The Ceremony in the Air

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Nichiren Daishonin explains that the Gohonzon is described in the ‘Ceremony in the Air’, in eight core chapters of the Lotus Sutra, from the ‘Emerging from the Earth’ (fifteenth) to the ‘Entrustment’ (twenty-second) chapters:  

The true object of devotion is described as follows:

   The treasure tower sits in the air above the saha world that the Buddha of the essential teaching [identified as the pure and eternal land]; Myoho-renge-kyo appears in the centre of the tower with the Buddhas Shakyamuni and Many Treasures seated to the right and left, and, flanking them, the four bodhisattvas, followers of Shakyamuni, led by Superior Practices. 

Likewise, many of the other characters that appear on the Gohonzon represent figures who participate in the Ceremony in the Air.  The Daishonin stresses how closely the Gohonzon illustrates this ceremony in a later Gosho, ‘The Real Aspect of the Gohonzon’: 

This mandala is in no way my invention.  It is the object of devotion that depicts Shakyamuni Buddha, the World-Honoured One, in the treasure tower of Many Treasures Buddha, and the Buddhas who were Shakyamuni’s emanations as accurately as a print matches its woodblock. 

It is important to understand, however, that while in one sense the Gohonzon is ‘derived’ from Shakyamuni’s Lotus Sutra, fundamentally it transcends it, since the Ceremony in the Air which the Gohonzon represents is an event unbounded by time or space.   From this perspective, Shakyamuni’s Lotus Sutra is a preparation for the revelation of the Gohonzon, in that it was used by Nichiren Daishonin to explain the fundamental object of worship.   

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