Regarding Great Bodhisattva Hachiman Chapter2
Many people in the world today claim that Great Bodhisattva Hachiman is a manifestation of Amida Buddha. They are perhaps simply repeating what has been said by persons of middle antiquity. But in the main Hachiman Shrine in Ōsumi there is a stone with an inscription.3 One half of the stone bears the two characters for the name Hachiman. The other half says: “Long ago on Eagle Peak he preached the Lotus Sutra of the Wonderful Law. Now he has manifested himself as the Great Bodhisattva and resides in the main shrine.” He appeared in India as Shakyamuni and preached the Lotus Sutra, and now has manifested himself in this country of Japan as Great Bodhisattva Hachiman, taking a vow that centers about the word “honest.”4 Shakyamuni, the lord of teachings, was born in the ninth period of decrease of the kalpa of continuance, when human beings had a life span of a hundred years, in central India on the eighth day of the fourth month, the day with the cyclical sign kinoe-tora. Eighty years later, he passed away, on the fifteenth day of the second month, the day with the cyclical sign mizunoe-saru. Great Bodhisattva Hachiman was born in Japan as the sixteenth sovereign, Emperor Ōjin, on the eighth day of the fourth month, the day with the cyclical sign kinoe-tora. He passed away at the age of eighty, on the fifteenth day of the second month, the day with the cyclical sign mizunoe-saru. Who, then, could question that he was in fact a manifestation of Shakyamuni Buddha?
But now the 4,589,659 people of this country of Japan have been deceived by the great heavenly devil in the person of men such as Shan-tao, Eshin, Yōkan, and Hōnen, who have led them to cast aside Shakyamuni and take Amida Buddha as their object of devotion. And in their madness, they have gone so far as to seize the fifteenth day of the second month [the day when Shakyamuni passed away] and declare it to be the day of Amida Buddha’s passing; and the eighth day of the fourth month [when Shakyamuni was born] they claim to be the birthday of Medicine Master Buddha. Their hatred of Shakyamuni, who is the father of us all, is so intense that they insist that Great Bodhisattva Hachiman is a manifestation of Amida Buddha. In doing so, they mean to pay honor to Great Bodhisattva Hachiman, but in fact they become enemies of Great Bodhisattva Hachiman.
Notes
3. This stone is said to have stood in the precincts of Hachiman Shrine in Ōsumi Province, an area in what is now Kagoshima in the southern part of Kyushu. The stone itself no longer exists, but the inscription is quoted in a work by the Zen priest Nampo Genshō (1555–1620).
4. The Daishonin refers to the vow of Great Bodhisattva Hachiman, which he describes in the words “When he preached the Lotus Sutra [as Shakyamuni Buddha] in India, he said, ‘Honestly discarding expedient means,’ and in Japan he vowed that he would make his residence on the heads of honest persons.”