The word mappō had been popularized by Genshin (942-1017) in his Ōjōyōshū (Essentials of Rebirth), and by the late Heian period it began to exercise a morbid fascination on the public mind. The mappō doctrine provided a way to account for the horrors multiplying daily, but at the same time instilled a new fear with its implications of an age when the Dharma would be lost. …

The first of the Buddhist leaders of the Kamakura period to formulate a doctrine specifically in terms of mappō thought was Hōnen Genkū-bō (1133-1212), founder of the Japanese Jodo or Pure Land sect. As a young man, Hōnen had studied at the prestigious Tendai institution on Mount Hiei, outwardly still prosperous but inwardly divided by ugly power struggles. The corruption he saw around him and his acute reflection on his own spiritual shortcomings confirmed in him the belief that “already the age is that of mappō, and its people all are evil.”

Hōnenk’s teaching set in motion a powerful new force in the realm of Japanese religion. Moreover, being first among the Buddhist leaders of the Kamakura period to propose a religion specifically for the age of the Final Dharma, Hōnen in large measure defined the vocabulary of contemporary mappō thought. Anyone else who took up the theme would be virtually compelled to address the issues he had raised: the nature of the time and the people’s capacity, whether people could attain enlightenment through their own efforts, whether monastic precepts remained valid in the Final Dharma age, difficulty versus ease of practice, and so forth.