Guānxīn běnzūn chāo 觀心本尊抄
The Anthology on Mind-Contemplation and the Object of Devotion by 日蓮 Nichiren (撰)
About the work
A single-fascicle major doctrinal treatise by Nichiren 日蓮 日蓮 (1222–1282), composed at Ichinosawa on Sado island in Bun’ei 10 / 1273 / 4th month / 25th day, when Nichiren was 51, addressed to Toki Jōnin 富木常忍, the senior Shimōsa-province disciple. The Kanjin honzon-shō — “Mind-Contemplation and the Object of Devotion” — is one of the Five Major Writings of Nichiren Buddhism. It is the work in which Nichiren most clearly articulates the doctrine of the honzon (本尊, “object of devotion”) — the calligraphic maṇḍala containing the daimoku and the names of the Lotus-Sūtra assembly — which became the central object of Nichiren-school devotion.
Abstract
The treatise opens with a question on the Tendai ichinen sanzen (一念三千, “three-thousand realms in a single thought”) doctrine and proceeds, in a sustained scholastic argument, to its Nichiren-distinctive reformulation: where Tendai ichinen sanzen is a meditative-introspective doctrine (the practitioner contemplates the three-thousand realms internally through shikan 止觀 meditation), Nichiren’s ichinen sanzen is externally objectified in the daimoku and the honzon. The practitioner accesses ichinen sanzen not through internal meditation but through chanting the daimoku in front of the honzon. The honzon is therefore the objectified form of the entire Mahāyāna soteriological cosmos.
The doctrinal argument proceeds in three principal moves:
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The Lotus Sūtra’s Jūryō-bon (chapter 16) reveals the eternal Buddha and the eternal Buddha-life; this is the doctrinal foundation of the honzon.
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The eternal Buddha and his retinue can be objectified in the form of a calligraphic maṇḍala — Nichiren’s omandara 御曼荼羅 — which therefore contains the eternal Buddha and his enlightened cosmos in graphical form.
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The practitioner accesses the eternal Buddha and the enlightened cosmos through chanting the daimoku in front of the honzon. The daimoku is the acoustic form of what the honzon is in graphic form; the two together constitute the complete devotional act of Nichiren Buddhism.
The Kanjin honzon-shō is therefore the theological foundation of the central devotional practice of all subsequent Nichiren Buddhism — daimoku chanting before the honzon maṇḍala.
Date. Internally Bun’ei 10 / 1273 / 4th month / 25th day, at Ichinosawa, Sado.
Structural Division
The CANWWW entry (div29.xml, T84N2692) 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
English translations:
- Burton Watson (trans.), in Selected Writings of Nichiren (Columbia UP, 1990).
- SGI (eds.), The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin (1999), vol. 1, pp. 354–382.
- Kyōtsū Hori (trans.), Kanjin Honzon Shō (NOPPA, 2002).
Major studies: Jacqueline I. Stone, Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (Hawai’i, 1999), ch. on the honzon; Sasaki Kentoku 佐々木憲徳, Nichiren no honzon-ron 日蓮の本尊論 (Heirakuji, 1973); Tamura Yoshirō, Nichiren Shōnin (Kōdansha, 1973).