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.