[T]his acute sense of the inability of ordinary human beings living in the Final Age to emulate their spiritual predecessors has led to what would be described, in a Christian context, as “dispensationalism”: that is, the idea that while certain teachings and practices may have been appropriate in an earlier age, we now find ourselves in a completely different era (or “dispensation”) in which a wholly new spiritual repertoire is called for. Thus the arguments set forth by the Japanese Buddhist teacher Hōnen (1133-1212) in favor of discarding all Buddhist scriptures other than those concerning the “original vow” of the Buddha Amitābha (Jpn. Amida) were based on the idea that a fundamentally new age was now in effect. Likewise, while his compatriot Nichiren (1222-1282) argued that his advocacy of chanting the daimoku was fully in accord with the intention of the Buddha Śākyamuni, he was also well aware that this constituted a radically new practice in the eyes of his fellow Buddhists, and he argued for its legitimacy precisely on the basis of such “dispensationalism.”

Thus, while in South, Southeast, and Inner Asia (including Tibet) the threat of the decline and ultimate demise of the Dharma served largely to elicit conformity with the existing tradition and to reinforce the importance of preserving whatever elements of the Dharma still remain, in East Asia a long series of Buddhist leaders —from the Pure Land teacher Tao-ch’o in 6th-century China to the Kamakura reformers of 13th-centuryJapan —found in the idea of mo-fa an incentive to innovation, often leading to the formulation of new religious ideas and practices of striking creativity.

The idea of decline, then, is clearly multivalent and has served a number of seemingly contradictory purposes in Buddhist religious history. Its significance in any given time and place—or for any given individual —will be influenced by a great number of factors, one of the most important of which is the presence, or absence, of a concept of mo-fa. The task of living within a prolonged period of the “Final Dharma” is quite different from that of facing the imminent demise of the Dharma as a whole, and it is hardly surprising that these two prospects should have evoked such different responses.