[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)

Following the traditional T’ien-t’ai classificatory schema of the five periods and eight teachings (goji hakkyō), Nichiren assigned the Lotus Sūtra to the last period of the Buddha’s preaching life and asserted that all other, earlier sūtras are provisional (gon) while the Lotus alone is true (jitsu). For textual support, he often cited the passage from the Wu-liang-i Ching (Sūtra of Immeasurable Meanings), the introductory scripture to the Lotus, which states: “In these forty years and more, I [Śākyamuni] have not yet revealed the truth,” and another from the Lotus itself: “Among all those [sūtras] I [Śākyamuni] have preached, now preach, or will preach, this Lotus Sūtra is the hardest to believe, the hardest to understand.” Nichiren, like other T’ien-t’ai/Tendai scholars before him, saw the superiority of the Lotus Sūtra as lying in two teachings unique to this scripture and identified respectively with the trace and origin teachings—specifically, with the second chapter (“Skillful Means”) and the sixteenth (“Fathoming the Lifespan of the Tathāgata”). The first is that persons of the two vehicles can attain Buddhahood (nijō sabutsu). Since those practicing the two vehicles of the Śrāvaka and the Pratyekabuddha are followers of the Hinayāna path, a number of Mahāyāna sūtras deny their capacity for the Buddhahood. The Lotus Sūtra’s pronouncement that they can become Buddhas was taken as representing the potential for the Buddhahood of all beings. Second is the revelation of the Buddha’s enlightenment in the remote past (kuonjitsujō). According to the sūtra, all other Buddhas are merely emanations or manifestations of Śākyamuni. Moreover, Śākyamuni is said to have dis played himself as entering final nirvāṇa as a “skillful means” to arouse people’s longing for his teaching, but in reality, he is “always here in this Sahā world.” As noted before, the Buddha’s enlightenment in the far distant past was also widely understood in Nichiren’s time to mean that the Buddha is eternal and constantly abides in this world. Like other Tendai thinkers of his day, Nichiren also associated these two teachings respectively with “principle” (ri) and “actuality” (ji). (Page 253-253)

In his Izu writings, Nichiren began to refer to himself as the gyōja— practitioner or votary—of the Lotus Sūtra. In contrast to the more conventional term jikyōsha, one who “holds” the sūtra and recites it as his or her personal practice, gyōja for Nichiren meant one who lived the sūtra through one’s actions, experiencing in one’s own person the great trials that it predicts. His later writings would call this “reading with the body” (shikidoku). Having been exiled, as he saw it, for the sūtra’s sake, Nichiren rejoiced that even when not specifically reciting it, he was in effect now practicing the sūtra continuously, walking, standing, sitting, and lying down, throughout all the hours of the day and night. (Page 252)

Nichiren’s writings during the Izu exile show the emergence of several new elements in his thought. One is a deepened sense of personal connection between himself and the Lotus Sūtra. The sūtra speaks of trials and difficulties that will attend its practice and propagation in the evil age after the Buddha’s nirvāṇa. “Hatred and jealousy toward this sūtra abound even during the Buddha’s lifetime; how much more so after his nirvāṇa!” Such passages, cast in the form of predictions uttered by the Buddha or great bodhisattvas, probably served to give meaning to the opposition from established Buddhist schools encountered by the Mahāyāna community that had compiled the sūtra. In exile, Nichiren began to read them as speaking specifically to his own circumstances and expressed delight that he was able to live in his own person the persecutions predicted in the sūtra. “The devotees (jikyōsha) of the Lotus Sūtra in Japan have not yet experienced these scriptural passages. I alone have read them. This is the meaning [of the statement]: ‘We do not value bodily life but cherish only the unexcelled way.’ ” (Page 251-252)

Had Nichiren not publicly attacked Hōnen’s teaching and come into conflict with the bakufu, his following might have remained simply another branch of medieval Tendai, and an independent Nichiren Hokke tradition might never have emerged. However, his failure to win an official hearing, followed by the sentence of exile, forced him into an adversarial position from which he would begin to define his religion over and against that of the ruling elites. Of low status from the outset and now under criminal sentence, Nichiren would increasingly articulate his message from the standpoint of someone on the margins in challenge to the center. More precisely, he would elaborate a world view and mythic vision in which center and periphery were reversed. (Page 251)

The beginnings of Nichiren’s eventual thinking concerning the daimoku are, however, already present in his Ichidai shōgyō taii (The cardinal meaning of the sacred teachings of the Buddha’s lifetime), written in 1258, which declares the Lotus Sūtra to be the Buddha’s ultimate teaching and the purpose of his advent in this world. In this work, Nichiren identifies the five characters of the daimoku, the “Wonderful Dharma,” with the “three thousand realms in one thought-moment” (ichinen sanzen), an identification that would be central to his later writings. The Ichidai shōgyō taii also foreshadows the importance Nichiren would place on the concept of the “three thousand realms in one thought-moment” as the foundation of his mature thought. Unlike the majority of medieval Tendai kuden texts, Nichiren took as his doctrinal basis not the threefold contemplation in a single mind, but the three thousand realms in a single thought-moment. While both concepts express the idea of a perfectly interpenetrating universe in which all dharmas simultaneously encompass one another, the “three thousand realms in one thought-moment” explicitly includes two component principles that Nichiren would draw upon in developing his thought. One is the mutual inclusion of the ten dharma realms (jikkai gogu), which Nichiren used to focus more diffuse notions of nonduality on the mutual encompassing of the Buddha realm and the nine realms of unenlightened beings. The other is the concept of the land (kokudo seken), which is nondual with and inseparable from the beings who inhabit it. This concept would be important to Nichiren for two reasons. First, it underlies his claim that the land itself can manifest Buddhahood, that is, that the pure land can be realized in the present world. Second, its implication that insentient forms can manifest Buddhahood provided the doctrinal basis for his use of a mandala as a honzon or object of worship. (Page 248-249)

Although Nichiren’s thinking during this early period thus remained largely within the framework of Taimitsu, some of the beginnings of his distinctive teaching are nevertheless in evidence. Around this time, Nichiren began recommending to his disciples a practice that has since become almost uniquely associated with his tradition: chanting the daimoku or title of the Lotus Sūtra, in the formula “Namu-Myōhō-Renge-Kyō.” Myōhōrenge-kyō is the Sino-Japanese pronunciation for Miao-fa-lien-hua Ching, the title of the Chinese translation of the Saddharma-pundanka-sūtra made by Kumārajīva in 406 and regarded as authoritative throughout East Asia. “Namu,” a transliteration of the Sanskrit namo- (from namas), is an expression of devotion, veneration, praise, or the taking of refuge. Nichiren himself did not invent this practice. Use of the phrase “Namu-myōhōrenge-kyō” to express devotion to the Dharma is attested as early as the ninth century. Throughout the late Heian period, single phrases expressing faith in the Lotus were chanted—though not nearly as widely— in the same manner as the nenbutsu. These expressions were not unified but included such variants as “Namu- myōhō-renge-kyō,” “Namu-ichijōmyōden” (Namu to the wonderful scripture of the one vehicle), and so forth.42 Nichiren, however, was the first to define the daimoku as an exclusive practice and to provide it with a doctrinal foundation. His emphasis on the daimoku as an exclusive practice no doubt reflects the influence of Hōnen’s exclusive nenbutsu teaching, as others have pointed out. But the doctrinal basis he provided for it has deep roots in Taimitsu and also reflects his own distinctive synthesis. (Page 247-248)

At this early stage, Nichiren’s claims for the daimoku were still rather modest. He presents it as an alternative for “ignorant persons” unable to perform the introspective contemplation on the “three thousand realms in a single thought-moment,” which those “who have the resolve” are encouraged to pursue. As for the merits resulting from this practice, Nichiren says only that those who chant it, even without understanding its meaning, will not be pulled down by worldly evils into the lower realms of transmigration but will eventually reach the stage of nonretrogression. Not until much later in life would he declare that “all persons, whether they have wisdom or not, should alike abandon other practices and chant Namu-Myōhō-Renge-Kyō” and advocate the daimoku as the sole practice for the direct realization of Buddhahood in this very body. (Page 248)

Nichiren’s writings of this period also employ Tendai ideas of nonduality and original enlightenment to undermine the categories of Honen’s thought, such as the distinction between “self-power” (jiriki) and “Other-power” (tariki), or between this impure world (edo) and the pure land. For example:

The Lotus Sūtra establishes self-power but is not self-power. Since the “self” encompasses all beings of the ten realms, one’s own person from the outset contains the Buddha realm of both oneself and of all beings. Thus, one does not now become a Buddha for the first time. [The sūtra] also establishes Other-power but is not Other-power. Since the Buddha who is “other” is contained within us ordinary worldlings, this Buddha naturally manifests himself as identical to ourselves.

The originally enlightened Buddha of the perfect teaching abides in this world. If one abandons this land, toward what other land should one aspire? … The practitioner who believes in the Lotus and Nirvāṇa sūtras should not seek another place, for wherever one has faith in this sūtra is precisely the pure land. … For people of our day, who have not yet formed a bond with the Lotus Sūtra, to aspire to the Western Pure Land is to aspire to a land of rubble. (Page 247)

After returning to the Kiyosumidera, Nichiren set out again for the vicinity of the capital, where he studied on Mt. Hiei and at other locations. Virtually nothing is known of his studies on Mt. Hiei. During his stay there, the master of instruction (sōgakutō) was Shunpan, a leading Tendai scholar and the current patriarch of the Sugiu line of the Eshin school. Traditional accounts maintain that Nichiren received from Shunpan the transmission of the Eshin lineage, which some modern scholars have upheld. However, the few brief references to Shunpan in Nichiren’s writings convey no sense of a personal relationship. Takagi Yutaka argues that while Nichiren may have audited Shunpan’s public lectures, his common birth would have precluded his entry into a master-disciple relationship with so eminent a prelate. Moreover, his Kantō accent would have instantly marked him as native of the eastern provinces, despised as culturally backward by people of the Kyoto region. Takagi further suggests that Nichiren’s exclusion from the circles of initiates that formed around the leading masters on Mt. Hiei may have led to his habit of turning to written documents, rather than living teachers, for instruction and verification. The first of the four reliances, “Rely on the Dharma and not upon persons” (ehō fuenin), would be his lifelong motto. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that Shunpan was among those ranking Tendai prelates who vigorously opposed Hōnen’s teaching. Even if Nichiren’s only exposure to Shunpan were through public lectures, what he heard may have confirmed him in his objections to the exclusive nenbutsu. (Page 244-245)