A New Buddhist Dialectic - Plague and Prophecy

Part two of an ongoing series.

[Note: This is the second entry in a series of essays exploring a concept I call the “Buddhist dialectic.” While you don’t necessarily have to read the first to understand this one, it may clarify why I have appropriated the term “dialectic” in the first place, thus providing useful context for the rest of the series. Link here.]

One of the first things, and often the only thing, that most people will learn about Nichiren Buddhism is that its primary practice is the chanting of the mantra “Namu Myoho Renge Kyo.” But why does it employ this particular mantra out of the countless ones in Buddhism? After all, the manner in which it is chanted is different from anything taught by the Tendai school which preceded Nichiren’s doctrine, nor is such a practice to be found in any of the thousands of texts in the Japanese Buddhists scriptural canon. From where does the importance arise?

I bring this up because it’s a matter that can only be fully understood through the lens of what I call “Buddhist dialectics.” Before we get to that point, however, we need to go back to Nichiren’s time: Japan’s “Kamakura” period, which lasted from 1185 to 1333.

One of the most notable events of this era was the Jokyu War in 1221. While the nation of Japan was certainly no stranger to warfare, this conflict was exceptional in that it ended with the banishment of not one, but three retired emperors by the Kamakura Shogunate, while the most recently enthroned emperor was forcefully unseated after a reign of only two months. Per Kishio Satomi’s retelling in chapter four of his 1924 book “Japanese Civilization: Its Significance and Realization”:

As soon as an urgent message was sent to the Hojos Government, Hojo Yoshitoki, the Shikken (the highest representative of the Government), sent an army against the Court troops. Unfortunately the Court troops were defeated and the Hojos’ army made a raid on the Court’s territory. Hereupon Hojo Yoskitoki usurped the Court and expelled three ex-Emperors to far islands remote from each other. Yoshitoki set one of H.I.H. princes on the throne who was in no way concerned with the war.

This chain of events, which had upended what was previously perceived as the natural order of the imperial government, enfolded the rest of the era in an aura of uncertainty. “Such a terrible event,” continued Satomi, “never before occurred and never must occur again in Japan.”

To make matters worse, the following decades were plagued by disasters. In the writings of Nichiren, he outlined a glut of misfortune from the years 1257 to 1260, a stretch of time now called the “Shoga Famine,” starting with a massive earthquake in 1257 and ending in a two-year onslaught of epidemics spurred on by persistent malnourishment.

“In recent years, strange phenomena in the sky, natural calamities on earth, famines, and epidemics have occurred and spread over all the land of Japan,” he wrote in his famous work Rissho Ankoku Ron. “Oxen and horses lie dead at crossroads and the streets are filled with skeletons. A majority of the population has perished and everyone has been touched by grief” (sourced from Kyotsu Hori’s translation in “Writings of Nichiren Shonin”). While a hyperbolic passage, it likely reflects how the regular Japanese person may have felt while living through this turbulent time.

To complicate matters further, this era also saw growing urbanization, with more of the population being consolidated into cities like Kamakura and Kyoto. This led to the birth of a new social dynamic; one less grounded in small agricultural communities. Per Kenji Matsuo’s “History of Japanese Buddhism”:

Many who left their rural homes and came to live in urban areas were forced to adopt radically different life-styles, and were often faced for the first time with people who were not part of the community of their birthplace. The resulting anomie compelled the city-dwellers to search for a sense of community from alternative sources. One of the most important of these was religion, especially the new religions which spoke to both individual problems and the needs of the community.

This shift, combined with the lingering anxiety around governmental instability and the various aforementioned calamities, produced a new cultural milieu which demanded a form of religion that the prior-established Buddhist sects could not provide. Contrary to how Buddhism is largely viewed in the Western world today, the Buddhism of the Heian period and before was not seen as a universal religion meant to address the spiritual needs of the individual, rather it was employed by the nobility in service of metaphysically advancing the interests of the nation. Matsuo continues:

The priests of the ancient and medieval six Nara schools and the two Heian schools were, in principle, not in any particular need of believers (or, in other words, of donations and offerings), because they were, essentially, state officials, and received their payment from the state in exchange for their participation in national religious services. Accordingly, they had no need to respond to the personal desires for salvation of individual believers, nor did they feel the necessity to organize their lay devotees, or to collect alms.

… as a general rule [they] did not respond to the individual wishes for salvation of the troubled citizens of the Heian and Nara periods. The reason for this is that they had restrictions that were equal to the public service regulations for state officials, and they could only practise the salvation of ‘individuals’ by means of a shisho 私請 (to undertake an individual invitation, upon receiving permission from the temple). Therefore, in the Kamakura period they were succeeded by priests who sought to put ‘benefiting of others’ into practice, who pursued the true Buddhist way and managed to release themselves from the world of the [official priests].

The status quo assured that there remained a wall between Buddhist practice in proper and the average “individual.” In order to surmount such an obstacle, it was necessary for priests to leave the temples, along with all of the privileges and (notably) the restrictions that come with life therein, and return to the impurities of the citizenry. As Kenji Matsuo put it, this amounted to a “re-renunciation of the world,” the first renunciation being entry into the temple (leaving normal life), and the second being the rejection of monastic seclusion in favor of proselytization.

The new priests mentioned in the passage above comprised the patriarchs of the “Kamakura schools” of Japanese Buddhism. Nichiren was a part of this grouping, but was, at that time, overshadowed by the others, including the Pure Land, Zen, and new Ritsu (“precept”) schools. This lag in popularity can be partially attributed to the fact that many of Nichiren’s early followers were suppressed, as well as his Buddhism being the very last in the nation of Japan to come to maturity; a feature which will become relevant in a later chapter of this work.

One of the prevalent overlapping features of Japanese Pure Land and Nichiren Buddhist doctrine is their focus on the prophecies Shakyamuni Buddha had proclaimed regarding the eventual corruption and disappearance of the Buddha-dharma from the world. While there were several different potential timelines for this decline to be gleaned from the scriptural texts, the one seen as the most authoritative by the Kamakura period was from the Moon Matrix section of the “Great Collection Sutra.” Below is Robert F. Rhodes’ translation of the passage, taken from “Saicho’s Mappo Tomyoki: The Candle of the Latter Dharma”:

After my nirvana, in the first five hundred years, the various bhikyus and others will be within my True Dharma, and their liberation will be firm. In the next 500 years, their dhyana will be firm. In the next 500 years, their listening to many teachings will be firm. In the next 500 years, their construction of temples will be firm. In the last 500 years, strifes and disputes will be firm, and the Pure Dharma will completely disappear.”

This makes for five different five-hundred-year periods, starting with the moment of Shakyamuni Buddha’s passing. Based on the calculations of medieval Japanese Buddhists, many in the Kamakura era believed themselves to be on the precipice of the fifth and final five-hundred-year period: the “Age of Conflict.” This also marked the beginning of the prophesized “Age of Decline” or “Latter Age” in proper, a span in which the Buddha’s pure law would disappear, lasting until the coming of the next Buddha, Maitreya (roughly 5,670,000,000 years from now, give or take).

The corollary to this belief was the notion that Shakyamuni Buddha, knowing full well the plight of the men of the Latter Age, would have left teachings which would lead us to liberation in accordance with our capacities and proclivities. This was where the Pure Land patriarchs and Nichiren diverged, as the former saw the Amitabha (Jpn: Amida) sutras and exclusive devotion to the otherworldly Buddha Amida as not only the proper teaching and practice for the Latter Age, but the primary ones that Shakyamuni Buddha manifested into our world to dispense, while the latter was convinced that the path to Buddhahood could only be found through the Lotus Sutra, Shakyamuni’s penultimate teaching and his “most difficult to believe and understand” (Chapter 10).

This is the first key to answering the question posed at the beginning of this essay, as “Myoho Renge Kyo” is one of the Chinese titles for the Lotus Sutra, while “Namu” is, in essence, a declaration of faith, often translated as “I take refuge in…” But more on this later.

It is reasonable to assume that beliefs around the Latter Age had instilled a sense of urgency in the Kamakura period patriarchs, as they became some of the most tenacious preachers of their era. As an example, both the Pure Land patriarchs Honen and Shinran, as well as Nichiren, continued their activity after being exiled by the Kamakura government. It could even be said that Nichiren’s resolve was bolstered by his two periods of exile, in large part thanks to a passage from the Lotus Sutra’s thirteenth chapter, which reads:

The evil monks of that muddied age, failing to understand the Buddha’s expedient means, how he preaches the Law in accordance with what is appropriate, will confront us with foul language and angry frowns; again and again we will be banished to a place far removed from towers and temples. All these various evils, because we keep in mind the Buddha’s orders, we will endure.

Nichiren wrote the following concerning this passage in his work “Kaimokusho,” or “The Opening of the Eyes” (per Kyotsu Hori’s translation):

It is further stated, “We will be banished many times.” If I, Nichiren, had not been exiled repeatedly on account of the Lotus Sutra, what could we do with these two words of “many times?” Even T’ien-t’ai and Dengyō did not read these two words from experience, much less other people. I, Nichiren, alone read them from experience. For I fit perfectly the Buddha’s description of the person spreading the Lotus Sutra “in the dreadful and evil world” at the beginning of the Latter Age of Degeneration.

It was thanks to this kind of fervor and devout faith that the forms of Buddhism propagated by Nichiren and the Pure Land patriarchs would go on to become the most popular among Japanese lay Buddhists.

Here we can already see the “Buddhist dialectic” at play; the self-refinement of Buddhism, prompted by the pressures of rapidly changing social dynamics, through a myriad of internal discourses. As you can tell from the above exposition, prophecies played a large part in this, altering systems of belief in order to reconcile scripture with lived realities and, in the process, fulfilling themselves. Thus faith in Buddhist doctrine was reinvigorated and the new doctrines focused on salvation of the individual could proliferate. It’s no wonder then that the Kamakura period is considered one of the most important turning points in the history of Japanese religion.

However, this is still the tip of the iceberg, and we have not yet fully answered the inquiry around “Namu Myoho Renge Kyo.” You see, “Myoho Renge Kyo” is just one of the many names given to the Lotus Sutra, with the original Sanskrit title being “Saddharma Pundarika Sutram.” Tendai employs the mantra “Namu Saddharma Pundarika Sutram” in some ritual contexts, so why don’t any of the Nichiren schools adopt that practice instead? Why that name in particular? Moreover, why do they place so much stock in the guidance of Nichiren, a priest who was inauspiciously born to a lowly fisherman’s family and never attained any high-ranking position within the Buddhist clergy?

Up until now, we have covered few beliefs that rational scholars would find abrasive to their sensibilities. Talk of prophecy dabbles in the realm of the supernatural, sure, but there is nothing unusual about men finding connections between their circumstances and those outlined in old supposedly prophetical texts. The human mind is drawn to patterns, after all, so it is quite natural for such lines to be drawn.

However, to find the remaining pieces of this puzzle, we must delve deeper into the religious mind and explore the Mahayana Buddhist idea that Shakyamuni Buddha and the Bodhisattvas described in the scriptural texts are still very much alive.

Until then, thank you all very much for reading.

To be continued…