Buddhahood in This Body, and Its Later Schools

Central to Nichiren's teaching is sokushin jobutsu, attaining Buddhahood in this very body, a claim that awakening is available in the practitioner's present ordinary life through the daimoku rather than across further lifetimes of accumulated merit. Because the practice requires nothing but the chant and faith in the gohonzon, Nichiren presented it as suited to ordinary people in a degenerate age incapable of Theravada monastic discipline or Tendai's demanding meditative curriculum, a claim structurally similar to Pure Land's argument for the nembutsu even as Nichiren rejected Pure Land practice by name.

After Nichiren's death, his teaching split into schools disputing his intent and his own status. Nichiren Shu treats Nichiren as a bodhisattva and founder. A stricter lineage descending through the priest Nikko, later organized as Nichiren Shoshu, held that Nichiren was himself the Buddha of the age and treats a particular inscribed gohonzon, the Dai-Gohonzon at its head temple, as uniquely authoritative. Soka Gakkai began in the twentieth century as a lay society within Nichiren Shoshu, was excommunicated by that priesthood in 1991 over disputes about lay authority and the interpretation of Nichiren's teaching, and now operates as an independent global lay movement, still centered on the daimoku but without Nichiren Shoshu's priesthood or its claim for the Dai-Gohonzon specifically.