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.