Whose Inscription Is the True One

Because Nichiren inscribed many Gohonzon himself and his teaching then split into several distinct schools after his death, more than one Nichiren tradition today holds its own transmitted Gohonzon as the authoritative one, and the schools do not agree with each other about which inscription that is. Several head temples associated with the schools descending from Nichiren's original senior disciples each maintain their own lineage of transmitted Gohonzon, typically traced to a specific original Nichiren inscribed for that particular temple or disciple, so the object a practitioner chants before differs by institutional affiliation even though every version follows the same basic design. Nichiren Shoshu presses a stronger claim than a shared design merely traced to different originals: it holds a single Gohonzon inscribed by Nichiren himself, the Dai Gohonzon kept at its head temple, to be the one true object meant for all humanity rather than one transmission among others of equal standing, a claim other Nichiren schools do not accept on their own account. Underneath the institutional dispute sits a genuine doctrinal question the schools answer differently: whether the authority of a Gohonzon rests in the specific physical object and its documented lineage, or in the practitioner's own buddha nature that the object serves only to disclose.