Questions and Answers on the Object of Devotion Chapter10-1

I, Nichiren, was born in the province of Awa, the twelfth of the fifteen provinces of Tōkaidō,¹⁶ the son of a fisherman in Kataumi in the village of Tōjō, the district of Nagasa. At the age of twelve I was sent to the mountain temple called Seichō-ji in the same village, where I took up residence. But though it was called a temple, since it was located in such a distant and outlying province, there was no one there who was capable of giving me proper instruction. I thereupon took it upon myself to go about to various other provinces, studying as I went along. Being a person of limited abilities, however, and having no one to teach me, I found it difficult to determine the exact origin of the ten schools of Buddhism and their relative worth.

As it happened, I prayed to the Buddhas and bodhisattvas that I would gain an understanding of these matters and made a thorough study of all the sutras and treatises, and on that basis examined the doctrines of the ten schools. As a result, I may state that the Dharma Analysis Treasury school, though shallow and inferior, to some degree accords with the teachings of the Hinayana sutras. The Establishment of Truth school represents a mixture of Hinayana and Mahayana doctrines and contains errors and misconceptions. The Precepts school originally followed the Hinayana teachings, but later it adopted those of provisional Mahayana, and now everyone regards it as a Mahayana school. There is also the Precepts school that the Great Teacher Dengyō established, but that is separate from the ordinary Precepts school.¹⁷

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