Tanaka, on the one hand, inherited the totalizing vision of his medieval Nichiren Buddhist forebears, in which temporal government, and indeed, all worldly activities, would someday be based on the Lotus Sūtra. On the other hand, Tanaka’s reinterpretation was innovative, in being indissolubly linked to the modern imperial state. In the latter part of his career, he increasingly identified “the Lotus Sūtra” with the Japanese national essence, an interpretive move that raised the Japanese kokutai to the status of universal truth and served to legitimate the armed extension of Japanese empire.

[Following the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905)] Tanaka consciously shifted his efforts from internal reform of the Nichiren sect to “study of the national essence” (kokutaigaku), by which name he termed his attempt to interpret the Japanese kokutai from the standpoint of Nichirenshugi. The notion of Japan’s unique national essence formed the ideological pillar of the modern state; its key elements included the myth of an unbroken imperial line, descended directly from the Sun Goddess and her grandson, Emperor Jinmu, and the concept of the emperor as benevolent father to the “family” of his subjects. …

Tanaka first seriously addressed this issue in a lecture delivered in Nara in 1904, shortly before the war’s outbreak, to some two hundred participants in a study training session whom he had taken on a visit to Emperor Jinmu’s tomb. It was published as a pamphlet titled Seikai tōitsu no tengyō (The divine task of world unification), and several thousand copies distributed to soldiers departing for the front. Its central argument, in Buddhist terms, was that the kokutai is the truth to be interpreted (shoshaku), and Nichirenshugi, that which interprets it (nōshaku). Tanaka’s hermeneutical strategy, here and in later writings, was to homologize the Lotus Sūtra, or, more specifically, Nichirenshugi, with the Japanese national essence through a logic of analogy and numerical correspondence. From the legendary account of Emperor Jinmu’s founding of the Yamato kingdom, as related in the eighth-century chronicle Nihon Shoki, Tanaka drew three phrases describing Jinmu’s achievements—”fostering righteousness, accumulating happiness, and increasing glory”—which he identified as the three original acts that had established the Japanese kokutai. These he in turn equated with the three imperial regalia—the sword, mirror and jewel—and with Nichiren’s three great secret Dharmas: the daimoku, the object of worship, and the ordination platform. The mission of Japan was the divine task of world unification inherited from Emperor Jinmu, to extend the blessings of the kokutai to all people. It would be spearheaded by the emperor, who was at once both Jinmu’s lineal heir and also the “wheel-turning monarch” of Buddhist tradition, who supports and protects the Dharma. At the same time, its fulfillment required the spiritual basis provided by Nichirenshugi; incomplete religions, such as Christianity or other forms of Buddhism, could never supply it. “Nichirenism is precisely Japanism,” Tanaka wrote. “Nichiren Shōnin appeared in order to interpret Japan’s spiritual essence as Buddhist doctrine, providing all humanity throughout the ten thousands years of the Final Dharma age with the ultimate refuge. The great teaching of Nichiren is the religion for Japan, and the religion for Japan is the religion for the world.”

From this point, Tanaka’s writings increasingly suggest that the underlying purpose of the Lotus Sūtra and Nichiren’s teaching was to explicate the Japanese national essence.

The appeal of [Tanaka’s] vision to followers and sympathizers … lay not merely in its immediacy but in the central role it assigned to Japan and its resonance with both official ideology and the popular patriotic sentiments of the day, which had been fanned by Japanese victories in the wars with China (1894-1895) and Russia (1904-1905), the annexation of Korea (1910) and later imperial expansion on the Asian continent. The “Buddhahood of the land,” in the sense of peace, just rule, and the manifestation of the Lotus Sūtra’s blessings in all spheres of human activity, was something Nichiren himself had envisioned. But neither Nichiren nor his medieval followers had understood this goal as necessarily allied to any specific regime or form of government; whether court or Bakufu, any government that upheld the Lotus Sūtra would serve to help realize this ideal. For Tanaka, however, “the Buddhahood of the land” was to be exemplified, mediated, and extended to all humanity by the imperial Japanese state. Already in Shūmon no ishin, he had written:

At that time [when the kaidan is established]—being exhaustively interpreted in connection with our holy founder Nichiren, who in his own person manifested the original Buddha Śākyamuni and the original Dharma of the Lotus Sūtra—the sacred plan of the divine ancestors of great Japan, her wondrous and unsurpassed national essence [kokutai], and her imperial house, divinely descended in a direct line, will manifest their true worth. Thus the authority of our teaching and the light of our country will fill the universe and instruct the people of all nations. This will accomplish the spiritual unification of the world, without need of a single soldier or sword.

Nichiren Buddhism and Japan, in Tanaka’s view, shared a divine mission to unite the world.

Tanaka’s vision underwent elaboration in his lectures and writings over the … years. He divided the mappō era, the Final Dharma age for which the Lotus Sūtra was intended, into three periods: the founding period, when Nichiren had lived and declared his teaching; the era of dissemination, when faith in the Lotus Sūtra was destined to spread; and the era of unification, when all people would embrace it. For Tanaka, this era of unification would be the “golden age” of ōbutsu myōgō—the merging of the ruler’s dharma with the Buddha Dharma—another phrase he derived from the Sandai hihō shō. At this time, a majority of the nation having been converted, the Diet would pass an amendment revising the constitutional article allowing for freedom of religion and make Nichiren Buddhism the state creed, and an imperial edict would be issued to build the kaidan, thus formalizing the merger of Buddhism and government. Politics, society, ethics, thought—all would all be unified on the basis of the Lotus Sūtra, a goal that Tanaka referred to as the “realization of Buddhahood by the land” (kokudo jōbutsu). This goal was “not like heaven or the Pure Land, which are never actually expected to appear before our eyes. We predict, envision, and aim for it as a reality that we will definitely witness.”

Central to Tanaka’s millenarian vision was the honmon no kaidan, the ordination platform of the origin teaching, to be established, according to the Sandai hihō shō, by “imperial edict and shogunal decree.” Substituting the relevant political structure of his own day, Tanaka argued that the mandate for the kaidan’s establishment would now have to come from the Imperial Diet; it would be, in his terms, a kokuritsu kaidan, a “national kaidan” or, literally, a “kaidan established by the state.” To win a majority of sympathizers in both Diet houses, it would be necessary to convert a majority of the Japanese populace by shakubuku. Tanaka depicted a scenario in which, one by one, other religions acknowledging the superior righteousness of the Lotus Sūtra, would declare their own dissolution and convert. Within Buddhism, Hossō and Kegon would capitulate first; their temples, passing to the Nichiren sect, would be respectfully preserved and offered to the state as national treasures. Tendai and Shingon would follow suit, and so, after some initial resistance, would Jōdo and Zen. Jōdo Shinshū and Christianity would resist mightily, and a great Dharma battle would ensue, but before the fifty years were out, the whole nation would embrace the one vehicle, and establishment of the kaidan would be proclaimed.

Tanaka first addressed [his reform ideas] in detail in his 1901 essay Shūmon no ishin (Restoration of the [Nichiren] sect), a manifesto for radical sectarian reform. Tanaka excoriated the traditional Nichiren temple institutions of his day as outmoded, parochial, and indifferent to the needs of modern Japan. “Nichiren Buddhism should not exist for its own sake,” he admonished, “but for the sake of the nation. It is the doctrine that can protect the Japanese state, and to which, in the future, all humanity must inevitably convert.” Toward Buddhist practice, he urged a spirit of restoration and in particular, a return to Nichiren’s foundational emphasis on shakubuku, directly challenging the teachings of other sects. Under the Tokugawa regime (1603-1868), when Buddhism had been incorporated into the shogunate’s administrative apparatus and religious debates were prohibited by law, the practice of assertive proselytizing by shakubuku had been largely abandoned. Doctrinal interpretation had assumed an accommodationist stance, one inherited by Nichiren sectarian leaders of the Meiji period. In addition, in the wake of the brief but violent anti-Buddhist persecution (haibutsu kishaku) that had erupted in the early 1870s, Buddhist leaders saw their best chance of institutional survival in transsectarian cooperation. Tanaka despised this ecumenical move; Nichiren had taught that only the Lotus Sūtra could protect the country, and, now that Japan was struggling to assume a place among the world’s powers, refutation of inferior teachings by shakubuku was what the times demanded.

The first person to re-envision the establishment of the kaidan in a modern context was Tanaka Chigaku (1861-1931). As a young man, Tanaka had abandoned his training for the priesthood of Nichirenshū, the chief denomination of Nichiren Buddhism, to embark on a career of lecturing and proselytizing as a lay teacher. What he advocated was not the traditional Nichiren Buddhism of temples and priests but “Nichirenshugi [Nichirenism],” a popularized, lay-oriented Nichiren doctrine applicable to contemporary social realities. In particular, he saw Nichirenshugi as providing a spiritual basis for Japan as a modern state, and “the fusion of Dharma and nation” (hōkoku myōgō) would be his lifelong concern. In 1881 Tanaka founded the Rengekai (Lotus Blossom Society) in Yokohama to propagate Nichirenshugi ideals. It was reorganized in 1885 as the Risshō Ankokukai (after Nichiren’s Risshō ankoku ron) and again in 1914 as the Kokuchūkai, or “Pillar of the Nation Society” (after Nichiren’s words, “I will be the pillar of Japan”).

Nichiren had taught that Buddhism for the time of mappō consisted in essence of “three great secret Dharmas” (sandai hihō) implicit in the depths of the origin teaching (honmon) of the Lotus Sūtra—the “origin teaching” being the latter half of the sūtra, which presents itself as the teaching of an eternal Buddha who constantly abides in this world. These three secret Dharmas are (1) the daimoku, or invocation of the Lotus Sūtra’s title, “Namu-myōhō-renge-kyō,” the central practice of Nichiren’s Buddhism and said by him to encompass all the eternal Buddha’s merits and virtues; (2) the object of worship (honzon), the calligraphic maṇḍala that Nichiren had devised, depicting the assembly of the Lotus Sūtra as the eternal Buddha’s enlightened realm; and (3) the “ordination platform.” The first two Nichiren had himself discussed in detail. But, while some of his later writings make reference to the “ordination platform of the origin teaching” (honmon no kaidan), no authenticated work of his explains precisely what he meant by this. Only this one writing, the Sandai hihō shō, clearly presents it as an officially sponsored ordination platform, to be erected in the future when “the ruler and his ministers” have embraced the Lotus Sūtra.

However, the Sandai hihō shō does not survive in Nichiren’s handwriting, and in the modern period his authorship has been heatedly disputed. In particular, in the years following Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War, in the mood of revulsion against institutional Buddhism’s support for the nation’s ill-judged imperialist venture, some scholars of the Nichiren tradition denounced the work as a forgery and denied that Nichiren would ever have embraced a state-sponsored kaidan as a religious ideal. Nonetheless, from the time of Buddhism’s introduction to Japan in the sixth century, the ordination of monks had at least in principle been regulated by the imperial court, and the four ordination platforms existing in Nichiren’s day were all court sponsored. He and his rather marginal religious community existed outside this official system of ordination, and it seems quite possible—whether he personally wrote the Sandai hihō shō or not—that he envisioned the establishment of an “ordination platform of the origin teaching” mandated by the court and the Bakufu, the two ruling structures of his day, as symbolic of the official acceptance of his Buddhism. Whatever Nichiren’s own views, throughout premodern times, the future establishment of an imperially mandated kaidan was widely accepted within the Nichiren tradition as a task whose achievement Nichiren had entrusted to his later followers. Rival lineages sometimes debated over whose head temple would house the eventual kaidan structure. Yet at the same time, perhaps in part because the likelihood of realizing this goal seemed so remote, a corollary interpretation emerged in which the honmon no kaidan referred simply to that place, wherever it might be, where the follower of Nichiren embraces faith in the Lotus Sūtra and chants Namu-myōhō-renge-kyō—a reading closely linked to Nichiren’s own claim that wherever one chants the daimoku of the Lotus Sūtra is the Buddha land. Under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate in the early modern period (1603-1868), when religious proselytizing was severely restricted, this abstract interpretation of the kaidan became the predominant one. Not until the Meiji period (1868-1912), with a radical restructuring of Japan’s government, would the ideal of an imperially sponsored kaidan be reimagined as something achievable in concrete terms.

The rhetoric of leading Buddhist institutions of Nichiren’s day held that the “Buddha-Dharma” (buppō) and the ruler’s dharma (ōbō) exist in mutual dependence. In practice, this generally meant providing rites of thaumaturgical protection for the emperor or sovereign (tennō), the shogun, or other officials in exchange for a guarantee of privileges and economic support. For Nichiren, however, such reciprocal arrangements were untenable where the ruler opposed or was indifferent to the Lotus Sūtra, or revered it only as one teaching among many. Until those in power embraced the True Dharma, he held, devotees of the Lotus must maintain an oppositional stance, admonishing the ruler, even at the risk of their lives, to take faith in it for the sake of the country and the people’s welfare. In this way, Nichiren’s Lotus exclusivism contained an element critical of authority and established a moral basis for defiance of worldly rule in the Dharma’s name.

However, certain Nichiren writings indicate that, when at some future point the ruler should embrace the Lotus Sūtra, a more cooperative relationship of ōbō and buppō could then be instituted. Envisioning that time, he wrote: “Of my disciples, the monks will be teachers to the sovereign and retired sovereigns, while the laymen will be ranged among the ministers of the left and right.” But the clearest statement attributed to him of a future unity of Buddhism and worldly rule appears in an essay known as the Sandai hihō shō (On the three great secret Dharmas):

When the ruler’s dharma [ōbō] becomes one with Buddha-Dharma [buppō] and the Buddha-Dharma is united with the ruler’s dharma, so that the ruler and his ministers all uphold the three great secret Dharmas of the origin teaching . . . then surely an imperial edict and a shogunal decree will be handed down, to seek out the most superlative site, resembling the Pure Land of Sacred Vulture Peak [where the Lotus Sūtra was expounded], and there to erect the ordination platform. You have only to await the time. … Not only will this be [the site of] the dharma of the precepts [kaihō] by which all people of the three countries [India, China, and Japan] and the entire world (Skt. Jambudvīpa; Jpn. Ichienbudai) will perform repentance and eradicate their offenses, but [the great protector deities] Brahmā and Indra will also descend and mount this ordination platform.

The place of “the ruler” in Nichiren’s thought is a complex one. Nichiren himself often directed his efforts in shakubuku toward those in positions of power because of their influence over the people at large. But at the same time, he strictly subordinated the authority of worldly rule to that of the true Dharma of the Lotus. A ruler’s obligation, in his view, was to protect the Lotus Sūtra and the monks who upheld it while denying support to those who “disparage the Dharma”; this would ensure general peace and prosperity. If, on the contrary, the ruler gave support to misleading teachings, disaster would plague his realm. This claim was articulated in Nichiren’s famous admonitory treatise Risshō Ankoku Ron (Treatise on establishing the true [Dharma] and bringing peace to the land), submitted to the Bakufu in 1260.