[During the Sado period,] Nichiren elaborated three aspects of this “secret Dharma”—the daimoku, the object of worship, and the ordination platform—to be discussed below.

Being the teaching and transmission of the original Buddha, this “secret Dharma of the sole great matter” has its locus in the origin teaching (honmon) of the Lotus Sūtra. Up until this point, Nichiren had merely asserted the superiority of the Lotus Sūtra over all others; now he turned his attention to its latter fourteen chapters. “The teaching of three thousand realms in one thought-moment is found only in the origin teaching of the Lotus Sūtra, hidden in the depths of the text of the ‘Fathoming the Lifespan’ chapter,” he wrote. Where Chih-i had derived the doctrine of three thousand realms in one thought-moment from the trace teaching, specifically from the “Skillful Means” chapter, Nichiren now identified it with the origin teaching: thus the “one thought-moment containing three thousand realms” becomes the thought-moment of the original Buddha. This was not entirely a novel move but was closely related to medieval Tendai associations of kanjin or “mind-contemplation” specifically with the origin teaching. Nichiren’s emphasis on the origin teaching was distinctive, however, in that he defined it as uniquely related to the Final Dharma age. For him, the origin teaching mediated a “great secret Dharma,” embodied as the five characters of the daimoku, that had been transferred by Śākyamuni Buddha to the bodhisattvas who had emerged from beneath the earth, especially for the mappō era:

“Now at the beginning of the Final Dharma age, Hinayāna is used to attack Mahāyāna, the provisional is used to repudiate the true. East and west are confused, and heaven and earth are turned upside down. … The heavenly deities forsake the country and do not protect it. At this time, the bodhisattvas who sprang up from the earth will appear for the first time in the world to bestow upon the children the medicine of the five characters myōhō-renge-kyō.” (Page 260)

During the Sado exile, together with his reinterpretation of the five characters myōhō renge kyō as the teaching conferred by the original Buddha, a shift becomes evident in Nichiren’s understanding of the daimoku. No longer would he speak of it as a practice accommodated to ignorant persons. Rather, in his writings of this period, it becomes the vehicle of direct access to the Buddha’s enlightenment. It was also on Sado that Nichiren inscribed for the first time the calligraphic mandala or daimandara he devised, depicting the assembly of Eagle Peak, which served as an object of worship.

During the Sado period, Nichiren articulated his own teaching, distinct from the Tendai of his day. In this regard, his increasing self-identification with the work of Bodhisattva Superior Conduct is significant for several reasons. According to the Lotus Sūtra, Superior Conduct and the other bodhisattvas who sprang up from the earth are the Buddha’s “original disciples” (honge); that is, they are followers not of the historical Śākyamuni who attained enlightenment under the bodhi tree, but of the original Buddha, enlightened since the inconceivably remote past. In identifying his efforts with those of Bodhisattva Superior Conduct, Nichiren was claiming a direct connection to the original Buddha. In later years, he would state this explicitly: “Hidden in the fleshly heart within his breast, Nichiren maintains the secret Dharma of the sole great matter transferred from Śākyamuni, master of teachings, at Eagle Peak.” This claim was probably related to the idea that “the assembly on Sacred [Eagle] Peak is solemnly [present] and has not yet dispersed,” which occurs repeatedly in medieval Tendai texts. (Page 259-260)

Nichiren’s most eloquent statement of his victory over doubts appears in the Kaimoku shō (Opening of the eyes), completed during the first winter on Sado as a last testament to his followers in the event of his death. Together with the Kanjin honzon shō (The contemplation of the mind and the object of worship), it is considered one of his two most important writings: In it he explores various reasons why he, as the gyōja or votary of the Lotus Sūtra, meets with evils: because of his own past slanders; because such obstacles must be met in order to prove the truth of the sūtra’s words; because the protective kami have abandoned a country given over to slander of the True Dharma; and so forth. But the final point at which he arrives is a conviction that seeks no explanation for adversity and no guarantee of protection, a simple resolve to carry on with his mission, whatever may happen: “Let Heaven forsake me. Let ordeals confront me. I will not begrudge bodily life. … No matter what trials we may encounter, so long as we do not have a mind of doubt, I and my disciples will naturally achieve the Buddha realm.” (Page 259)

On 9/12/1271, Nichiren was arrested by Hei (Taira) no Yoritsuna (Hei no Saemon-no-jō, d. 1294), deputy chief of the samurai-dokoro, the board of retainers for the Hōjō, and sentenced to exile on the remote island of Sado in the Japan Sea. He was remanded to the custody of Honma Shigetsura, deputy governor of the island. His arrest was probably part of a larger bakufu move to subdue unruly elements in mobilizing their defenses against the Mongols. Nichiren himself wrote that, while he was formally sentenced to exile, Yoritsuna’s real intent was to have him beheaded that night, and he was taken to the execution grounds at Tatsunokuchi, but for some reason his life was spared. Later hagiographies, which elaborate on the drama of Nichiren’s arrest and near-beheading, say he was saved when a dazzling object streaked across the night sky, terrifying his executioners. Nichiren himself clearly felt that in some sense he had undergone a death and transformation: “On the twelfth night of the ninth month of last year, between the hours of the Rat and the Ox [11:00 pm to 3 am] the man called Nichiren was beheaded. This is his spirit (konpaku) that has come to the province of Sado and, in the second month of the following year, is writing this amid the snow.” (Page 257-258)

In later life, Nichiren’s conviction that all the people of Japan in his day were slanderers of the Lotus Sūtra would underscore his advocacy of shakubuku (to “break and subdue”), the “stern method” of teaching the Dharma by assertively rebuking “wrong views.” To the rhetoric of rebuking slander he assimilated both the Buddhist ideal of bodhisattva conduct and the Confucian virtues of loyalty and filial piety. One rebukes another’s slander to save that person from the hells and to provide the karmic connection to the Lotus that alone enables the realization of Buddhahood; thus Nichiren regarded shakubuku as an act of bodhisattva-like compassion and the highest form of service to that person. In addition, Nichiren argued that not to obey a sovereign or parent who opposed the Lotus Sūtra was the true form of loyalty and filial devotion, thus appropriating Confucian virtues in a way that could in some cases legitimize, or even mandate, defiance of worldly authority. (Page 255-256)

In keeping with Nichiren’s increased emphasis on the Lotus Sūtra as the exclusive vehicle of salvation in the Final Dharma age, his writings during the Izu period also show a growing concern with the evil of “slander of the Dharma” (hōbō), a sin elaborated in detail in a number of Mahāyāna sūtras but which Nichiren understood as willful disbelief in or rejection of the Lotus Sūtra. Believers in the Lotus Sūtra, in his thought, ordinarily need not fear rebirth in the hells, whatever their mis deeds: “Apart from discarding faith in the Lotus Sūtra to follow an advocate of provisional teachings, all other worldly evil acts cannot equal [in weight] the merit of the Lotus; thus those who have faith in the Lotus Sūtra will not fall into the three evil paths.” Slander of the Lotus Sūtra, however, “exceeds a thousand times” the five perverse offenses (gogyakuzai) of killing one’s mother, father, or an arhat; causing the body of the Buddha to bleed; or disrupting the harmony of the sangha; and is the cause for falling into the Avici Hell. Thus the practitioner of the Lotus has a duty to rebuke slander, whatever the personal consequences: “No matter what great good one may produce, even if one reads and transcribes the entire Lotus Sūtra a thousand or ten thousand times, or masters the way of contemplating the three thousand realms in one thought-moment, if one fails to rebuke enemies of the Lotus Sūtra, one cannot attain the Way.” (Page 255)

THE LAND OR COUNTRY (KORU): “Country” here means a land inhabited by a specific people. From the viewpoint that the “self” at present is the concatenation of all past deeds, living beings represent primary karmic recompense (shōhō) and the land they inhabit, dependent recompense (ehō). The two are understood as nondual (eshō funi), like body and shadow. Thus, in correspondence to the capacity of their inhabitants, lands or countries may be said to have an affinity to particular teachings. Following earlier Tendai thinkers such as Saichō, Annen, and Genshin, Nichiren argued that the country of Japan is related exclusively to the Lotus Sūtra. However, such claims on the part of Annen and others were inevitably linked to the authority of their religious institution, the Enryakuji on Mt. Hiei, as a major cultic center for the rites of nation-protection. In Nichiren’s hands, the same claim served to challenge the authority of Mt. Hiei and other leading cultic centers, as well as the rulers who supported them, by arguing that they did not preserve unadulterated the teaching of the Lotus, which alone could truly protect the country, but had contaminated it with Mikkyō, Pure Land, and other “inferior” teachings. Indeed, part of Nichiren’s idea of Japan was that it had become “a country of slanderers of the Dharma”; hence one disaster was destined to follow upon another. (Page 254-255)

THE TIME (ji). This category encompasses Nichiren’s understanding of the Final Dharma age, which, like most Buddhist scholars of the time, he held to have begun in 1052. Here again, the comparison with Hōnen is instructive. For Hōnen, in the time of mappō, people are of limited capacity, and the easy practice of the nenbutsu is therefore appropriate. For Nichiren, the Buddha specifically intended the daimoku of the Lotus Sūtra for the Final Dharma age; thus this age is the very time when the daimoku is destined to spread. This element of historical inevitability is a key aspect of Nichiren’s thought and would later form the topic of one of his major treatises: Senji shō (The selection of the time). By defining the beginning of the Final Dharma age as the precise historical moment when the Buddha’s ultimate teaching, the Lotus Sūtra, shall spread, Nichiren was able to reverse the conventional gloomy connotations of the last age and celebrate it as the best possible time to be alive. He represented great teachers of the past, such as Chih-i, Chan-jan, and Saichō, as lamenting their inability to see the dawn of this age. “Rather than be great rulers during the two thousand years of the True and Semblance Dharma ages, those concerned for their salvation should be common people now in the Final Dharma age. … It is better to be a leper who chants Namu-myōhō-renge-kyō than be chief abbot (zasu) of the Tendai school.” (Page 254)

[The concept of human capacity], often invoked in the context of mappō discourse, refers to innate receptivity or capacity for achieving salvation through a particular teaching. “Capacity” forms an element central to the exclusive nenbutsu teaching of Honen, who argued that the superiority of a teaching depends not on its depth of philosophical content but on whether or not people can actually practice it; hence he maintained that the nenbutsu, readily accessible even to those of limited capacity who predominate in this evil age, is superior. For Nichiren, as for Hōnen, “capacity” was to be understood in universal terms; being advocates of exclusive practices, neither man focused on individual differences in receptivity but maintained that all persons can be saved through a single teaching. However, Nichiren did not base his argument for the superiority of the Lotus Sūtra solely on ease of practice. The Lotus Sūtra is the seed of Buddhahood; that is, encountering the Lotus Sūtra is the condition that enables salvation. Nichiren described the people of the Final Dharma age as “not yet having good [roots]” (honmi uzen), that is, without prior connection to the Lotus Sūtra that would ensure their enlightenment. Thus, persons of this age should, he said, all be instructed in the Lotus Sūtra; whether they accept it or slander it, they will in either case receive the seed of Buddhahood and eventually become Buddhas. Nichiren vehemently rejected the position of exclusive nenbutsu adherents, that the Lotus should be set aside as too profound for the benighted people of the Final Dharma age. He maintained, with Chan-jan, that “the more true the teaching, the lower the stage [of the practitioners it can bring to enlightenment].” It was in part to stress the ability of the Lotus to save even the lowly and sinful that Nichiren would refer to himself, later in life, as “the son of lowly people” and born of a caṇḍāla family.” (Page 253)