Regarding the chief priests of the Tendai school, nothing need be said here about the Great Teacher Dengyō, the founder of the school. Following him, the first chief priest, Gishin, and the second chief priest, Enchō, both regarded the Lotus Sutra as the correct or principal doctrine and the True Word teachings as subsidiary. But the third chief priest, the Great Teacher Jikaku, viewed the True Word as the correct doctrine and the Lotus Sutra as subsidiary. The various chief priests who succeeded him in the years following debated the matter but came to no fixed conclusion.
The General Administrator of Priests Myōun served two terms, as the fifty-fifth and the fifty-seventh chief priest of the Tendai school. On a certain day in the fifth month of the third year of Angen [1177] he incurred the wrath of the Retired Emperor Goshirakawa and was ordered into exile in the province of Izu. He was rescued at Ōtsu by priests of Mount Hiei, however, and thereafter became chief priest once more in the eleventh month of the third year of Jishō [1179]. But because he engaged in activities designed to overthrow the General of the Right Minamoto no Yoritomo, on the nineteenth day of the eleventh month of the second year of Juei [1183] he was attacked by Minamoto no Yoshinaka.
This man encountered great troubles twice, once when he was alive and again at the time of his death. The troubles he met when he was alive were the kind that customarily go with practice of the Buddhist teaching, adornments to the activities and achievements of a sage or worthy man. But the humiliations he suffered in his manner of death and thereafter were the type of disgrace invited by an evil or a foolish man, one who slanders the correct Law. He was like the Great Arrogant Brahman or Shuri.6
From all of this it is fairly evident that, from the time of Myōun and thereafter, the chief priests have all favored the True Word teachings. This situation has continued down to the present, a period of over a hundred years, or the terms of more than thirty chief priests. During that whole time, True Word chief priests have stolen the position that rightfully belongs to the Lotus Sutra.
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.
Notes
6. For Great Arrogant Brahman, see Glossary. It is uncertain to whom the name Shuri refers, though it appears to be a part of a Sanskrit name.