Nichiren was by no means the only person to condemn Hōnen’s exclusive nenbutsu teaching as “disparaging the dharma.” Other critics, however, based their objections on the widely held premise that the Buddha had taught multiple forms of practice for persons of different capacities; claiming exclusive validity for one practice alone was “disparaging the dharma” because it rejected the multitude of other Buddhist teachings and practices such as keeping the precepts, meditation, esoteric ritual performance, reciting sūtras, and so forth.

Nichiren’s criticism had a different thrust: namely, that the Pure Land teachings were provisional and therefore unsuited to the present time, the age of the Final Dharma. They did not set forth the mutual inclusion of the ten realms that enabled all persons to realize buddhahood here in this world, in this body, but instead deferred it to another realm after death. By his time, a generation or so after Hōnen, exclusive nenbutsu followers were specifically urging people to abandon the Lotus Sūtra, which they claimed was too profound for people in this benighted era. In Nichiren’s view, this was disparaging the dharma. To discourage people from practicing the Lotus Sūtra because it was beyond their capacity was far worse than direct verbal abuse of the sūtra, because it threatened to drive the Lotus into obscurity, closing off the one teaching powerful enough to liberate people of the present evil age. “The Lotus Sūtra is the eyes of all the buddhas,” he wrote. “It is the original teacher of Śākyamuni Buddha, master of teachings. One who discards even a single character or brush dot commits a sin graver than killing one’s parents ten million times or shedding the blood of all buddhas in the ten directions.”