The Refutation of the Three Great Teachers Chapter6
Nichiren
Objection: What business does a person of your social standing have in attempting to refute these three great teachers?
Answer: I would not venture to try to refute these three great teachers.
Question: Then what is the meaning of what you have just been saying?
Answer: The sutras and treatises brought from India to China and to our own country run to five thousand or seven thousand volumes, and I am roughly familiar with these works. Regarding Kōbō, Jikaku, and Chishō I will say nothing here as to what their secular faults may be, but in terms of their approach to the Buddha’s teachings I must state that they are to be counted among the foremost slanderers of the Law.
The Thus Come One has told us in his own golden words that those who speak slanderously of the Mahayana teachings will fall into hell more swiftly than an arrow in flight.16 And Kōbō, Jikaku, and their like have spoken in the same terms regarding the gravity of the sin of slandering the Law. But I will leave aside the pronouncements of such men.
If the golden words of the two Buddhas, Shakyamuni and Many Treasures, are not fallacious,17 then Kōbō, Jikaku, and Chishō must certainly be destined for the great citadel of the hell of incessant suffering. And if the tongues of the Buddhas of the ten directions who were emanations of Shakyamuni Buddha did not fall to the ground [when they testified to the truth of the Buddha’s words], then all the persons living in Japan, 4,589,659 in number, will be like the disciples and lay supporters of the monk Shore of Suffering and the other teachers whom I mentioned earlier, who fell into the Avīchi hell. There they lay facing upward on burning iron for nine hundred ten thousand million years, lay facing downward for nine hundred ten thousand million years, lay on their left side for nine hundred ten thousand million years, and lay on their right side for nine hundred ten thousand million years. Thus they spent thirty-six hundred ten thousand million years lying on burning iron. After that they migrated out of the Avīchi hell and were born in a great hell in another land, where they spent countless hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, millions of nayutas of years undergoing great pain and agony.
Shore of Suffering and the others were guilty only of using the Hinayana sutras to refute the provisional Mahayana teachings, and yet they had to suffer all this. How much worse, then, must be the suffering of these three great teachers, who not only use sutras that have “not yet revealed the truth”18 to try to refute the teachings that reveal the true intentions of the Buddhas of the three existences of past, present, and future,19 but who furthermore destroy the path by which all living beings may attain Buddhahood. Their guilt is so weighty and so profound that even the Buddhas of the past, the present, and the future could never finish describing it. What salvation could they ever hope for?
Notes
16. The source of this statement is unknown.
17. Shakyamuni says in the second chapter of the Lotus Sutra that he “has long expounded his doctrines and now must reveal the truth,” and Many Treasures lends credence to Shakyamuni’s teachings in the Lotus Sutra when he proclaims in the eleventh chapter, “All that you have expounded is the truth.”
18. Immeasurable Meanings Sutra.
19. The “true intentions” indicates the Lotus Sutra. The second chapter says, “Following the same fashion that the Buddhas of the three existences employ in preaching the teachings, I now will do likewise, preaching a Law that is without distinctions.”