Ages
Mappo (The Age of the Dharma's Decline)
Also Known As Mofa
Position 3 in Its Cycle
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Mappo, the Age of the Dharma's Decline, called Mofa in Chinese, is the third and last of the three ages into which East Asian Buddhist writers divided the time following the historical Buddha. In this final age only the teaching is held to survive, as words alone, with the practice and the attainment of the two ages before it now gone; the Japanese reckoning most influential for the Pure Land and Nichiren schools placed its opening in the year 1052. This entry names the age's position in the wider three age scheme this atlas already tracks under its own doctrine entry, Mappo (The Latter Age of the Dharma), which carries the fuller treatment of the scheme and the debate over what it means.
Facts
Disputed
Proposed DatingThe Japanese reckoning most influential for the Pure Land and Nichiren schools; Chinese calculations before it placed the transition variously, and the tradition as a whole holds no single settled year. Proposed DatingPlaced variously by Chinese calculation from the sixth century onward; the Japanese reckoning most widely adopted, and the one the atlas records as a start year below, sets it at 1052. 1 Chinese calculations, worked out from the sixth century onward, placed the onset of this last age variously; the Japanese reckoning most influential for the Pure Land and Nichiren schools set it at the year 1052, the date on which those schools' distinctive practices are premised, but the tradition as a whole holds no single settled year. Attributions
TraditionEast Asian Buddhism, and above all the Japanese Pure Land and Nichiren schools, whose distinctive practices are premised on having entered this age. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
The third and last East Asian Buddhist Dharma age, in which only the teaching is held to survive, central to the Japanese Pure Land and Nichiren schools.
Related To
The five corruptions are the diagnostic evidence East Asian Pure Land teachers cited that the present age has entered Mappo.
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The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.