Kāimù chāo 開目抄
The Anthology Opening the [Spiritual] Eyes by 日蓮 Nichiren (撰)
About the work
A two-fascicle major doctrinal treatise by Nichiren 日蓮 日蓮 (1222–1282), composed during his Sado exile in Bun’ei 9 / 1272 at the cottage at Tsukahara, when Nichiren was 50. The Kaimoku-shō — “Opening the Eyes” — is the most theologically substantive of Nichiren’s writings and one of the Five Major Writings (go-jū-go-shō 五重御書) that constitute the doctrinal canon of Nichiren Buddhism. The work is conventionally understood as Nichiren’s self-revelation of his identity as the Honbutsu — the original (or “true”) Buddha of the Lotus Sūtra — for the mappō age.
Abstract
The treatise’s distinctive doctrinal claim is the opening of three vows (sandai 三大): Nichiren as sovereign, teacher, and parent for the people of Japan in the mappō age. Each of these claims is justified through a sustained reading of the Lotus Sūtra, especially the Jūryō-bon 壽量品 (chapter 16, “The Lifespan of the Tathāgata”), which Nichiren reads as revealing the eternal Buddha-life beyond the manifestations of the historical Śākyamuni — and as authorizing the Lotus-teacher in the mappō age (i.e. Nichiren himself) to bear the same triple office.
The argument proceeds in three principal moves:
-
The Confucian and Brahmanical sages, while authentic within their own categories, are exceeded by the Buddha. The classical sages of the secular world — Confucius, the Zhōu kings, the Brahmanical seers — are exceeded by the Buddha’s superior knowledge of karma and mokṣa.
-
The Hīnayāna, Quasi-Mahāyāna, and Provisional Mahāyāna teachings, while authentic within their own categories, are exceeded by the Lotus. This is the classical Tendai kyō-han sequencing, here radicalized: Nichiren insists that the Lotus alone provides the complete teaching for mappō, and that all other Mahāyāna teachings — including the Pure Land, Zen, and Shingon — are incomplete and therefore inappropriate to the present age.
-
The Lotus Sūtra, read through its Jūryō-bon (life-span) chapter, reveals the eternal Buddha and authorizes the Lotus-teacher in the mappō age to bear the offices of sovereign, teacher, and parent of the people. This is the self-application: Nichiren explicitly claims this triple office for himself.
The treatise was written in extreme hardship — Nichiren had been condemned to execution at Tatsunokuchi shortly before (the 9th month of 1271), and was now in Sado exile under conditions amounting to slow starvation. The Kaimoku-shō contains some of the most powerful personal-existential passages in medieval Japanese religious literature — Nichiren’s reflection on his own suffering and the necessity of bearing it as the Lotus-witness.
Date. Internally dated Bun’ei 9 / 1272, second month, at Tsukahara, Sado.
Structural Division
The CANWWW entry (div29.xml, T84N2689) records the work as a 2-fascicle treatise by Nichiren with no internal toc sub-list and no related-text cross-references tabulated.
Translations and research
English translations:
- Burton Watson (trans.), in Selected Writings of Nichiren (Columbia UP, 1990), pp. 51–146.
- SGI (eds.), The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin (1999), vol. 1, pp. 220–296.
Major studies: Jacqueline I. Stone, Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (Hawai’i, 1999); Tamura Yoshirō, Nichiren Shōnin (Kōdansha, 1973); Asai Endō 浅井圓道, Nichiren shōnin kyōgaku no kenkyū (Heirakuji, 1976); Watanabe Hōyō, Nichiren no shisō to Kamakura Bukkyō (Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1985); Anesaki Masaharu, Nichiren the Buddhist Prophet (Harvard UP, 1916).