Honen's exclusive emphasis on the nembutsu, the recitation of Amida Buddha's name, as sufficient for rebirth in the Pure Land, drew serious opposition from established Buddhist institutions in Kyoto, who saw it as a direct threat to more traditional, monastically centred practice. That opposition culminated in 1207 in an officially sanctioned crackdown after petitions from rival schools and a scandal involving some of his followers reached the court: several of Honen's disciples were executed, and Honen himself, then in his mid seventies, was stripped of his priestly status and exiled to a remote province, a severe and well documented punishment for a religious teacher of his stature and advanced age. He was eventually pardoned and allowed to return shortly before his death, but the episode shows that the single practice teaching now closely associated with mainstream Japanese Pure Land Buddhism was, in its own time, treated by the religious and political establishment as dangerous enough to warrant exile and execution rather than simply debated as one option among others.
The later widespread acceptance and institutional respectability of Jodo shu, the school built on his teaching, developed only after this period of active persecution, a trajectory from suppressed movement to established tradition that is easy to lose sight of when the school is encountered today as a settled, uncontroversial part of Japanese Buddhism.