By Imperial Edict and Shogunal Decree, p195Since, in his view, the devotion paid to outdated and ineffectual teachings was inviting disastrous social consequences, Nichiren saw the dissemination of his message as a matter of urgency. Accordingly, he stressed the practice of shakubuku, an assertive approach to proselytizing in which one actively rebukes attachment to views deemed inferior or false. Nichiren practiced shakubuku by preaching and writing, engaging in doctrinal debate with fellow clerics, and admonishing officials of the Bakufu, the recently established shogunate or military government that shared power with the imperial court.
Category Archives: Stone: Honmon No Kaidan
‘By Imperial Edict and Shogunal Decree’
For the past 26 days I’ve been reviewing and commenting on the adaptation of Nichiren Buddhism by Chigaku Tanaka. As described by Tanaka’s son, Kishio Satomi, the most significant difference between traditional Nichiren Buddhist doctrine and Tanaka’s Nichirenism was the focus on the “Holy Altar,” the kaidan or precepts platform. This is one of the Three Great Secret Dharmas.
In 2003, Jacqueline I. Stone, at the time a professor of Japanese Religions in the Religion Department of Princeton University, wrote a paper entitled, “By Imperial Edict and Shogunal Decree: Politics and the Issue of the Ordination Platform in Modern Lay Buddhism.” You can download a PDF copy here. The paper became a chapter in “Buddhism in the Modern World: Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition” edited by Steven Heine and Charles S. Prevish.
As Stone explains:
By Imperial Edict and Shogunal Decree, p193-194One aspect of the medieval Nichiren Buddhist vision … has proved difficult for modern practitioners. This is the tradition that, someday, a great ordination platform (kaidan) would be erected “by imperial edict and shogunal decree,” symbolizing the fusion of Buddhism and worldly rule and the conversion of the sovereign and his people to Nichiren’s teaching. One might expect that this ideal, framed in such obviously medieval terms, might be allowed to lapse into obscurity, or be interpreted in purely symbolic fashion. Such has, indeed, been the mainstream tendency within the various Nichiren Buddhist temple denominations. Nonetheless, there have also been two significant attempts within the last century to reframe the goal of establishing the kaidan in a literal sense, in the context of political milieus that Nichiren’s medieval followers never imagined: the militant imperialism of the first part of the twentieth century and the parliamentary democracy instituted after the Pacific War.
Beginning today and running through Aug. 7 I will publish quotes from Stone’s article illustrating the background and nature of Tanaka’s Nichirenshugi and the importance of Manifesting This World as an Ideal Realm.
Manifesting This World as an Ideal Realm
By Imperial Edict and Shogunal Decree, p194-195Nichiren taught a doctrine of exclusive devotion to the Lotus Sūtra and stressed as a primary practice the chanting of its daimoku or title in the formula, “Namu-myōhō-renge-kyō.” In medieval Japan, the Lotus Sūtra, with its promise that “all shall achieve the Buddha Way,” was widely revered as the highest of the Buddha’s teachings, reconciling all others within itself. For Nichiren, however, the Lotus Sūtra was not simply one teaching supreme among many but the sole Dharma that could lead to Buddhahood now in the Final Dharma age (mappō), preached by the Buddha expressly for the people of this degenerate time. In his estimation, the other Buddhist forms current in his day—Pure Land, Zen, and the esoteric teachings—being provisional and incomplete, no longer led to liberation in the mappō era; to embrace them and reject the Lotus Sūtra was a pernicious inversion of high and low, a form of “disparaging the Dharma” (hōbō) that could only invite suffering. Drawing on traditional Mahāyāna ideas of the nonduality of individuals and their container world, the “realm of the land” (kokudo seken), Nichiren insisted that it was precisely this evil, a neglect of the Lotus Sūtra’s perfect teaching, that had brought down on the populace the calamities of his day: drought, famine, earthquakes, and the threat of invasion by the Mongols. Conversely, Nichiren held that the spread of exclusive faith in the Lotus Sūtra would banish such disasters and manifest this world as an ideal realm:
When all people throughout the land enter the one Buddha vehicle, and the Wonderful Dharma [of the Lotus] alone flourishes, because the people all chant Namu-myōhō-renge-kyō, the wind will not thrash the branches nor the rain fall hard enough to break clods.
The age will become like the reigns of [the Chinese sage kings] Yao and Shun. In the present life, inauspicious calamities will be banished, and the people will obtain the art of longevity. There can be no doubt of the sūtra’s promise of “peace and security in the present world.
Nyosetsu shugyō shō