Sāndà mìfǎ chāo 三大祕法抄
The Anthology of the Three Great Secret Laws by 日蓮 Nichiren (撰)
About the work
A single-fascicle Nichiren doctrinal letter attributed to Nichiren 日蓮 日蓮 (1222–1282), conventionally dated to Kōan 4 / 1281 / 4th month / 8th day, when Nichiren was 59, at Minobu. The work sets out the three great secret laws (三大祕法 sandai hihō) — the doctrinal triple of Nichiren Buddhism: (1) the honzon of the original gate (honmon no honzon 本門の本尊); (2) the kaidan of the original gate (honmon no kaidan 本門の戒壇); (3) the daimoku of the original gate (honmon no daimoku 本門の題目, i.e. Nam-myōhō-renge-kyō).
Abstract
The letter is the classical doctrinal statement of the sandai hihō. Each of the three is presented as a secret transmission (密法 mippō) of the Lotus Sūtra — Nichiren’s distinctive doctrinal position is that the Lotus’s original gate (honmon 本門, i.e. chapters 15–28 of the sūtra) contains secret laws not explicitly stated in the text but transmissible through proper kyō-han doctrinal analysis.
The three great secret laws are doctrinally fundamental to all subsequent Nichiren Buddhism:
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The honzon is the object of devotion — the calligraphic maṇḍala (in Nichiren’s day) or, in later sectarian developments, the Daigohonzon of the Taisekiji (the headquarters of the Fuji-monryū branch, which subsequently became Nichiren Shōshū and the parent body of Sōka Gakkai) or various other forms.
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The kaidan is the ordination platform — i.e. the sacred site where the daimoku is publicly proclaimed and where the practitioner formally enters the Nichiren community. In Nichiren’s own teaching, the kaidan was a future eschatological reality to be established when the Lotus triumphed in Japan; subsequent sectarian developments have located the kaidan at various sites.
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The daimoku is the acoustic invocation Nam-myōhō-renge-kyō — the central liturgical-meditative practice of Nichiren Buddhism.
Authentication caveat. Modern critical scholarship — beginning with Asai Yōrin 浅井要麟 and continuing with Tamura Yoshirō 田村芳朗, Watanabe Hōyō 渡邊寳陽, and others — has called the Nichiren authorship of this letter into question. The classical Nichiren-shū position is that the letter is authentic; some scholarly opinion (especially in the Nichiren-shū academic tradition, not the Nichiren Shōshū / Sōka Gakkai tradition) holds that the letter may be a post-Nichiren composition of the early 14th c., projected back onto Nichiren by his disciples. The most rigorous modern scholarly opinion considers the doctrinal content substantially Nichiren-derived even if the present textual form is post-Nichiren. The status of the question remains contested in Nichiren-school sectarian polemics to this day.
Date. Conventionally Kōan 4 / 1281 / 4th month / 8th day, at Minobu — though see the authenticity caveat above.
Structural Division
The CANWWW entry (div29.xml, T84N2695) 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:
- SGI (eds.), The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin (1999), vol. 1.
Major studies on the sandai hihō doctrine: Jacqueline I. Stone, Original Enlightenment (Hawai’i, 1999); Sasaki Kentoku, Nichiren no honzon-ron (Heirakuji, 1973); Tamura Yoshirō, Nichiren Shōnin (Kōdansha, 1973). On the authenticity question: Asai Yōrin, Nichiren shōnin kyōgaku no kenkyū (Heirakuji, 1976); Watanabe Hōyō, Nichiren no shisō to Kamakura Bukkyō (Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1985).