Nam-myoho-renge-kyo

What is recited is the title of a text, not a statement about it, and that is the whole doctrinal point.

The words are the Sino-Japanese reading of the characters Myoho-renge-kyo, which is Kumarajiva's Chinese rendering of the Sanskrit title of the Lotus Sutra, the sutra of the lotus of the wonderful dharma, prefixed by namu, homage. Nichiren's position is that the title contains the entire content of the sutra, that the sutra contains the entire content of Buddhism, and that in the degenerate age the appropriate practice is therefore the title alone. He called this the daimoku.

He proclaimed it, by the tradition's reckoning, on the twenty-eighth day of the fourth month of 1253, at a temple in what is now Chiba prefecture. That is an unusually precise founding date for a religious practice and it is preserved because Nichiren was a prolific writer who dated his own letters, a large number of which survive, some in his own hand.

He was also uncompromising to a degree that got him repeatedly exiled and once nearly executed. His position was not that the Lotus Sutra was the best of the sutras but that the others were superseded and that practising them in this age was actively harmful, and he said so to the authorities in writing, naming schools and predicting national disaster if they were not suppressed. The Mongol invasion attempts of 1274 and 1281 were taken by his followers as vindication.

The exclusivity is intrinsic to the teaching rather than incidental to its founder's temperament.

The traditions descending from Nichiren are numerous and do not agree, and the twentieth-century history is unusually well documented because much of it happened in public.

Nichiren Shu and the older temple lineages represent one line of descent. Nichiren Shoshu represents another, holding a distinctive doctrine of Nichiren's own status and possessing an object of veneration it regards as inscribed by him. Soka Gakkai, founded in 1930 as a lay educational society, became after the war the most numerically successful new religious movement in Japan, growing through an aggressive conversion practice and building a political party that has been in national government.

In 1991 Nichiren Shoshu excommunicated Soka Gakkai. The dispute was about priestly authority, and it separated a lay organisation of millions from the priesthood it had been affiliated to, leaving both to claim the founder. The mutual polemic since has been sustained and public.

For anyone encountering the practice outside Japan, the practical consequence is that the formula is most often met through SGI, the international arm, whose presentation of it emphasises human revitalisation, peace and individual capability, and which does not present itself in the exclusivist terms Nichiren used. Whether that presentation is a legitimate development or a departure is precisely what the competing lineages argue about.

The formula itself is identical in all of them. What differs is what is claimed about who may authorise its recitation, and about what the object of veneration in front of the reciter is.