On Repaying Debts of Gratitude
Nichiren
Chapter25(The Ominous Manifestations of Kobo and Jikaku)
Main Text
Let us turn now to the Great Teacher Kōbō. At the time of the great drought in the second month of the first year of Tenchō (824), the emperor ordered Shubin to pray for rain, and within seven days Shubin was able to make rain fall. But the rain fell only in the capital and did not extend to the countryside.
Kōbō was then ordered to take over the prayers for rain, but seven days passed and there was no sign of it. Another seven days passed and there still were no clouds. After seven more days had passed, the emperor ordered Wake no Matsuna to go and present offerings in Shinsen’en garden,85 whereupon rain fell from the sky for a period of three days. The Great Teacher Kōbō and his disciples thereupon proceeded to appropriate this rain and claim it as their own, and for more than four hundred years now, it has been known as “Kōbō’s rain.”
The Great Teacher Jikaku said he had a dream in which he shot down the sun. And the Great Teacher Kōbō told a great falsehood, claiming that, in the spring of the ninth year of the Kōnin era (818), when he was praying for an end to the great epidemic, the sun came out in the middle of the night.
Since the kalpa of formation, when the earth took shape, down to the ninth period of decrease86 in the kalpa of continuance, twenty-nine kalpas have passed by, but in all that time, the sun has never been known to come out at night! As to the Great Teacher Jikaku’s dream of the sun, where in all the five thousand or seven thousand volumes of the Buddhist scriptures or the three thousand or more volumes of the Confucian and Taoist scriptures is it recorded that to dream of shooting the sun is auspicious? The king of the asuras, angered at the deity Shakra, shot an arrow at the sun god, but the arrow came back and struck the king himself in the eye. King Chou87 of the Yin dynasty used the sun as a target for his arrows, and in the end he was destroyed.
In Japan, in the reign of Emperor Jimmu, the emperor’s elder brother Itsuse no Mikoto engaged in battle with the chieftain of Tomi,88 and Itsuse no Mikoto was wounded in the hand by an arrow. He said, “I am a descendant of the sun deity. But because I have drawn my bow while facing the sun, I have incurred this punishment from the sun deity.”
In India, King Ajātashatru renounced his earlier mistaken views and became a follower of the Buddha. He returned to his palace and lay down to sleep, but later rose up in alarm and said to his ministers, “I have dreamed that the sun has left the sky and fallen to the earth!” His ministers said, “Perhaps this means the passing away of the Buddha.” Subhadra89 also had the same kind of dream just before the Buddha passed away.
It would be particularly inauspicious to dream [as Jikaku claims he did] of shooting the sun in Japan, since the supreme deity in Japan is the Sun Goddess, and the name of the country, Japan, means “source of the sun.” In addition, Shakyamuni Buddha, the lord of teachings, is called Sun Seed because his mother, Lady Māyā, dreamed that she conceived the sun and in time gave birth to this child, the crown prince.
The Great Teacher Jikaku established the Thus Come One Mahāvairochana as the object of devotion on Mount Hiei and rejected Shakyamuni Buddha. He paid honor to the three True Word sutras and acted as an enemy to the Lotus Sutra and its two companion sutras. That was no doubt the reason why he dreamed this dream of shooting the sun.
Notes
85. Shinsen’en was a garden established by Emperor Kammu within the imperial palace in Kyoto. It was the site of a large pond where prayers for rain were performed. According to Genkō Era Biographies, a dragon lived in this pond, and when it made an appearance, rain would fall. Matsuna’s offerings were made to this dragon.
86. “The ninth period of decrease” corresponds to the present age. See kalpa of continuance in Glossary.
87. A dissolute ruler who was conquered by King Wu of the Chou dynasty. According to Records of the Historian, he had a human figure made and called it a heavenly god, and caused people to treat it with contempt. Moreover, it is said that he shot arrows at a leather bag filled with blood, claiming that he had shot the god of the sun.
88. The chieftain of Tomi refers to Nagasunebiko, a powerful local leader in Yamato. According to The Chronicles of Japan, Jimmu, the legendary first emperor, proceeded southward to invade the Yamato region, where he was engaged in battle by Nagasunebiko and driven back.
89. The last convert of Shakyamuni Buddha. According to The Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom, he had a dream in which all people were deprived of their eyesight and left standing naked in the darkness, whereupon the sun fell from the sky, the earth cracked, the seas ran dry, and Mount Sumeru was toppled by a great wind. In the morning, being told that the Buddha would enter nirvana before the next day, he went to Shakyamuni and joined the Order, and that night attained the state of arhat.
Lecture
This chapter specifically refutes the Shingon (True Word) school, and in particular, this section focuses on denouncing Kobo and Jikaku of Japan.
Kobo claimed that the sun appeared in the middle of the night. Jikaku, on the other hand, asserted that he had a dream in which he shot down the sun with a bow, using this as proof that his perverse doctrines were in accord with the Buddha’s intent. Details regarding Kobo will appear in the following chapter, while Jikaku’s story is further elaborated upon in The Selection of the Time (Senji-sho).
Specifically, Jikaku authored commentaries on the Diamond Peak Sutra and the Susiddhikara Sutra. In them, he argued that while the Lotus Sutra and the Shingon teachings are identical in principle regarding the “three thousand realms in a single moment of life” (ichinen sanzen), the Shingon school includes mudras and mantras that the Lotus Sutra lacks, creating a disparity as vast as that between heaven and earth.
To determine whether the essence of his commentary reached the heart of the Buddha, Jikaku placed it before an image of the Buddha and offered prayers for seven days and seven nights. At the fifth watch of the fifth day, he dreamed that he shot down the sun with an arrow. He regarded this profoundly ominous dream as evidence that his erroneous views were aligned with the Buddha’s will. Truly, this must be described as the most perverse among all perverse doctrines.
Nevertheless, even today—seven hundred years after the passing of Nichiren Daishonin—the remnants of such perverse religions persist. It is a startling fact that even among the new religious movements that emerged after the war, similar erroneous doctrines that ignore all reason continue to prevail openly.
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