Lìzhèng ānguó lùn 立正安國論
Treatise on Establishing the Correct [Teaching] for the Peace of the State by 日蓮 Nichiren (撰)
About the work
A single-fascicle treatise by Nichiren 日蓮 日蓮 (1222–1282), submitted to the Kamakura bakufu — specifically to the zen-shū shogun-regent Hōjō Tokiyori 北條時頼 — on the 16th day of the 7th month of Bun’ō 1 / 1260, when Nichiren was 39. The Risshō ankoku-ron is the foundational text of Nichiren Buddhism and the work whose submission inaugurated Nichiren’s lifelong campaign of polemic against the established Buddhist schools of Kamakura Japan in the name of the Lotus Sūtra as the sole authentic teaching for the mappō age. It is conventionally regarded as the single most important text of Japanese Buddhist political theology.
Abstract
The treatise is structured as a fictional dialogue between a traveling visitor (the author’s voice) and his host (a learned but doctrinally confused interlocutor representing the established Buddhist establishment). The visitor begins by surveying the catastrophes afflicting late-Kamakura Japan: famines, plagues, earthquakes, and especially the Shōka famine of 1257 and the major earthquake of the same year. He traces these calamities to a doctrinal cause: the spread of heretical Pure Land devotion (Hōnen-school senju-nenbutsu) which has displaced the Lotus Sūtra from its proper position as the central teaching, depriving the nation of the dharma-protective gods (shō-jin shō-tenjin 諸天神).
The argument is constructed entirely from scriptural citation: the Konkōmyōkyō 金光明經, the Daihatsunehan-gyō 大般涅槃經, the Yakushi-kyō 藥師經, the Ninnōkyō 仁王經, and most importantly the Lotus Sūtra itself. The cumulative argument is that the nation that abandons the Lotus suffers the three calamities and seven disasters; conversely, the nation that adopts the Lotus as its principal teaching is protected by the dharma-protective gods and prospers.
Nichiren then issues the famous prediction that, if Japan does not return to the Lotus, it will suffer two further calamities not yet manifested: internal rebellion (ji-kai-hon-gyaku-nan 自界叛逆難) and foreign invasion (ta-koku-shin-pitsu-nan 他國侵逼難). The first was held by Nichiren and his disciples to have been fulfilled in the Nigatsu-sōdō rebellion of Bun’ei 9 / 1272; the second, more spectacularly, in the Mongol invasions of Bun’ei 11 / 1274 and Kōan 4 / 1281. This prophetic fulfillment became the principal historical-apologetic foundation of subsequent Nichiren Buddhism.
The submission of the treatise to the bakufu in 1260 produced no official response but triggered the first of Nichiren’s exiles — to the Izu peninsula in Kōchō 1 / 1261 — and inaugurated his career as the most aggressively polemic Buddhist teacher in Japanese history.
Date. Internally dated Bun’ō 1 / 1260, seventh month, sixteenth day, when Nichiren was 39.
Structural Division
The CANWWW entry (div29.xml, T84N2688) records the work as a single-fascicle treatise by Nichiren with no internal toc sub-list and no related-text cross-references tabulated.
Translations and research
The literature is enormous. Standard English translations:
- Burton Watson (trans.), in Selected Writings of Nichiren (Columbia UP, 1990), pp. 13–58.
- Soka Gakkai International (eds.), The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin (Soka Gakkai, 1999), vol. 1, pp. 6–34.
- Philip B. Yampolsky (ed.), Selected Writings of Nichiren (Columbia UP, 1990).
Major studies: Jacqueline I. Stone, Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (Hawai’i, 1999); Anesaki Masaharu 姉崎正治, Nichiren the Buddhist Prophet (Harvard UP, 1916, repr. Routledge 2010); Jacqueline I. Stone, “Some Reflections on Entrusting Buddhist Faith to Nichiren,” Soka Gakkai International Studies (1994); Tamura Yoshirō 田村芳朗, Nichiren Shōnin (Kōdansha, 1973); Watanabe Hōyō 渡邊寳陽, Nichiren no shisō to Kamakura Bukkyō (Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1985).
Other points of interest
The Risshō ankoku-ron prediction of foreign invasion is one of the most famous instances of fulfilled prophecy in East Asian religious history. The fulfillment in the Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281 gave Nichiren and his disciples enormous polemic credibility and was the principal historical basis on which Nichiren Buddhism established itself as a major school. Nichiren himself revised the treatise once, the Risshō ankoku-ron kō (the revised “Composition Notes”), and re-submitted it in Kōan 1 / 1278, with the prophecy now demonstrated.
Links
- CBETA online
- Wikipedia
- Author: 日蓮 (Nichiren)