“Which priests are beaten with stick and sword?
...Which priests are slandered...for the sake of the Lotus?
Which priests are suffering in exile in accordance with the teachings of scriptures,
that say, ‘The true followers of Buddhism will be frequently exiled’?
There is no such priest in Japan except Nichiren.”
Said Nichiren.
There are a lot of historical figures that you would hate to meet in real life,
but are just so interesting that you love to read about them.
If I met the Buddhist priest Nichiren in real life, he’d probably start yelling at me
to convert to Buddhism for hours until I finally gave up and became a Muslim out of spite.
It wouldn’t be fun.
What is fun is seeing Nichiren abuse other people, which he couldn’t stop doing.
It was fantastic.
Nichiren 日蓮 was born in 1222 into a minor samurai family.
He studied Buddhism at a young age and entered the famous Enryakuji temple
for super Buddhist training.
There, he came across the Lotus Sutra, and it was love at first chant.
Everyone already knew about the Lotus Sutra.
It was the main piece of scripture that his current school of Tendai Buddhism was based on.
But it wasn’t enough for Nichiren.
He thought the sutra had absolute truth because it was the central message of the historical Buddha,
the guy who sat under a tree, had a mushroom trip, and founded Buddhism.
Nichiren looked around and saw monks doing rituals that had nothing to do with the Lotus Sutra.
He was like, “These incels are clueless.
We should only allow Lotus Sutra rituals.”
He was obsessed.
Someone would go, “Hi, how are you?”
And he’d be like, “Not good, until I read the Lotus Sutra.”
He started carrying the sutra everywhere.
And did that until the day he died.
Nichiren called himself a prophet for the Lotus Sutra, and his mission was to make everyone
follow its ideals, even through violence if absolutely necessary.
The sutra itself had some passages that justified his aggressiveness if you took them literally,
and of course he did.
He founded the Nichiren school in 1253, and was ready to take on any school of Buddhism
that did not rhyme with Bichiren.
At the time, the Tendai and Shingon schools were the old traditional schools, big and powerful.
Newer schools entered the religious ring like Pure Land and Zen.
And Nichiren attacked all of them.
Against the traditional schools, he was like, “C’mon, this is the 13th century.
Stop living in the past.”
Against the Pure Land school, he wrote, “Its teacher is a devil and his disciples, the
devil’s people.”
He said about Hōnen, the Pure Land founder who was already dead at the time, that the
guy must have been suffering in hell, abandoned by the Amida Buddha that he worshipped.
Nichiren wrote vicious bomb-ass diss letters against everyone,
full of insults and calling people evil.
He charged into temples and challenged the head priests to debates.
His followers were social media experts.
They boiled down his criticisms of the other schools into a slogan:
“Nembutsu is hell, Zen is a demon, Shingon national ruin, Ritsu treason.”
It sounds better in Japanese.
It was unprecedented.
The other schools had never before had their feelings hurt so much.
But Nichiren was an unstoppable train, a Snowpiercer that ran on tears.
Nichiren blamed all the natural disasters and wars on people not following the
True Buddhism, his Buddhism.
And he warned that the country would suffer revolt and a foreign invasion.
In 1271, the shogunate was like, “Jesus Christ, chill”
and exiled him to the cold and rough island of Sado for 3 years.
A few years later, the Mongols invaded Japan, and the shogunate was like, “Huh.”
Everyone outside of Nichiren’s school hated him,
but you couldn’t accuse him of not being true to his faith.
The man suffered exiles and assassination attempts, and almost got executed once.
His life deserves another video actually.
Later in life, the madman claimed to be a bodhisattva, a god-like being who postponed
entering Nirvana just to help people on earth reach enlightenment.
But not just any bodhisattva, that’s not how he rolled.
He claimed to be the leader of all the bodhisattvas on earth.
Some called him Great Bodhisattva Nichiren.
His major supporters were low and mid level samurai, but he did manage to amass a decent
following among the commoners later in life.
After his death, his community of militant misfits grew into a major Buddhist school.
Why was Nichiren such a dick?
Because of compassion.
The Lotus Sutra says that those who slander Buddha’s Law will go to the
deepest level of hell.
Nichiren took this seriously.
Unfortunately, he interpreted the word slander in such a broad way
that you could buy overpriced tickets to see it.
His was the one true faith.
So any slight criticism of his school meant slandering Buddha’s Law.
Choosing another school? Slander!
Because it meant thinking the other school was superior.
Not joining his school? Slander.
So anyone who was not a Nichiren-er was slandering.
He thought he lived in a country of dirty slanderers.
These mofuckers getting up out of bed and slandering all day.
Slander slander slander.
Is that a salamander? No, it’s a slander.
Is that Ned Flanders? No, it’s a slander.
What does the Lotus Sutra say about those who slander the Buddhist Law?
They go to the deepest level of hell for trillions of years.
Afterwards, they are reborn as wild dogs or snakes.
After that, they are reborn again and again as humans
but poor, deformed, and wracked with disease.
This goes on for a trillion years times the number of grains of sand on a beach.
If you really believed that, wouldn’t you go as hard as you can to try and save people.
Nichiren thought so, especially since he believed most people in Japan were slanderers.
Nichiren Buddhism was all about the Lotus Sutra, because it contained the final teachings
of the historical Buddha, or Shakyamuni, the guy who sat under a tree, fell asleep,
and awakened.
There were other Buddhas.
Those Pure Land bozos worshipped the Amida Buddha.
Nichiren was like screw Amida, the number one Buddha was Shakyamuni Buddha.
Amida was just one buddha among many, and each was just an emanation of Shakyamuni,
so why worship Amida, a shadow, when you could worship the one who cast shadows.
The sutra was Shakyamuni in physical form, so carrying it around was like carrying him
in your pocket like a Pokemon.
To read the sutra was to meet him.
Anything you do with it, like reading, memorizing, reciting, copying,
and giving it to others was like meeting the Buddha.
Nichiren hated Pure Land Buddhism, but he did borrow an idea from those Pure Land idiots
to make his religion easy to practice.
Pure Landers had a practice called nembutsu.
All you had to do was repeat “Namu Amida Butsu.”
It meant “I take refuge in Amida Buddha.”
Do that a bunch of times and it would help you gain enlightenment.
Nichiren had his own words, called the daimoku.
Just chant the title of the Lotus Sutra:
“Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō”,
which meant “I take refuge in the Lotus Sutra.”
The daimoku actually existed before Nichiren, Tendai priests did it.
But Nichiren made it the only ritual you had to do.
Chanting it helps you reach enlightenment, protects you from harm,
and gives you benefits in this life.
The theory behind why this one line means so much is a little out there.
It’s the principle of “one contains all.”
Like how one drop of water, in a sense, contains water from all the oceans,
any one word from the Lotus Sutra contains all the other words too.
Go one step further, and it contains all the teachings of all the buddhas.
So the single line contains within it all the truths and teachings of all the buddhas.
But wait, doesn’t that mean any line from any sutra contains all the teachings of all the--
Aaaaaaaah…
Nichiren took another puff and said that any thought, word, or action in support of the
Lotus Sutra contains in it the universe.
You could experience the universe in one thought.
This universe experience and the knowledge that Shakyamuni was with him at all times,
to Nichiren it gave him enough joy to carry him through all the suffering and oppression
tossed his way.
Unlike other famous monks, like the Pure Land monk Shinran, who ran out of the room when
anyone mentioned the word politics, Nichiren thought politics was part of practicing faith.
Religion and state were in bed together, in a coitus for truth.
It was the ruler’s job to uphold the true Buddhist teachings.
Do this and the power of Buddhism would reacharound to protect the land and its people.
Nichiren thought that you could tell how true a religious practice was by looking at how
the society was doing.
Following the correct path would result in a kickass country.
But Nichiren looked around and only saw a country getting its ass kicked, a country
beaten by war and natural disasters, under invasion by Mongols.
He concluded that it was because the rulers allowed these false Buddhist schools to
run around spreading their dumb ideas.
These schools had been passing down their false teachings from teacher to student for
generations, a human centipede of bulls--t.
He had to stop them to alleviate the people’s suffering.
One of the main rules of being a Nichiren Buddhist was you must speak up against enemies
of the Lotus Sutra.
Enemies meaning everyone else.
If you heard a jackass spouting some BS doctrine, you had to correct him and jam your compassion
down his throat.
If you didn’t, you were slandering Buddha’s Law and off you went to hell.
It was this idea that gave Nichiren followers a reputation for being fanatical, militant,
and just super annoying.
They were the targets of a ton of hate and oppression.
What did Nichiren think about his life being the most persecuted religious figure of his time?
He said, “I, Nichiren, perhaps am the richest man in Japan today, because I offered my life
for the Lotus Sutra.
My name will endure forever.”
In wartime Japan, there were extreme sects of Nichiren Buddhism that were super nationalistic.
Their reputation rubbed off on Nichiren the man, making people today portray him as nationalistic,
bigoted, and militant.
But that view may be too simplistic.
Was the guy bigoted?
Against other Buddhist schools, absolutely.
He talked a lot of trash.
He said, “The country is already full of the enemies of truth.”
And, “I, Nichiren, am the most affectionate parent of the people of Japan.
Those of the Tendai sect are their great enemies.”
He even tried to get the shogunate to stop funding the other schools.
Was Nichiren militant?
In his speech, yep.
He even called for violence a few times.
Fearing a Mongol invasion, he said, “All the Nembutsu and Zen temples...
should be burned to the ground and their priests taken to Yui Beach to have their heads cut off!
If this is not done, then Japan is certain to be destroyed!”
Some say he was just being hyperbolic and didn’t mean it, but I dunno it sounds really bad.
He also believed that in certain cases you should take up arms to defend the Lotus Sutra.
But the man wasn’t going around inciting his followers to attack people like
some kind of High Sparrow.
He mostly wrote a lot.
Nichiren and his followers often seemed to be victims of persecution,
probably because they couldn’t keep their mouths shut.
Was Nichiren nationalistic?
Now that’s a more complicated question for another video, later.
For more Buddhism talk, check out these videos.
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