Chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo

The chanting of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo is the central practice of Nichiren Buddhism, a repeated invocation of the title of the Lotus Sutra understood to contain within it the entire truth and liberating power of that scripture. The phrase means, roughly, "devotion to the Mystic Law of the Lotus Sutra," and its recitation, called the daimoku, the "title", rests on the teaching of the thirteenth-century Japanese monk Nichiren, who held that in the degenerate age the vast and subtle teaching of the Lotus Sutra could not be realised through the older disciplines of study and meditation, but was made accessible to all through the simple, wholehearted chanting of its title. To chant the daimoku, in this teaching, is to draw out and manifest the enlightened Buddha-nature held to be inherent in every person.

The practice is typically performed before a gohonzon, a scroll inscribed with the invocation and the assembly of the Lotus Sutra, and it is chanted rhythmically, often for extended periods, alone and in groups. In the modern era the practice spread far beyond Japan through Nichiren-derived movements, most prominently the lay organisation Soka Gakkai, which carried the chanting worldwide and teaches it as a means not only of spiritual awakening but of transforming the practitioner's concrete circumstances, health, relationships, livelihood, an emphasis on tangible benefit that has drawn both wide appeal and criticism. Across its forms the practice concentrates the whole of religious life into a single repeated phrase, in the conviction that the title carries the power of the whole.

The chant descends from Nichiren, a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist monk who taught that the Lotus Sutra alone contained the complete teaching needed for enlightenment in the degenerate age he believed his own time to be, and that chanting its title was sufficient practice for people without the leisure or learning for full scriptural study, a democratising claim that put him at odds with the established Buddhist schools of his day and led to his exile more than once.

Nichiren Buddhism split into competing lineages over the following centuries, among them Nichiren Shu and the priesthood-centred Nichiren Shoshu, and the practice reached its present global scale mainly through Soka Gakkai, a lay organisation founded in Japan in the 1930s that was for decades affiliated with Nichiren Shoshu before a formal and acrimonious split between the two bodies in 1991 over authority and doctrine.

Soka Gakkai International, its worldwide federation, built a large lay membership across Japan, the Americas and elsewhere by pairing the daily chant with door-to-door recruitment, small home discussion groups, and an explicit promise that chanting produces concrete results in health, relationships and career alongside spiritual benefit, a promise that has drawn both its appeal and most of the criticism levelled at it as overly transactional religion. The organisation also became a significant political force in Japan through its affiliated Komeito party, an involvement with no parallel among the older, smaller Nichiren lineages that kept the same core chant without building a comparable lay movement around it.