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.