The Votary of the Lotus Sutra

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It is significant that Nichiren Daishonin wrote ‘The Opening of the Eyes’ only after surviving the Tatsunokuchi Persecution and being exiled to Sado.  Up to that point, he had identified himself - albeit indirectly - with Bodhisattva Jogyo, the leader of the Bodhisattvas of the Earth, who appears in the Lotus Sutra to take on the task of spreading the sutra in the Latter Day.  Until the Sado exile, as the ‘votary of the Lotus Sutra’, Nichiren Daishonin’s primary aim thus appeared to be to reassert the supremacy of Shakyamuni’s Lotus Sutra.  For example, Rissho Ankoku Ron, written in 1260 and presented to the effective ruler of Japan, Hojo Tokiyori, explains that the nation had been suffering its long series of disasters precisely because the Japanese people had turned their backs on the Lotus Sutra:  

If people favor what is only incidental and forget what is primary, can the benevolent deities be anything but angry?  If people cast aside what is perfect and take up what is biased, can the world escape the plots of demons?  

On reaching Sado, however, Nichiren Daishonin discarded his identity as Jogyo and revealed his true identity as the Buddha of the Latter Day of the Law.  He says:  

On the twelfth day of the ninth month of last year, between the hours of the rat and the ox (11 p.m. to 3 a.m.), this person named Nichiren was beheaded. It is his soul that has come to this island of Sado and, in the second month of the following year, snowbound, is writing this to send to his close disciples.  

Of course, ‘this person named Nichiren’ was not literally beheaded. Rather, the Daishonin here is indicating the profound change of status that he went through at Tatsunokuchi, as he ‘cast off the transient and revealed the true’ (hosshaku kempon).   

Elsewhere in the same Gosho he gives further hints of his true identity - as when he states, for example, ‘I, Nichiren, am sovereign, teacher, and father and mother to all the people of Japan.’  The principle of the Three Virtues of sovereign, teacher and parent derives from the verse section of the ‘Life Span of the Thus Come One’ (sixteenth) chapter of the Lotus Sutra, and describes Shakyamuni Buddha’s relationship to the people of the saha world.  The parallel the Daishonin is drawing is clear - he is the Buddha who perfectly embodies the Three Virtues in the Latter Day. 

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