Followers of the Buddhist reformer Nichiren (1222-1282) have made his willingness to strongly admonish people and practices deemed slanderous of the true Dharma, no matter their power or status, into a core feature of Nichiren Buddhism. This panel brings together three researchers who consider ways Nichiren Buddhists from the thirteenth century to the present have influenced Japan’s religio-political order through risky rebuke. The papers introduce contrasting applications of Nichiren Buddhist admonishing that reveal how uncompromising confrontations with heterodoxy both destabilize and construct institutions and their practices. By considering how adherents’ defense of orthodoxy inspires self-legitimizing claims that invert doctrinal and temporary authority, and by analyzing examples of self-sacrificing admonishing from a wide historical range, these papers suggest ways attention to Nichiren’s rebukes helps us understand how religions take shape through conflict.
During Japan’s medieval period, Nichiren Buddhist clerics engaged in kokka kangyō (“admonishing and enlightening the state”): direct remonstrations with the shōgun, his representatives, or local officials to abandon support for all other teachings and embrace the Lotus Sūtra alone. Such acts reenacted precedent set by the sect’s founder, Nichiren (1222–1282), who had remonstrated to this effect with the Kamakura shogunate. Famine, earthquakes, and other catastrophes ravaging Japan, Nichiren argued, stemmed from neglect of the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha’s highest teaching; conversely, faith in the Lotus would make this world an ideal buddha land. At great personal risk, Nichiren’s successors established a tradition of such remonstrations, especially in times of widespread disaster. Kokka kangyō asserted the dharma’s claims over those of worldly rule. It illustrates how remonstrations with authority articulated from the margins in the name of a transcendent truth can symbolically invert power hierarchies and solidify group identity.
By focusing on Tanaka Chigaku (1861–1939), one of the key figures in modern Nichiren Buddhism, this paper sheds light on how the medieval practice of kokka kangyō (“admonishing the state”) was revived and refashioned in the Meiji era (1868–1912). This was the period in which Japan’s Constitution of 1889 guaranteed freedom of religion, establishing it as a matter of personal choice, and, barring civic responsibilities, excluded from government affairs. Drawing on “media event theory,” I argue that the Meiji Constitution’s parameters guided Tanaka’s kokka kangyō efforts to target ordinary subjects rather than the government itself. His remonstration strategies involved the conspicuous circulation of his self-published tracts that are best understood as a type of media event: intentionally preplanned and staged as “extraordinary” and “historic,” advertised in advance, and intensively reported on and experienced by engaged adherents who turned state remonstrating into a form of proselytizing via print media.
Over the last decade, the lay Nichiren Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai has seen a new constituency of adherents invoke Nichiren’s tradition of admonishing authority to confront administrators within their own religion and elected officials in its affiliated political party Komeito. This paper considers ways Gakkai members critical of the religion and party are returning to Nichiren’s “admonishing of the state” (kokka kangyō) to leverage the practice into a rebuke of Nichiren Buddhists by Nichiren Buddhists. The presentation will consider the position adopted by these critical members against a religion now undergoing dramatic transformations, the tactics they are employing to admonish while mitigating public suspicion about religious expressions, how they rely on doctrine to guide fellow adherents and inspire institutional reforms, and what their inversion of Nichiren’s admonitory practices into an internally aimed critique may tell us about the nature of religious rebuke.