The birth of a new era always involves trouble. The hull of the old system cannot be removed all at once, and the new powers themselves constantly experience crises from internal division. The Hojo regime was exactly like this. Following a series of extraordinary natural disasters and cataclysms, it was faced with social instability. In addition, there twice occurred unprecedented attacks from outside of Japan: the Mongol raids of 1274 and 1281.
Yet these domestic and external troubles were different from the symptoms of a period of decline. They were the kind of troubles that occur as trials during times of constructive development. They were not the kind of troubles that cause one to despair or to give up on the world but the kind that produce the will to courageously confront and reform the world. Under these circumstances, Nichiren did not understand Buddhism to be limited to saving individual souls, but rather understood it to extend to the salvation of society as a whole. Thus his hope to reform this world colored his faith in and devotion to the Lotus Sutra.
It is not hard to find reasons for this. Observing the trends and the troubles of the new age in Kamakura, Nichiren wrote his Establishment of True Dharma for the Protection of the Country and presented it to the government. In this treatise he proclaims the unification of Buddhism based on the Lotus Sutra and gives full force to social salvation by calling for Buddhism to be united, emphasizing that the nation could only be made secure if governed by politics based on the idea of a unified Buddhism.
He focused his criticism in this work on Honen’s Pure Land chanting of Amida Buddha’s name. Honen’s concentration on retaining the nembutsu as his focus of devotion, and rejecting everything else, was contrary to the unification of Buddhism that Nichiren sought. Nichiren also objected to the Pure Land nembutsu as an escape from the actual world. But Nichiren invited oppression upon himself by making such criticisms of Pure Land Buddhism. In 1261, at the age of forty, he was exiled to Izu Island for about two years, and in 1271 he was exiled for about three years to Sado Island. During this time he was subjected to frequent persecution, beginning his career filled with suffering. …
