The argument advanced here is not that Nichiren did or did not embrace original enlightenment thought, but that Tendai original enlightenment thought and Nichiren’s teaching both represent different appropriations and developments of a new, distinctively medieval paradigm of Buddhist liberation, embodied in different social and institutional contexts and given a different ideological thrust. The example of Nichiren and his later tradition will serve to illustrate that the doctrines of the new Kamakura Buddhism cannot be understood simply as emerging from the matrix of medieval Tendai original enlightenment thought, nor simply as reacting against it, nor as retaining its philosophical subtleties while eliminating its morally ambiguous areas. Rather, the various streams of both medieval Tendai and the new Kamakura Buddhism, in a complex web of mutual influences, now appropriating, now rejecting, together developed and were themselves expressions of a shared “nonlinear” reconception of the problem of salvation, which in each case was fleshed out in the specifics of a different religious vision and ideological orientation. (Page 241)