One Sutra Above All

Nichiren's exclusive exaltation of the Lotus Sutra set his teaching apart from the other Buddhisms of Japan, which he vigorously criticised, and it remains the defining conviction of the traditions and modern movements that descend from him. The belief rests on the Lotus Sutra's own claim to be the Buddha's ultimate teaching, in which even those thought incapable of it are promised buddhahood. Its promise of enlightenment through faith and chanting, available to lay people amid ordinary life, gives Nichiren Buddhism its accessible and strongly devotional character.

Nichiren's exclusivist reading of the Lotus Sutra has generated major modern lay movements, most prominently Soka Gakkai, founded in Japan in 1930 by the educator Tsunesaburo Makiguchi as a value-creating lay society and later built into a mass international movement by his successors. Soka Gakkai was originally a lay association affiliated with the priestly school Nichiren Shoshu, but the two split acrimoniously in 1991 amid disputes over authority and doctrine, after which Soka Gakkai continued independently, worshipping the Gohonzon without requiring a Nichiren Shoshu priesthood as intermediary, a rupture that illustrates continuing disagreement, even within Nichiren Buddhism, over where legitimate religious authority to interpret the Lotus Sutra actually resides.