Gohonzon

Where most Buddhist objects of devotion are statues or painted images, the gohonzon is writing. Down the center of the scroll runs Namu-myoho-renge-kyo, devotion to the Mystic Law of the Lotus Sutra, in bold calligraphy, flanked by the names of buddhas, bodhisattvas, protective deities and other figures drawn from the sutra's great assembly, the gathering in open space at which the Lotus Sutra's teaching is proclaimed. Nichiren described the arrangement as a depiction of that ceremony with the Law itself at the center rather than any figure. He began inscribing such mandalas in the 1270s, during and after his exile to Sado Island, and many scrolls in his hand survive in temple collections.

In his treatise The Object of Devotion for Observing the Mind, written in 1273 for a follower, he argued that the object of devotion for the age after the Buddha is not an image of the historical Buddha but the Law through which all beings attain Buddhahood, embodied in the invocation that stands at the mandala's heart. Believers do not treat the scroll as a picture to be contemplated but as the focus of practice: one chants the invocation facing it. Because the gohonzon is understood as a mirror of the practitioner's own Buddha nature rather than an external power, Nichiren traditions stress that its meaning is realized in practice rather than in possession of the object.

A gohonzon is not bought but conferred. In the traditional temple schools a priest transcribes or consecrates the scroll; in Soka Gakkai, the lay movement that carried Nichiren practice worldwide, new members receive a printed transcription upon joining and enshrine it at home in a butsudan, however modest. The daily practice of gongyo, reciting portions of the Lotus Sutra and chanting the invocation before the scroll, makes the home altar the primary site of Nichiren Buddhist life. Which transcription is conferred, and by whose authority, is where the modern history grows sensitive.

Nichiren Shoshu, the temple school centered at Taiseki-ji near Mount Fuji, holds as its supreme object of devotion the Dai-Gohonzon, a camphor-wood mandala it attributes to Nichiren himself. Soka Gakkai began as a lay society within that school, and for decades its members received gohonzon through Nichiren Shoshu temples. The two bodies separated acrimoniously in 1991, after which Soka Gakkai issued its own transcriptions from a scroll inscribed in 1720 by the high priest Nichikan, and each movement now describes the object of devotion in its own terms. An atlas can record without adjudicating: each community's understanding of conferral is its own, the practice of chanting before the scroll is common to all, and the gohonzon remains among the most widely enshrined sacred objects of any Japanese Buddhist lineage.