ESSAY 05

Saint Nichiren — A Buddhist Priest

I. — Buddhism in Japan.

Religion is man's chiefest concern.

Properly understood, a man without a religion is unthinkable.

In this strange existence where our wishes are so much more than our faculties,

and our hopes exceed all that the world does or can give,

something must be done to remove these incongruities, in our thought at least, if not in our actions as well.

Indeed we often hear some say that they are "men of no religion."

By that they simply mean that they do not sign their names to any distinct set of dogmas,

own no order of priests as their guides,

and pay no homage to any wooden or metallic or psychic image as their god.

But a religion they nevertheless have.

The Inscrutable within them is tamed in some way,

be it by Mammon-Worship or Whiskey-Oblations or some other soporific or sedative method of his own choosing.

A man's religion is his own explanation of life;

and some explanation of it is an absolute necessity for his well-being in this world of strifes.

Then that all-important question of death, the hope of the poor and the dread of the rich — that is the question of all questions.

Where death is, religion must be;

a sure sign of our weakness it may be, but withal also of our noble birth, and of deathlessness within us.

Not to die by dying, — that is what all the sons of Adam yearn after,

and we Japanese no less than the Hebrews or the Hindoos of famed religiosity.

And for twenty-five centuries before we heard of any thing about Resurrection, we have managed to die in some fashion,

some of us in very creditable fashion, thanks for all the good religions we have had.

With this beautiful land as our earthly home,

with cherry blossoms to adorn our joyous spring, and maples to paint our serene autumn, and peaceful domesticity as our lot in life,

existence has been a burden to us only very seldom, and death has been grievous unto us so much the more.

With our desire to live "a thousand and eight thousand years," the thought of death was a double pain,

to be alleviated only by a faith that could introduce us into a still better land, be it a saints' home in Shinto heaven, or a lotus garden in Buddhist paradise.

We feared death not so much from our cowardice as from our attachment to this beautiful land of ours.

Religions we needed to resign ourselves when fate or duty called us from the beloved land of our birth.

The Japanese has a religion of his own,

which in all probability he brought with him from his home in Central Asia.

What the exact nature of that religion originally was is not easy to tell.

Its similarity to the Mosaic Faith has been recently pointed out, and another attempt was made to find in us the Lost Ten Tribes of the Jewish record.

But whatever it had been, the time came when it was superseded and eclipsed by a very much more complex, and, may we say, refined faith of Indian origin.

We can easily imagine the effect of the Hindoo faith as it first made its way among Japanese.

Its gorgeous ceremonies, high mysticisms, and speculations bold and labyrinthine, must have struck the simple-hearted people with wonder.

It satisfied the eyes of the ignorant, whetted the intellect of the learned, and served the purpose of the ruler.

Notwithstanding some patriotic opposition against the wholesale importation of an exotic faith, the Hindoo religion spread in Japan with gigantic strides.

For a time at least, the ancient faith was placed wholly in the background, and the new reigned supreme for centuries in succession.

The date of the introduction of Buddhism into Japan is the thirteenth year of the reign of Kinmei, the twenty-ninth emperor,

which we make to be 551 of the Christian era, or "1501 year after Buddha's entrance into Nirvana," as Buddhist chronologists like to have it.

The great temple of Tenwoji was built as early as 587 A.D. at Naniwa (Osaka) by Shotoku Taishi, the wisest prince the country has had, and "the father of Japanese Buddhism."

The next century (seventh) saw active proselyting going on throughout the empire, the emperors themselves taking the initiatives in the work.

About this time there was a great revival of Buddhism in China under the leadership of Hiuen Chwang, that famous priest of the Tang dynasty,

whose adventurous journey into India was so vividly described by Barthelemy St. Hilaire;

and scholars were sent from Japan across the water to study under the man who had sought the faith in the land of its birth.

The emperors of the Nara dynasty (708-769) were all strong supporters of Buddhism,

and the mighty temples that still adorn the ancient capital of the same name witness to the power attained by the new religion so soon after its introduction into the land.

But the new enthusiasm reached its acme, when by the beginning of the ninth century, two Buddhist scholars, Saijo and Kukai

returned from their study in China, each with a sect of his choosing.

The emperor Kammu who removed the capital from Nara to Kyoto gave each a conspicuous site for temple-building, and endowments and privileges affixed thereto.

Saijo built Eizan lying to the northeast of the new capital, the direction from which all evils were thought to come.

Kukai posted himself at Koya in the province of Kii, but had a temple-site given him in the south end of the capital, the famed Toji with its peering pagoda right south of the railway station being his own establishment.

With Eizan founded in 787, and Koya in 816 A.D., we may say that Japanese Buddhism had rooted itself firmly in the native soil.

No competition with it by any other faith was possible,

and no wonder that its founders thought that its foundations were immovably laid as the mountains on which they builded.

Thus in the beginning of the ninth century we find the so-called eight sects of Buddhism firmly established in the land.

For four centuries after the death of Kukai we hear nothing about the introduction or formation of any new sect in Japan.

The "eight" grew on in power and influence, Saijo's (Tendai) leading all the rest.

And here as elsewhere assumption of power by spiritual bodies brought in all the attending corruptions.

Soon the priesthood became emperors of emperors, so much so that one of the latter expressed the annoyance due to his priest-subjects by the well-known saying,

"Two things are beyond the power of my control: the water of the Kamo and mountain-priests."

Emperor after emperor, and noble after noble vied with one another in building, endowing, and embellishing temples of their particular devotion;

and the large city of Kyoto and its suburbs, with their magnificent religious structures, — porches, pagodas, hexagons, bell-houses, — are one huge monument of the faith that once flourished among us.

Near the close of the twelfth century, a pacific settlement of the country after long internecine wars gave rise to a new activity in religious thought.

The great Yoritomo crippled the temporal power of the priests, but showed them due respect as the people's spiritual guides;

and the result was the rise of many great teachers honourable for their learning and virtue.

The Hojos who succeeded him were most of them faithful devotees of Buddhism.

Tired with the pomp and vain-gloriousness of the then existing sects, they caused the Zen or meditative school of Buddhism to be introduced from China (1200),

and several great temples were built, in Kyoto, Kamakura, and Echizen, to perpetuate the new form of worship in the land.

The new became a favorite faith with the upper and intellectual classes, its esoterism and endless metaphysics standing in strong contrast to the ceremonial shows of the older sects.

The populace too needed a faith other than the high intellectualities of the Zen philosophy, or the unapproachable sublimities of the older cults.

And such a faith was furnished them by a priest called Genku (Saint Honen), who, about 1207 A.D. introduced among them what has since been called the Jodo or "pure-land" sect.

It taught above all other things, the possibility of entrance into the Pure-Land merely by calling upon the name of Buddha, and hence was otherwise called Nen-Butzu or Call-on-Buddha sect.

The simple "Nam-Amida-Butsu" (I commit myself to thee O thou Amitabha Buddha) was set to music on the hand-bell;

and the whole uttered with plaintive voice and often attended with a dance gave entirely new features to, thus far, a very august form of belief.

A branch of this was the Shin sect, started at about the same time by a priest named Hanyen (Saint Shinran),

destined to eclipse all other sects by the influence it was to have over the mass of the people.

The very novel feature of this sect was the removal of the vows of chastity from the priest-class, and considerable leniency thus afforded to their free indulgence in the common joys of life.

Buddhism thus vulgarized, its approach to the commonality was greatly facilitated;

and now without any imperial authority to forward its propagation, it began to be a power among the people, — a matter of very great consequence to the ages that followed.

The addition of one more branch, that of Jishu, to the Nen-Butsu sect completed the development of the exoteric school of Buddhism in Japan,

the three coming to be adopted by the people almost simultaneously with one another, and with the esoteric Zen school which invaded the cultured society of the time.

The country was to have one more sect, — twelve in all, — immediately following the last we have mentioned.

We may say therefore that the thirteenth century was the last and greatest formative period of Japanese Buddhism.

The century was really the reformative era of the Hindoo faith in Japan.

No such lights as we saw then have appeared since, and we of this century still hang upon the words then uttered with all the conviction of the age.

Here, as elsewhere, enthusiasm disappeared together with superstition,

and we, afraid of being nonscientific, are cowardly creatures, basing our actions wholly upon the seeable,

and upon the faint echoes of the time when men were sincere without our knowledge, and heroic without our crowding cares.

Let us call up a hero then to shame our vaunted faith,

and in our love of ignoble ease when heaven and earth are calling us to nobler deeds and sacrifice.

II.— Birth and Consecration.

On a spring day of the 1st year of Teiwo (1222), as the sun rose above the billowy horizon,

and the easternmost outpost of Earth's nations caught its first rosy rays,

a child was born to a fisher's family in the village of Kominato (Little Haven) near the easternmost cape of the province of Awa.

The father was a fugitive there for some political reasons, now a poor fisherman without any outward distinction;

and the mother, also, of no mean birth, a devout worshipper of the Sun-god, of whom the gift of a son had long been asked, and now granted in answer to her prayers.

They named him Zen-Nichi-Maro (Good-Sun-Boy) in pious commemoration of the deity who called him into being,

a fact which had considerable to do when the child came to decide his mission to this world, as we shall see afterward.

All the wonders and miracles which are reported to have attended his birth,

how a crystalline spring spontaneously gushed forth in the fisher's garden "to wash natal uncleanliness away,"

how a white lotus of unusual magnitude, entirely out of season, opened near by "to cast fragrance into the air," etc.,

we of this century are accustomed to ascribe to the devout imaginations of the time.

But the date of his birth is worth particular mention here,

as it was a point much ruminated upon by the young enthusiast as the awful question of his country's salvation afterward came before his mind.

The year was the 2171st after Buddha's entrance into the Nirvana; that is, after the first "millenium of the right law" had ended,

and the second "millenium of the image-law" had also spent itself,

and the third and last "millenium of the latter law" had just been ushered in;

when as was prophesied by the Great Teacher, a light was expected to appear to the east of him to shine the darkness of the last days.

The day was the 16th of the second month (according to the lunar calendar), a day after the same great event in Buddha's life, which was on the15th of the same month.

Correspondences such as these were of immense importance to a mind like our hero's.

When he came to be twelve years old, the pious inclination of his parents decided upon his being made a priest.

Considering what he did in after-years, we can well believe many stories told about his remarkable childhood;

and we do not wonder if the paternal ambition of the fugitive-fisherman saw in his son's consecration to a priestly office an opportunity for the lad's rise in society,

as in that age of rigid social distinctions, religion was the only way open for a low-born genius to show itself in the world.

Not far from the place where he was born, was a temple, Kiyozumi by name, and its abbott Dozen had local reputation for his learning and virtue.

There the boy Zennichi was taken, and entrusted to the care of the benignant teacher who seems to have taken special delight in the youth.

Passing his novitiate of four years, he was formally consecrated a priest at the age of sixteen under the new name of Rencho;

and already the good abbott, watching the unusual ability of his young disciple, was beginning to think of nominating him as his possible successor in his office.

The youth remained his parents' hope, and the pride of his teacher,

when behind all outward appearances struggles were going on in his mind, which drove him at last from the region of his birth, to seek enlightenment throughout the country.

III.— In and Out of Darkness.

He was fairly introduced into the elementary knowledge of Buddhism when several questions presented themselves to his mind for solution.

The most apparent was the existence of multitudinous sects in Buddhism.

"Why is it" he asked to himself, "that Buddhism which had its origin in the life and teaching of one man is now divided into so many sects and divisions?

Is Buddhism more than one? What means that which I see around me, that one sect speaks evil of all others, each maintaining that it has Buddha's true mind?

The waters of the sea have the same taste, and there can be no two ways in the teachings of Buddha. Oh wherein lies the explanation of this division into sects;

and which among these sects is Buddha's way, the way I should walk in?"

Such was his first and greatest doubt, an entirely reasonable doubt, we believe.

We also have similar doubt about Buddhism and some other religions, and we can entirely sympathize with our hero in the struggle he had.

As neither his abbott nor anybody else relieved him from his doubt, he naturally resorted to his prayers.

One day as he came from his worship at the temple of the Bodhisattwa of his special devotion, the burden within him became unbearable,

and down he came to the ground with abundant hemorrhage from his mouth.

His friends helped him up, and it was sometime before he returned to consciousness again.

We are still pointed to the exact spot of this occurrence, a little bamboo bush near by with certain reddish tints in its leaves being supposed to have taken its colours from the blood that was spattered on that occasion.

One evening, however, as his eyes were poring over the Nirvana Sutra, said to have been delivered by Buddha just before his entrance to that blessed state,

the following caught the attention of the young priest, to the inexpressible relief of his troubled mind: Trust in the Word and not in man.

That is, he was not to trust in human opinions, however plausible and high-sounding,

but in the sutras as left by the Great Teacher, and he was to decide all questions by them and them only.

His mind was now at ease. He found something to stand upon, whereas thus far all had been sinking sand under him.

Who, by reading the above account of the Japanese priest, is not reminded of a similar case in the convent of Erfurt four hundred years ago,

when after much questionings, "loss of consciousness," etc., the young German monk found his rest in an old Latin Bible that caught his eyes,

and clung to it ever afterward as his strongfold of faith and life?

But in the case of the Buddhist priest, the question of the authoritative scripture was not so simple a one as in that of the Christian Luther.

Whereas the German had a single Bible to rely upon, the Japanese had dozens, often of very contradictory natures,

from which to make his selection of the canon of supreme authority.

This, however, was a comparatively easy task in the age when the so-called Higher-Criticism was wholly unknown, and men put their simple trust upon the records of the ancients without questioning why and wherefore.

It was enough for our hero that he found that one of the sutras gave the chronological order of all the great sutras in both mahayana and hinayana.

The order given was, beginning with the Avatamsaka Sutra, supposed to contain Buddha's first public utterances,

(1) the Agamas (Kegon-Kyo), containing his teachings of the first twelve years of his ministry,

(2) the Vaipulya Sutras (Agon Kyo), containing those of the second sixteen years,

(3) the Pragna Sutra (Hannya Kyo), of the third fourteen years,

and (4) the Saddharma-Pundarika Sutra (Myo-Ho-Renge or Hokke Kyo), of the last eight years of his life.

Natural conclusions from this order were that the last-mentioned sutra contained the essence of the teaching of Buddha's whole life;

or in the words of Nichiren, it had in it "the principle of all things, the truth of eternity, and the secret importance of Buddha's original state and of the virtue of his enlightenment."

Hence its beautiful name of "the Sutra of the Lotus of the Mysterious Law."

It is not in our purpose here to enter into a critical examination of the exact order of the Buddhist canons, or of the comparative value of one above others.

I think it is fairly settled now that the sutra that Nichiren thought so much of was a later product, some 500 years after Buddha's death,

and that the Amitartha Sutra that gives the order of the different canons here mentioned was written expressly for the purpose of giving authenticity and superlative authority to the new canon.

But be these whatever they may, it only suffices us to know that our hero accepted them in the order here given,

and found in Saddharma-Pundarika Sutra the standard of the Buddhist faith, and a clear simple explanation of the all-comprehensibility of so many discordant views in Buddhism.

As he came to this conclusion, the joy and gratitude within him burst into abundant tears.

"I," he finally said to himself, "I who left my father and mother, and gave myself to the service of this excellent faith, —

should I cling to the traditional teachings of common priests, and not seek the golden words of the Tathagata (Buddha) himself?"

He was twenty years old when the holy ambition rose in his mind.

Seclusion in a country-monastery became no more possible.

Bidding farewell to his abbott and order, he launched out boldly into the world, to seek the truth far and wide.

His first destination was Kamakura, the Shogun's capital of the time.

A country-priest in the metropolis, — a Luther in Rome, — strange phenomena met his eyes, and strange doctrines reached his ears.

With the magnificence of its temple-structures and the pomp of its priest-classes, the city was given up wholly to falsities.

The Zen sect leading the high, and the Jodo sect the low, the former into quagmires of futile speculation, and the latter into a delirium of blind trust in Amitabha, Buddha's Buddhism was not to be found anywhere.

Yea more, he saw Buddha's very images given to children for toys, and Amitabha of only fabulous existence was given the supreme position in what they called Buddhist worship!

Men clad in holy garb vaunted themselves in their open shame.

Salvation, they taught, consisted only in calling upon the name of Amitabha, and not in acts of virtue and discipline;

and so amidst the din of Nam-Amida-Butsu, licentiousness of the grossest kind prevailed among the people.

During his five years' stay in Kamakura, he saw enough to convince him of the presence of the Latter Days already in the world,

and the need and opportunity of a new faith to bring in a new era of light, as foretold by the Worshipful in his Holy Sutra.

Only but recently, Saint Daia, an object of universal adoration, had died a death, which sent horrors to all his followers.

His body "shrivelled up into the smallness of a child," and the color of his skin changed into "pitchy darkness," — unmistakable signs of his fall into Hell, and evidences of the diabolical nature of the faith he represented.

Then, too, what do those monstrosities in the sky signify? Three aerial forms, white and red, hung clear against the western sky,

and when the two white disappeared, the red remained "as a pillar of fire piercing through the zenith."

The whole was succeeded by a violent earthquake bringing down many temples to the ground, and men and beasts groaned under the debris of the structures intended for their salvation.

"All because the true sutra is not preached in the land, and errors are taught and believed in. Am not I he of eternal appointment to revive the Faith in the land?"

With thoughts such as these, Rencho left Kamakura behind him, wisely remarking that "the capital of a country is a place for disseminating the truth, and not for learning it."

After a short visit to his parents, he set out for further search after knowledge.

Eizan towering in the direction of Kimon (Devil's Gate) from Kyoto toward all evil influences from off the Mikado's capital, has for the last one thousand years been the chief repository of Buddhist learning in Japan.

There twenty-five hundred feet above the sea-level, encompassed by tall cryptomeria forests, and with a magnificent view of the placid Biwa Lake below, the ways of Sakya were searched into, contemplated, and transmitted.

In its days of prosperity, the whole mountain must have worn the aspect of a bustling colony, harbouring, as it did, an army of mendicants three thousand strong,

a dread of the populace as well as of the emperors.

It was here that Genku studied, and formulated his exoteric school of Buddhism so contrary to the tenets taught in the mountain, and had it afterward so widely adopted by the people.

His disciple Hanyen, the founder of the Shin sect, was also a student here, as were also many others who had had national reputations for their attainment in the secret laws of the Faith.

And now our Rencho, ambitious of the propagation of genuine Buddhism in Japan, came four hundred miles on his feet from his fisher's hut in the province of Awa, to seek enlightenment in the same mountain.

With the new opportunities for investigation here afforded, Rencho took in with avidity all that he could lay his hands upon.

But his speciality was Saddharma Pundarika Sutra, — his Sutra, — of which valuable manuscripts and commentaries were accessible in the mountain.

Indeed, the Tendai sect of which Eizan was the centre, made a great deal of this Sutra.

What are called "the sixty volumes" of the sect are so many commentaries upon this one book.

Such a wonderful book is it that Tendai, the Chinese founder of the sect, wrote thirty volumes upon it;

and one of his disciples, Myogaku, finding that the master's commentaries still needed commentaries, wrote another thirty volumes upon the first thirty volumes.

Ten of these volumes treat separately of each of the six Chinese hieroglyphics that compose the name of the Sutra!

So deep to the ancient did appear the meaning of the book which to us appears as nothing very extraordinary. — For ten long years, Rencho stayed in Eizan, delving into these intricacies.

We can only give the conclusions he came to.

He was now thoroughly convinced of the view he had entertained of the superiority of the Pundarika Sutra above all the other Sutras; of its introduction into Japan in its pure form by Saijo, the founder of Eizan,

and of considerable vitiations introduced thereto by priests who came after him.

Often to Kyoto, and once to Nara and Koya, he carried his researches, to establish him further in his conviction;

and when no more doubting was possible, he was ready to lay down his life for the Sutra.

Once he saw with his own eyes all the principal deities of the land coming to promise protection to him;

and as they vanished in the air, a divine chorus was heard in the sky, saying, (this man will go round the world, and destroy the darkness that is in men).

He was not the only mystic, however, who has had similar visions and visitations.

He was now thirty-two years of age, friendless, unknown, yet independent and indomitable.

He had no ancestral lineage to lay his claim upon, as had Hanyen of the Shin Sect.

He was a fisherman's son, "a shudra of the sea-coast," as he afterward called himself.

Neither was his study prosecuted in a foreign land, as were those of Saijo, Kukai, and other eminent "theologians," —

a matter of prime importance, then, as now, of being accepted by Japanese as a holder of a key to the secret of any branch of knowledge.

Patronage of any kind he had absolutely none; much less, imperial patronage, as had most other sect-founders in abundance.

He alone began single-handed, against powers of all kinds, with a view wholly at variance with those of the influential sects of the day.

He is the only case, as far as we know, of Japanese Buddhists, who, without any example to follow after, stood for a Sutra and a Law with his life in his hand.

His life is interesting not so much for the doctrinal views he maintained and promulgated, as for the brave way in which he upheld them.

Religious persecution in its true sense began in Japan with Nichiren.

IV.— Proclamation.

"A prophet is not without honour save in his own county."

Yet it is a pathetic fact to know that a prophet usually begins his public career in his own country.

Homeless as he is in this world, he yet feels the attraction of his home,

and despite the kind of treatment he is sure to receive there, he resorts there as a hart pants after the water-brooks, only to be rejected, stoned, and expelled.

Rencho's course was not to be otherwise.

In his humble home at Little Heaven, he found his parents eagerly waiting for the return of their son;

and the first and greatest of all his trials was to protest against their natural desire of seeing him installed as the abbott of the monastery that had nursed him in his youth.

He now changed his name to Nichiren, Sun-Lotus, significant of the god who called him into being, and of the Sutra he was to give to the world.

On the 28th day of the fourth month of the fifth year of Kencho (1253), as the rosy sun was half above the eastern horizon,

Nichiren was upon a cliff looking toward the broad Pacific, and to the seas before him and the mountains behind him, and through them to the whole universe,

he repeated the form of prayer he had framed for himself, the form that was intended to silence all others, to lead his disciples to the end of the earth, and be their watchword to all eternity,

the form, indeed, that embodied the essence of Buddhism, the constitution of man, and of the universe. It was NAM-MYO-HO-REN-GE-KYO, I humbly trust in the Sutra of the Mysterious Law of the White Lotus.

Nature addressed in morning, he was to address his townsmen in afternoon.

His fame had already gone around the whole neighborhood. He who spent fifteen years in study in Kamakura, Eizan, and Nara,

must have something new, deep, and edifying to say to his countrymen. So they came, young and old, men and women,

some repeating the harahzritaya of the Shingon sect, others the nam-ami-da-butsu of the Jodo.

When the temple was all filled, and "incense perfumed its four corners," Nichiren appeared in the pulpit "at the beating of a drum."

A man just reaching fulness of manhood, with many marks of vigils upon him, the eyes of a zealot, the dignity of a prophet, —

he was the cynosure of the whole congregation, and his opening words were watched with breathless silence.

He took up his sutra, the Pundarika, read a part of its sixth chapter, and "with countenance mild, and voice resonant" he thus began:

"Years have I spent in the study of all the sutras, and read and heard all that different sects have to say about them.

In one of them we are told that for 500 years after Buddha's entrance into Nirvana, many will attain buddhahood without any exertion on their part;

and for the succeeding 500 years, with diligence and ascetic contemplation. This is the millenium of the right law.

Then will come 500 years of sutra-reading, and another 500 years of temple-building. This is the millenium of the image-law.

Then will be inaugurated the five centuries of 'the concealment of the pure law,' wherein the merit of the Tathagata's teaching shall have exhausted itself, and all ways of enlightenment shall be lost to mankind. This is the beginning of the latter-day-law, which will continue for ten thousand years.

Now it is two hundred years since the world entered the last millenium.

And to us so far removed from the direct teaching of Buddha, there is but one way provided for our attainment of buddhahood;

and that way is contained in the five characters of Myo-Ho-Ren-Ge-Kyo.

Yet the Jodo calls upon the people to shut this precious sutra, and to turn no more ear to it; the Zen makes light of it;

and the Shingon reviles it as unworthy of to loose the shoes from off the feet of their sutra, the Mahavairokana.

Are not such vSpoken of by the Worshipful in the second book of the Pundarika, in the chapter on parables, as the exterminators of the seeds of Buddhism, whose sure end will be endless Hell?

He that has ears to hear and eyes to see, let him understand, and divide truth from falsehood.

Know that the Jodo is a way to Hell, the Zen, the teaching of infernal hosts; the Shingon, a heresy to destroy the nation, and the Ritzu, an enemy of the land.

These are not my own words, but I found them in the sutra. Hark to the cuckoo above the cloud.

He knows the time, and warns you to plant. Plant now therefore, and do not repent when the harvest season comes.

Now is the time for planting the Lotus Sutra, and I am the messenger sent by the Worshipful for that end."

He ended, and an uproar of indignation arose from the infuriated audience.

Some said his mind was out of order, and hence that he might be pardoned; others that his blasphemy was worthy of the severest punishment.

The landlord who attended the meeting would see to the blasphemer's being dispatched as soon as he stepped out of the holy ground.

But the old abbott was kind. His pupil might some day repent, resume his former orthodoxy, and so end his dreaming.

At dusk, he ordered two of his disciples to take Nichiren out of the district by ways safe from the landlord's attack.

V.— Alone against the World.

Rejected at home, he made his way right into Kamakura, the capital of the country, "the best place for disseminating the truth."

There in a spot owned by nobody, in what is still called Matsuba-ga-Tani (Pine-Leaf's Dale), he had a little straw-hut built for him.

Here he posted himself with his Pundarika Sutra, — an independent man, — to begin his conquest of errors around him.

The great Nichiren Sect had its beginning in this hut.

The stupendous temple-structures at Minobu, Ikegami, and other places, with more than five thousand temples in the land, and two-million souls that worship in them, — all had their beginning in this hut and this one man.

So are great works always born. One indomitable soul, and the world against him, — therein lies the promise of all permanent greatness.

The twentieth century may well learn of this man, of his faith and bravery, if not of his doctrines.

Had Christianity itself such a beginning in Japan?

Mission-schools, mission-churches, allowances in money, helps in men, — great Nichiren, he began with himself alone, with none of these!

For a year he is silent once more in study and contemplation. Meanwhile he had his first disciple, named Nissho afterward,

who came all the way from Eizan, attracted by the views they had in common upon the state of Buddhism in Japan.

Nichiren is exceedingly glad, because he can now appear before the public, and lay down his life there without the fear of his doctrines being lost to his country.

So he began in the spring of 1254 what was never heard of before in the land, — street preaching.

He repeated materially, amidst the gibes and railings of the metropolitan hearers, what he had first proclaimed to his townsmen.

To the retort that it was not becoming for a man of his order to preach by the way-side, his decisive answer was that it was becoming for a man to eat standing in time of war.

To the rebuke that he must not speak evil of the faith adored by the ruler of the land, his plain reply was that "the priest is Buddha's messenger, and fear of the world and men agrees not with his vocation."

To the natural doubt that the other forms of worship could not all be mistaken, his simple explanation was that "the scaffold is of use only till the temple is done."

For six years he preached in this manner, in season and out of season, till his work and person began to call public attention.

Among his disciples were counted not a few of men in high authority, some even of the Shogun's household,

and there was a fear that the whole city might be carried away by his influence, if not checked in due time.

There was Abbott Doryu of Kencho-ji, Abbott Ryochu of Komyo-ji, Ryokwan of Gokuraku-ji, Ryukwan of Daibutsu-ji, etc., all high dignitaries of vast influence,

who took counsel together for the suppression of the rising faith in the capital.

But Nichiren's audacity was more than all their united efforts against him.

Taking advantage of many calamities that had recently befallen the land, he prepared what is still considered the most remarkable production of the kind, — Rissei-Ankoku-Ron, A Treatise on Bringing Peace and Righteousness to the Country.

Therein he recounted all the evils from which the land was then suffering, and traced their cause to the false doctrines taught among the people.

These he proved by extensive quotations from sutras.

The remedy, in his view, lay in the universal acceptation by the nation of the highest of all sutras, the Pundarika;

and pointed out, as the sure result of refusal of such a gift, civil wars and a foreign invasion.

Never before were more caustic terms applied to the church-dignitaries of the land.

The whole treatise was a battle-cry, a declaration of war of the most determined kind, which if fought through, could have but one issue, the extirpation of his sect, or of all the other sects.

It was enthusiasm indistinguishable from madness, and Hojo Tokiyori, among the wisest of the rulers the country has had, decided upon its suppression by the removal of the zealot from the capital.

But the politic man did not know the kind of soul he was dealing with.

It was a soul prepared for death, and with such sincerity in it that it had already begotten other souls like it,

no less prepared for encounter with all kinds of trial, as was abundantly proved afterward.

Nothing could intimidate these men, and "warfare against Buddha's enemies" was carried on with unabated vigor,

till by force the little company was disbanded and its leader carried away as an exile to a far-off province.

VI.— Sword and Exile.

For fifteen years following the publication of his Treatise, his life was a continuous battling with the powers and principalities of this world.

He was first banished to Idzu, where he remained three years, making converts in his exile.

On his return to Kamakura, he was entreated by his followers to stop "warfare" and devote himself mostly to their edification;

to which his decided answer was that "now in the beginning of the Latter Days, when the virulence of errors is so strong, polemic attack is a necessity as medicine to a disease at its crisis, and is a mercy, though it does not appear so."

He at once resumed his old attitude, — an incorrigible priest, — heedless of the destruction now hanging over his head.

One evening, when on his missionary tour with several of his disciples, he was suddenly attacked by a company of men, swords in hand.

The leader of the attacking party was no other than the landlord who had determined upon the removal of the audacious renovator at the time of his proclamation of the new doctrines four years ago.

Three of his disciples were killed, one priest and two laymen, in their effort to save the life of their master.

Thus the sutra had its first martyrs in Japan, precious to the memory of the myriad who now put their trust in the same.

Nichiren escaped with a wound in his forehead, the mark of his fidelity to the Law.

But the real crisis came in the autumn of 1271.

His life had been spared thus far, for the law of the time forbade the capital punishment of the priest-class;

and though his impudence was now beyond forbearance, his shaven head and sacerdotal robes were his strong protection against the rigor of the law.

But when nothing could prevent his vituperative attack upon the existing faiths of the land, and with them upon the authorities both civil and clerical,

Hojo decided upon his being delivered to the hand of the executioner as an extraordinary measure in his special case.

The so-called "Danger of the Sutra (Go-ho-nan) at Tatsunokuchi" is a most notable event in the religious history of Japan.

Its historic veracity has been recently doubted; but the "danger" shorn of the miracles which later piety attached to the event, seems unquestionable.

The popular account is on this wise: At the instant when the executioner lifted up his sword for the final despatch, repetition by Nichiren of sacred words from his Sutra brought down a sudden gust of wind from heaven,

and to the utter bewilderment of all around him, the blade was broken in to three pieces, and no second stroke was possible by the paralysis of the swordsman's hand.

Soon a messenger reached the spot "galloping at full-speed," bringing a writ of release from Kamakura, and the cause of the sutra was thus saved.

But we can explain the incident without calling in the aid of a miracle.

The superstitious fear of the executioner to put an end to the life of a man of the holy order is perfectly possible in that age.

And when he saw the calm composure of the dignified priest ready to receive the fatal stroke in the attitude of offering prayer,

we can well imagine the poor executioner shaking with fear of heavenly punishment, should he be instrumental in shedding innocent blood.

A similar fear must have overtaken the ruler himself who had decided upon this unprecedented execution; and he at once sent out a messenger with the sentence of exile instead of death.

The escape we believe was narrow, but was perfectly natural.

The exile which was to take the place of death was a severe one. He was now carried to Sado, a forlorn island in the Japan Sea,

at that time the most inaccessible part in the whole country, and the favorite place of banishment for criminals of the most offensive kind.

That he survived the exile of five years in this island is a wonder.

One severe winter he passed through with little beyond the mental food of his sutra.

His was another conquest of mind over body, spirit over force.

At the close of his banishment, he added one more province to his spiritual dominion. Ever since, Sado and the neighboring populous province of Echigo have remained fanatically loyal to his cause.

His indomitable courage and perseverance now called forth the fear and admiration of the authority at Kamakura;

and this, together with the fast approaching danger from the Mongol attack in fulfillment of his prophesy of a foreign invasion, secured him permission for his return to the capital (1274).

Soon after his arrival there, he obtained a charter for the free promulgation of his doctrines in the land.

Spirit conquered at last, and for seven centuries it was to be a power in the nation.

VII.— The Last Days.

The man was now fifty-two years of age, and most of his life had been spent in vigils and battlings with the world.

He was now free to speak to his countrymen; but the way in which the permission was given to that effect did not please him at all.

It was fear which induced the Hojos to grant freedom, whereas he aimed at the willing acceptation of the sutra by the ruler and his people.

He now began to think of retiring to a mountain after the manner of his Hindoo Master, there to end his days in quiet contemplation and instruction of his disciples.

Herein we believe lies his greatness, and the main reason of the permanence of his sect. When the world began to receive him, he left it.

Here was an opportunity for stumbling for souls less than his.

But to his disciples, the removal of the interdiction of their tenets was the commencement of open aggressive actions against the adherents of the older sects.

We are told of temple after temple "stormed and brought down by vocal attacks."

We know what the manner of these zealots is. Each carries a drum in his hand, and all in unison repeat their prayer, — Nam-Myo-Ho-Ren-Ge-Kyo, — with five strikes to accompany its five syllables.

Twenty of them is stunning to our ears, and we can well imagine the effect of hundreds of them in their new vigor and enthusiasm, going from house to house, from temple to temple, through the city of Kamakura, calling for its immediate surrender to the new faith.

The zeal, the fire, the intolerance of the founder, are still distinctly visible in his disciples of to-day, — the only case of martial zeal in the naturally inoffensive and pessimistic religion of Buddha.

Our hero's last days were peaceful. He established himself in Mt. Minobu to the west of Mt. Fuji,

and there with the splendid view of the ocean to the south, and noble mountains beside and behind him, he received the homage of his admirers from all parts of the land.

Here he lived to see his prophesy literally fulfilled in the great Mongol invasion of 1281, which of course increased his fame and influence considerably.

The year following that great event, he was carried to Ikegami (near Omori Station) as a guest of one of his lay-disciples, and there died on the11th day of the 10th month, 1282.

His last wish was to have his doctrines preached in the imperial city of Kyoto, to have "the holy hearings" at last, and he appointed one Nizzo, then a boy fourteen years of age, for this work.

One feature of his death-bed scene needs our notice. They brought to him an idol of Buddha as his possible consolation in his last hours;

but he beckoned with his hand to remove it at once, with evident signs of much displeasure.

Then they unrolled before him a kakemono with the name of Saddharma-Pundarika Sutra written in magnificent Chinese characters.

Thereto he slowly turned his body, and clasping his hands towards it, he breathed his last.

A bibliolator, and not an idolator, was he.

VIII.— An Estimate of His Character.

No more enigmatic character has appeared in our history than this subject of our essay.

To his enemy he was a blasphemer, a hypocrite, a belly-server, a king of mountebanks, and all that.

Books were written, some of them very ingenious, to prove his charlatanism.

He is the favorite mark of attack when Buddhism is to be ridiculed by its enemies.

He is made the scapegoat of all that is opprobrious in that religion, by his brother-Buddhists out of his own sect.

No man in Japan had more calumnies piled upon him.

And when Christianity made its appearance in the land, it too took its part in the matter, and many more stones were thrown at him from that quarter as well.

I know one of its famed ministers once turning his whole attention in that direction.

Indeed, for a Christian man in Japan to write anything laudatory of this man sounds as impious as to speak good words for Judas Iscariot.

But I for one venture my honour, if need be, for this man.

Most of his doctrines, I grant, cannot stand the test of the present-day criticism.

His polemics were inelegant, and his whole tone was insanoid.

He certainly was an unbalanced character, too pointed in only one direction.

But divest him of his intellectual errors, of his hereditary temperament, and of much that his time and surroundings marked upon him,

and you have a soul sincere to its very core, the honestest of men, the bravest of Japanese.

A hypocrite cannot keep his hypocrisy for twenty-five years and more.

Neither can he have thousands of followers ready to lay down their lives for him. "A false man found a religion?" Carlyle exclaims.

"Why, a false man cannot build a brick house."

I look around me, and I see 5000 temples manned by 4000 priests and 8000 teachers, and 1,500,000—2,000,000 souls worshipping in them

after the manner prescribed by this man, now six hundred years after his death;

and I am told to take all these as the work of a shameless mountebank!

My belief in human nature is too strong for me to believe in any such thing. If falsity is so permanent upon this earth, by what other means shall we distinguish honesty from it?

The most fearless of men, his courage was based wholly upon his conviction that he was Buddha's special messenger to this earth.

He himself is nothing, — "a sudra of a sea-coast"; — but in his capacity as a vehicle of the Pundarika Sutra, his person had all the importance of heaven and earth.

"I am a worthless, ordinary priest," he once said to a man in authority; "but as a promulgator of the Pundarika Sutra, I am Sakyamouni's special messenger, and as such Brahma serves me on my right hand and Sakra on my left,

the Sun guides me and the Moon follows me, and all the deities of the land bend their heads and honour me."

His own life was of no account whatever to him; but that his nation should persecute him, the bearer of such a law, was lamentable to him beyond his power of expression.

If demented he was, his dementia was of a noble sort, hard to be distinguished from that highest form of self-respect which knows its own worth by the worth of the mission it was sent to fulfill.

Nichiren was not the only man in History who has had such an estimate of himself.

Therefore, the holy sutras, and especially his own Pundarika, were the constant sources of his consolation during years of hard persecution.

Turning to Nichiro his favorite disciple, who to approach his master's boat as it was launched for its voyage to the land of the exile, had his arms painfully disabled by the angry strokes of its oarsmen,

Nichiren had this consolation, to offer: "Know that staves and exiles are the necessary accompaniments of the preachers of the Sutra in the Latter Day.

What was written in the chapter on exhortation in the Pundarika Sutra two-thousand years ago, has now come upon thee and me. Rejoice, therefore, for the time of the conquest of the Sutra is at hand."

His exilic epistles to his disciples are full of quotations from sutras. In one of them he writes: "In the Nirvana Sutra, we have the doctrine of 'the turning of heaviness into lightness.'

We receive this heaviness in this life, and with it, lightness in the life to come is assured. Devabodhisattwa was killed by heretics, Arjasimha was beheaded, and Nagardjuna met diverse temptations;

and they in the Right Law Age, in Buddha's own land. How much more then in this end of the earth, in the beginning of the Latter-Law Age? etc."

The Christian Bible was not more precious to Luther than the Pundarika Sutra to this man.

"If I can die for the sake of my Sutra, I count not my life precious," were his words on many critical occasions.

A bibliolator he might have been, as in one sense our own Luther was;

but a book certainly is a nobler object of worship than images and forces of all kinds, and a man that could die for a book is a nobler sort of hero than most that go by that name.

Let the modern Christian reviler of Nichiren see whether his Book is not covered with dust;

or if it is daily mumbled in his mouth, and its inspiration hotly defended, whether he could endure sword and exile for fifteen years, and stake his life and soul for it, that it might be adopted by the people to whom he is sent.

Nichiren should be the last man to be stoned by the owners of that Book, which more than all other books, did fashion for the better the affairs of mankind.

Nichiren's private life was the simplest that could be imagined.

Thirty years after he had established himself in the straw-hut in Kamakura, we find him in a similar structure in Minobu, when wealthy laymen were his disciples, and ease and comfort were at his command.

Very intolerant to what he called "Buddha's enemies," he was the mildest of men when he dealt with the poor and stricken.

His letters to his disciples breathe the softest of tempers, in great contrast to the fire in his memorable "Treatise."

No wonder that they thought so much of him.

Indeed, Nichiren's life always reminds me of Mahomet without the concupiscence of the latter.

The same intensity, the same insanoid fanaticism, yet withal the same sincerity of purpose, and much of inward pity and tenderness, in one as in the other.

Only I believe the Japanese was greater than the Arabian, in that the former had more confidence in his Sutra than the latter in his Koran.

Physical force was not a necessity to Nichiren, seeing that he had such a book to trust in.

It alone without any human agency is a power enough, and no force is needed to establish its worth.

History that has acquitted Mahomet of hypocrisy, ought have done more toward a right estimate of Nichiren.

Divested therefore of his thirteenth century garb, of the aberration of his critical knowledge,

and of a little taint of insanity that might have dwelt in him, (as it dwells in all great men, I suppose,)

there stands before us a remarkable figure, one of the greatest of his kind in the world.

No more independent man can I think of among my countrymen.

Indeed, he by his originality and independence made Buddhism a Japanese religion.

His sect alone is purely Japanese, while all others have had their beginnings either in Hindoo, or Chinese, or Corean minds.

His ambition, too, embraced the whole world of his time.

He speaks of the eastward march of Buddhism from India to Japan till his time, and of the westward march of its improved form from Japan to India from his time on.

He was therefore an exception among passive receptive Japanese, — not a very tractable fellow no doubt, because he had a will of his own.

But such alone is the nation's backbone, while much else that goes by the name of affability, humility, receptivity, or beg-ability,

is no better than the country's shame, fitted only for swelling the number of "converts" in proselytizers' reports to their homeland.

Nichiren minus his combativity is our ideal religious man.

前の章Nakae Toju — A Village Teacher