Born [December 14, 1861] in Edo just seven years before the transfer of the imperial capital from Kyoto was to change the city’s name to Tokyo, Tanaka Chigaku was the third son of a physician named Tada Genryū and his second wife. Tada Genryū died in February 1870, a few months after the death of his wife, but his influence upon his youngest child seems to have been considerable. He was a Buddhist, in early life a devotee of the Amidist Pure Land sect and later a convert to Nichiren, and he is reputed to have instilled in his children a deep commitment to Nichiren doctrine and, concomitantly, an ingrained distrust of the established church. Apparently an enthusiastic tippler, Genryū, in his cups, once exclaimed, ‘If you want to write good poems, don’t become a poet; if you want to understand Buddhism, don’t become a priest. Miso that smells like miso is not good miso.’ Yet the Nichiren priesthood seemed precisely the career for which Genryū’s third son was destined when young Tanaka, in a move presumably viewed by his half-brothers as a means of obtaining an eductaion, was enrolled, two months after his father’s death, as a novice in a Nichiren temple in northeastern Tokyo. What was to be a relatively short academic career thus began in the spring of 1870, and during its course Tanaka moved successively from scholar to scholar and from temple to temple, mostly in the northern part of Tokyo and nearby Chiba prefecture, until finally, in 1874, he entered the Daikyō-in, the newly opened Nichiren academy, a predecessor of Risshō University.

By this time he had adopted the name Tanaka Chigaku, the surname as a result of government order (Tada Genryū’s original family name had been Tanaka) and the sobriquet “Chigaku” (‘Wisdom and learning’) in honor of an early teacher, Chikyō-in Nisshin. According to his biographers, within two years of his enrollment in the academy, Tanaka became disillusioned by what he regarded as the discrepancies between the accommodating views of Nichiren sectarian leaders, caught up in the problem of preserving their institutions in the midst of the government’s support of Shinto, and the absolutist doctrines of Nichiren himself. It is not inconceivable, however, that Tanaka, like many other students, simply became frustrated with the stiff requirements of formal education and, consciously or not, began to seek an excuse for dropping out. At any rate, he fell victim to pneumonia in December 1876 as he began to prepare for his graduation examinations, and the next two years were marked by recurrences of illness whenever he seemed ready to resume his studies.

These were not, however, years of idleness. Tanaka continued to study on his own the Lotus Sutra, the works of Nichiren, and some of the ancient texts of Japanese history. He read voraciously, and by the time he finally determined to renounce his priestly vows early in 1879, he had most likely acquired an understanding of Buddhist fundamentals deeper than that of students whose education followed the ordinary course. A short, unsuccessful venture as an adoptive son of the Tanuma family then followed, at the instigation of his half-brothers, but by the late spring of 1880 Tanaka had determined to embark upon a career as a lay propagandist of ‘true’ Nichiren Buddhism.