The Lotus Sutra as the supreme teaching

Nichiren Buddhists affirm the Lotus Sutra as the highest and complete teaching of the Buddha, superseding all others. Following the thirteenth-century Japanese teacher Nichiren, they hold that in the present degenerate age the essence of the sutra is made accessible through devoted chanting of its title in the invocation Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, by which any person can awaken the Buddha-nature within and attain enlightenment in this very life. Devotion focuses on the Gohonzon, a mandala inscribed with the invocation, as the object of reverence.

Nichiren (1222 to 1282) first proclaimed his teaching in 1253 at Seicho-ji temple, and his uncompromising attacks on the other Buddhist schools of Kamakura Japan as inadequate or worse brought him repeated persecution: he was exiled to Izu in 1261, narrowly escaped execution at Tatsunokuchi in 1271, and was then exiled to the remote island of Sado from 1271 to 1274, where he wrote some of his most important treatises. He read Japan's political and natural disasters of the period as confirmation of his warning, set out in his 1260 treatise Rissho Ankoku Ron (On Establishing the Correct Teaching for the Peace of the Land), that neglecting the Lotus Sutra in favour of lesser teachings, particularly Pure Land Buddhism's devotion to Amida, would bring national calamity.

Nichiren's exclusive exaltation of the Lotus Sutra set his teaching apart from the other Buddhisms of Japan, which he vigorously criticised, and it remains the defining conviction of the traditions and modern movements that descend from him. The belief rests on the Lotus Sutra's own claim to be the Buddha's ultimate teaching, in which even those thought incapable of it are promised buddhahood. Its promise of enlightenment through faith and chanting, available to lay people amid ordinary life, gives Nichiren Buddhism its accessible and strongly devotional character.

Nichiren's exclusivist reading of the Lotus Sutra has generated major modern lay movements, most prominently Soka Gakkai, founded in Japan in 1930 by the educator Tsunesaburo Makiguchi as a value-creating lay society and later built into a mass international movement by his successors. Soka Gakkai was originally a lay association affiliated with the priestly school Nichiren Shoshu, but the two split acrimoniously in 1991 amid disputes over authority and doctrine, after which Soka Gakkai continued independently, worshipping the Gohonzon without requiring a Nichiren Shoshu priesthood as intermediary, a rupture that illustrates continuing disagreement, even within Nichiren Buddhism, over where legitimate religious authority to interpret the Lotus Sutra actually resides.