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.