the Daimoku website asked:

I watched day 3 of your minute-long videos. … I don’t understand how chanting the Odaimoku substitutes for the 8-fold path. How does chanting a phrase accomplish what the path prescribed by the Buddha is supposed to do?

In reading that comment I had to admit I was a little puzzled too. But as it turns out, the day I received that email happened to be the same day my daily reading from Lotus Sutra included Chapter 7, the Parable of the Magic City, where we learn that the 8-fold-path and all of the other expedient teachings were just a rest stop on the journey to the place of treasures.

This was certainly one explanation that fit my understanding of the Lotus Sutra, but it wasn’t really the right explanation about why chanting the Daimoku makes the 8-fold-path superfluous in Nichiren Buddhism.

One of the reasons I often appear so excited about the age of Artificial Intelligence is that I now have a tool with which to answer questions like these. Sure, in a perfect world, I would have a teacher with whom I studied and with whom I could have my questions answered, but that’s not realistically available to me. No one has the time or the inclination to answer all of the emails I would send.

What I do have is a tool created by Google. I have uploaded sources of information about the teaching of Nichiren into Google’s Gemini Notebook. I currently have more than 80 of these sources uploaded – academic papers, Nichiren’s writings and quotes I’ve collected from my reading. (See this list.) This tool can answer my questions. The answers are drawn from the sources. The tool does not go out and find answers on the Internet; it reads the sources it has been provided and answers based on the content of those sources. If the sources don’t address a particular issue, the tool states that.

Over the next four days I’m going to post the answers to these questions:

1. Considering that Nichiren revealed that we do not need to walk the long, eon-spanning path of gradual self-cultivation because the Buddha has already completed that arduous journey for us, is Nichiren Buddhism a “faith-based” rather then a “works-based” practice?
2. Build a comparative chart contrasting the stages of the traditional “works-based” path (the six paramitas and monastic precepts) with Nichiren’s nondual “faith-based” model of juji soku jikai.
3. Given the importance of faith in Nichiren Buddhism, explain Nichiren’s emphasis on strict ‘polishing’ and practice.
4. Reconcile the theological shift from a gradual, “works-based” path to the immediate, “faith-based” nonduality of Nichiren Buddhism with Nichiren’s emphasis on strict ‘polishing’ and practice.