Two Buddhas, p85Nichiren’s understanding of dharma slander included not only verbal disparagement, as the term suggests, but the mental act of rejection or disbelief. As he declared, “To be born in a country where the Lotus Sūtra has spread and neither to have faith in it nor practice it, is disparaging the dharma.” In other words, one could be guilty of “disparaging the dharma” without malign intent, even without knowledge that one was doing so, simply by following a teacher who had set the Lotus aside in favor of lesser, provisional teachings. Nichiren initially leveled, this charge against Hōnen’s followers but later expanded it to include both Shingon and Tendai adepts who subordinated the Lotus Sūtra to the esoteric teachings; practitioners of Zen, who emphasized its “wordless transmission” over the Buddhist scriptures in general; as well as movements to revitalize precept observance, which based themselves on precepts grounded in provisional teachings.
Category Archives: WONS
Repenting After Committing a Serious Crime
You also asked in your letter to be told where Yashirō, who killed men, would be reborn in his next life. As sure as a needle sinks in the water and rain falls from the sky, a man who kills an ant falls to hell and a man who cuts off a dead body cannot avoid falling into the three evil regions of hell, hungry spirits, and beasts. Much more so, a man who kills a human. However, even a large boulder can float with the power of a boat, and a great fire can be extinguished with the power of water. Likewise, if a man does not repent for even a small transgression, he necessarily falls into an evil path, but if a man repents after committing a serious crime, his transgression will be expiated. There are many examples to support this.
Kōnichi-bō Gosho, A Letter to Nun Kōnichi, Writings of Nichiren Shōnin, Biography and Disciples, Volume 5, Pages 51
The One Teaching Powerful Enough to Liberate People
Two Buddhas, p84-85Nichiren 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.”
The Merit Contained in Only Five Chinese Characters
QUESTION: I would like to know how great the merit contained in only five Chinese characters of myō, hō, ren, ge, and kyō can be.
ANSWER: The great ocean receives the whole flow of rivers from all over the world; the great earth contains everything including sentient and insentient beings; the wish-fulfilling gem rains all kinds of treasures; the King of the Brahma Heaven controls the whole Triple World (realms of desire, no desire, and non-form). Likewise, the five Chinese characters of myō, hō, ren, ge, and kyō possess the merits of all phenomena. In short, they contain everything in the Ten Realms from hell to the realm of Buddhas, including those that exist in the lands and the lands themselves.
Hokke Daimoku Shō, Treatise on the Daimoku of the Lotus Sūtra, Writings of Nichiren Shōnin, Faith and Practice, Volume 4, Page 39
Dharma Slanderers
Two Buddhas, p83What particularly drew Nichiren’s attention in the “Parable” chapter was the long segment of the final verse section detailing the horrific karmic retribution incurred by those who disparage the Lotus Sūtra. The act of “disparaging the dharma” (S. saddharmapratiksepa, J. hōbō, also translated as “slandering” or “maligning” the dharma) was considered so grave a sin that in East Asia it was sometimes appended to the list of the five heinous deeds. The term occurs frequently in the Mahāyāna sūtras, where it often means maligning the Great Vehicle scriptures; in its Indic context, it was probably intended to counter the mainstream Buddhist criticism that the Mahāyāna was not the Buddha’s teaching.
Japanese Buddhists, however, understood theirs to be a “Mahāyāna country.” Unlike the situation faced by the Lotus Sūtra’s compilers, no one questioned the Mahāyāna’s legitimacy. Nichiren therefore took the term “dharma slander” in a different sense, to mean rejecting the Lotus Sūtra in favor of provisional teachings.
Insufficient Faith
QUESTION: Is there a definitive statement proving that the bodhisattvas do not attain Buddhahood if the Two Vehicles do not attain it?
ANSWER: It is stated in the thirty-sixth fascicle of the Nirvana Sūtra: “A person who believes that people possess the Buddha-nature but that not necessarily all the people have it is called a man of insufficient faith.” If this is true, bodhisattvas in various pre-Lotus sūtras are all icchantika (a man without faith and virtue and without the possibility of attaining Buddhahood). These sūtras do not acknowledge the attainment of Buddhahood by the Two Vehicles as well as by the bodhisattvas. In this sense, as long as the attaining of Buddhahood by the Vehicles is not acknowledged, attaining Buddhahood by the bodhisattvas is not possible in the pre-Lotus sūtras preached during the first forty years or so.
Nizen Nijō Bosatsu Fu-sabutsu Ji, Never-Attaining Buddhahood by the Two Vehicles and Bodhisattvas in the Pre-Lotus Sūtras, Writings of Nichiren Shōnin, Doctrine 3, Page 220
The Time for Aggressive of Persuasive Propagation
Grand Master Chang-an says in his Annotations on the Nirvana Sūtra, fascicle 8, that whether we should adopt the aggressive means of propagation or the persuasive means must be decided according to the condition of the time, and therefore, we cannot say either one way or the other. Grand Master T’ien-t’ai says of this in the Words and Phrases of the Lotus Sūtra, fascicle 8: “It all depends on the time. Sometimes resort to the aggressive means, other times use the persuasive means.” For instance, we cannot harvest rice by cultivating rice paddies and planting rice seeds at the end of autumn.
Kaimoku-shō, Open Your Eyes to the Lotus Teaching, Writings of Nichiren Shōnin, Doctrine 2, Page 112
Revealing the Possibility of Buddhahood for All
Two Buddhas, p72This second chapter of the Lotus Sūtra represents the Buddha as declaring, “I will now definitely expound the truth” and “having openly set aside skillful means, I will teach only the highest path.” These statements, together with the passage from the Lotus Sūtra’s introductory scripture, Sūtra of Immeasurable Meanings — “For more than forty years I have expounded the dharma in all manner of ways through adeptness in skillful means, but the core truth has still not been revealed” — constituted for Nichiren significant proof that the Lotus Sūtra superseded all prior, provisional teachings. They were, he said, like a great wind scattering dark clouds, the full moon appearing in the heavens, or the orb of the sun blazing in the blue sky, revealing the possibility of buddhahood for all.
Governing the World with Lotus Sūtra
Before the transmission of Buddhism to China and Japan, non-Buddhist teachings of the Three Emperors, Five Rulers, and Three Sages were used to educate the people and govern the country. As a result, human hearts hardened and virtue declined while evil flourished. Nevertheless, the depth of wisdom of the non-Buddhist doctrines did not pose a sufficient challenge to the depth of evil. As the country could not be governed by non-Buddhist teachings, Buddhism was adopted from India to govern the country peacefully. This was due solely to the superiority of Buddhism responding to the heart of the people.
What we call geten (non-Buddhist scriptures) today are not the same as the original gekyō (non-Buddhist sūtras). When Buddhism was transmitted, confrontation arose between non-Buddhist scriptures and Buddhist sūtras. Over time, however, the non-Buddhist scriptures were deemed inferior and cast aside, by both the king and the people. While supporters of non-Buddhist scriptures conceded to advocates of Buddhist sūtras — thus ending the dispute — they adopted the superior points of Buddhist sūtras and added them to their own. These are the non-Buddhist scriptures as we know them today. Ignorant kings, however, mistakenly thought that these non-Buddhist scriptures were originally excellent.
Moreover, as the quality of the human heart diminished, evil wisdom increased at the expense of virtuous wisdom. As a result Hinayāna sūtras, which are counted among the Buddhist scriptures, could not control the rising evil and the world fell into disarray. Mahāyāna sūtras were then spread to govern the world, achieving a measure of order. However, the world fell into disarray once again even with the wisdom of Mahāyāna sūtras. Thereafter, the wisdom of the One Vehicle Sūtra, the Lotus Sūtra, was employed to govern the world at the present time.
Chie Bōkoku Gosho, Evil Wisdom Destroying the Country, Volume 7, Followers II, Pages 84-85
Syncing the Ten Realms and Three Thousand Realms with the Buddha
Two Buddhas, p71-72The interpenetration of ten realms reveals that, in principle, there is no difference between an ordinary person and a buddha; both embody the three thousand realms in a single thought-moment. But in ordinary, deluded persons the buddha realm remains dormant and unrealized, and they are trapped by suffering. In the case of a buddha, the buddha realm is fully expressed; that is, all the other nine realms are illuminated, elevated, and redirected by it to work in an enlightened way. For Nichiren, this fully realized state was embodied in the daimoku. We could say that chanting the daimoku aligns or “syncs” the ten realms and three thousand realms of the practitioner with those of the Buddha, enabling direct realization in the very act of practice.