BEN AJARI NISSHŌ (1221-1323), the eldest of the six, was sixty-two at the time of Nichiren’s death. He was based at the Hokkeji, a temple he had established at Hamado in Kamakura, and, together with Daikoku Ajari Nichiro, headed the community of Nichiren’s followers in Kamakura. His lineage became known as the Nisshō or Hama monryū.

DAIKOKU AJARI NICHIRŌ (1245-1320) was based at the Myōhonji, which he had founded, in Hikigayatsu in Kamakura, and also headed the Honmonji in Ikegami. He is additionally regarded as the founder of the Hondoji at Hiraga in Shimösa. His followers were known as the Hikigayatsu or Nichirō monryū. Among his many talented disciples, Higo Ajari Nichizō (1269-1342) was the first monk of the Hokkeshū to preach Nichiren’s doctrine in Kyoto.

MINBU AJARI NIKŌ (1253-1314) was based in Mobara in Kazusa and later became the second chief abbot of Minobu (Nichiren is regarded as the first).

BYAKUREN AJARI NIKKO (1246-1333) was active in Suruga, Kai, and Izu. A disagreement between him and the aforementioned Nikō led in 1289 to the first schism among Nichiren’s followers. Nikkō established himself at Omosu near Fuji, and his line is called the Fuji monryū or Nikko monryū.

IYO AJARI NITCHŌ (1252-1317) was based at Mama and Wakamiya in Shimōsa, where he assisted the efforts of Nichijō (Toki Jōnin), originally a prominent lay supporter of Nichiren who had taken clerical vows after his death. Nitchō was Toki Jōnin’s adopted son. However, for reasons that are not clear, there was a break between the two, and Nitchō left the area around 1292, retiring to Omosu, where he joined Nikko. Nichijō’s line came to be known as the Nakayama lineage, after Nakayama in Shimōsa, where its main temple was located.

RENGE AJARI NICHIJI (1250-?) was based at Matsuno in Suruga. However, in 1295, he embarked on a journey, determined to spread Nichiren’s teaching beyond the confines of Japan, and is said to have traveled north to Hokkaido, crossing over into northern China and Manchuria. It has been argued that he did in fact reach Mongolia, but the evidence is inconclusive. (Page 302)

In Nichiren’s case, the single-practice orientation was connected at least in part with the social composition of his following. He himself was a person of common origins, from a remote part of eastern Japan, without powerful backers, and whose followers were chiefly middle- and lower-ranking samurai – persons on the periphery, if not altogether outside, the “influential parties system” or kenmon taisei. At the same time, Nichiren’s criticisms of leading religious figures and institutions, and of the rulers and officials who were their patrons, resulted in sanctions and suppressions that further marginalized him and his followers and prompted increasing self-definition in opposition to existing religious and political authority. In this process, Nichiren’s assimilation of the new paradigm of enlightenment to an exclusive practice became, in effect, a challenge to the establishment. In his reading of the paradigm, direct access to enlightenment was possible only by the teaching of which he and his disciples were the bearers – a Dharma received directly from Śākyamuni Buddha for the Final Dharma age and alone capable of saving the country from disaster. Thus, in his reading, the locus of authority and legitimacy was made to shift, and it was not the court, nor the bakufu, nor the clerics of the leading shrines and temples, but Nichiren and his disciples who held the center stage of their historical moment. (Page 298-299)

As in much of medieval Tendai thought and various schools of Kamakura Pure Land, Zen, and other traditions, no direct causal connection is drawn in Nichiren’s thought between good deeds or the cultivation of virtue and the realization of enlightenment. … Nichiren did not stress observance of the precepts as necessary to liberation: the merit of keeping precepts is already contained within the daimoku. Moreover, he claimed that one who chants the daimoku cannot be drawn by evil acts into the lower realms of transmigration. Nichiren also participated in the discourse of the “realization of Buddhahood by evil persons” (akunin jōbutsu), usually in teachings to his warrior followers:

Whether or not evil persons (akunin) of the last age attain Buddhahood does not depend on whether their sins are light or heavy but rests solely upon whether or not they have faith in this sūtra. You are a person of a warrior house, an evil man involved day and night in killing. Up until now you have not abandoned the household life [to become a monk], so by what means will you escape the three evil paths? You should consider this well. The heart of the Lotus Sūtra is that [all dharmas] in their present status are precisely the Wonderful [Dharma], without change of original status. Thus, without abandoning sinful karma, one attains the Buddha Way.

This does not mean that Nichiren’s teaching legitimates evildoing, or that his community lacked for moral guidelines. His letters and other writings show that, in making personal decisions or advising his followers, Nichiren drew on a variety of ethical sources. Prominent among these is Confucian social morality, with its emphasis on the virtues of benevolence, righteousness, good faith, loyalty, and filial piety. Other ethical sources for Nichiren were generic Buddhist morality, including the virtues of almsgiving, forbearance, and equanimity; and the emerging warrior ethos, with its emphasis on courage and personal honor. However, such values are not central to Nichiren’s formal doctrine, which does not explicitly articulate a set of ethical principles. Only faith in the Lotus Sūtra and the rebuking of “slander of the Dharma” are specifically enjoined as necessary to salvation.

While [Nichiren’s] single-practice orientation is itself open to criticism for the ease with which it can translate into dogmatic self-assertion, such observations miss the underlying logic of Nichiren’s aim. This appears to have been not to eradicate the spectrum of religious interpretations current in his day, but to undercut their bases in other traditions and assimilate them to the Lotus Sūtra. This is illustrated in the following passage:

Once they enter the great ocean of the Lotus Sūtra, the teachings preached before the Lotus are no longer shunned as provisional. It is the mysterious virtue of the great ocean of the Lotus Sūtra that, once they are encompassed in the single flavor of Namu-myōhō-renge-kyō, there is no longer any reason to refer to the distinct names “nenbutsu, ” “precepts,” “shingon, ” or “Zen.” Thus the commentary states, “When the various rivers enter the sea, they assume the same unitary salty flavor. When the various kinds of wisdom [represented by the provisional teachings] enter the true teaching, they lose their original names.

Nichiren’s teaching is no less exclusivistic for its attempt to be all-encompassing, but it should be understood as one of a number of contemporaneous attempts at subsuming all teachings, virtues, and possibilities within a single formulation. (Page 297)