What Practice Remains Possible

Accepting that the age of mappo had arrived did not tell a Kamakura era teacher what to do about it, and the schools that answered the question became some of the most influential in Japanese Buddhism. Honen and his student Shinran, whose teaching became the Pure Land and Jodo Shinshu traditions, concluded that self powered practice, the disciplined meditation and precept keeping of earlier centuries, could no longer reach its goal in a degenerate age, and that the only reliable path left was calling on the vow of the Buddha Amida through recitation of his name, a practice open to anyone regardless of learning or moral achievement. Nichiren reached a different answer to the same premise. Rather than turning away from self effort, he held that the Lotus Sutra alone remained fully effective in the degenerate age, and that chanting its title, the daimoku, was the practice suited to the times. The schools that trace to him, including the lay movements Soka Gakkai and Nichiren Shoshu founded centuries later, still read their own origin through that same claim. Both answers assume mappo as a shared fact of religious history and diverge entirely on what follows from it. Both movements trace their own founding directly to this shared diagnosis of the age.