On the Great Teacher Jikaku Chapter1

Background

This is a reply to Ōta Jōmyō of Shimōsa Province, who had sent donations of money and a priest’s surplice to Nichiren Daishonin at Minobu. It is dated simply the twenty-seventh day of the first month, but it is thought to have been written in 1280.

Acknowledging receipt of Ōta’s offerings, the Daishonin refers Ōta to another letter, which he wrote to a follower named Akimoto, for doctrinal details. He then expresses delight at the rare opportunity of having encountered the Lotus Sutra and grasped the supremacy of its teaching. Next he addresses the erroneous interpretation of Jikaku, the third chief priest of Enryaku-ji, the head temple of the Tendai school, which held that the esoteric Diamond Crown Sutra is the “crown,” or supreme, among sutras, ranking above the Lotus Sutra. The Daishonin compares Jikaku’s usurping of the Lotus Sutra’s supreme status and assigning it to the True Word sutras to cutting off the head of a crane and trying to substitute the head of a frog, which ends in the death of both. He indicates that it appears that the head and the body of Jikaku are buried in different places, and that that reminds one of the fact that Myōun, who was both the fifty-fifth and the fifty-seventh chief priest of Enryaku-ji, had been killed.

Dengyō, the founder, and his two successors, Gishin and Enchō, respectively the first and second chief priests of Enryaku-ji, regarded the Lotus Sutra as the primary teaching and the True Word sutras as subordinate, but this view was inverted by Jikaku, the third chief priest. Since the time of Myōun, a latter-day successor of Jikaku, all the chief priests of the Tendai school became chief priests of the True Word teaching, the Daishonin says. In closing he admonishes his disciples to be aware of this fault within the Tendai school, and to bear in mind that those chief priests who upheld the True Word doctrines are the enemies of all the Buddhas and gods.