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Kanjin Honzon Sho: The Treatise Nichiren Wrote in Exile

On the twenty-fifth day of the fourth month of 1273, a fifty-two-year-old Buddhist monk living in a hut at Ichinosawa, a remote settlement on Sado Island in the Sea of Japan, finished writing a doctrinal treatise and entrusted it to a messenger bound for the mainland. The monk was Nichiren, then in the second year of a penal exile imposed by the Kamakura shogunate. The manuscript he sent, known as the Kanjin Honzon Sho, survives today in his own handwriting at Hokekyoji Temple in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, where it holds the status of a National Treasure of Japan.

The full title runs much longer: Nyorai Metsugo Go Gohyakusai Shi Kanjin Honzon Sho, which can be rendered as "The Treatise on the Object of Devotion for Observing the Mind, Established in the Fifth Five-Hundred-Year Period after the Buddha's Passing." The Agency for Cultural Affairs registers the work as a single bound booklet, one of the most consequential documents in the history of Japanese Buddhism.

Nichiren (1222–1282) founded the school of Buddhism that bears his name, teaching that the Lotus Sutra contains the Buddha's ultimate message and that chanting its title, Namu Myoho Renge Kyo, opens the path to enlightenment for ordinary people. The Kanjin Honzon Sho is where he set out the doctrinal architecture behind that practice. Japanese tradition counts it among his "five major writings," and within that group it is often paired with the Kaimoku Sho of 1272: the earlier work is said to reveal the person of Nichiren, while the Kanjin Honzon Sho reveals his teaching itself.

What the Treatise Says

The argument unfolds in two movements. The first half takes up "kanjin," the observation of one's own mind. Nichiren begins from a theory formulated by the sixth-century Chinese master Zhiyi, founder of the Tiantai school, who held that a single moment of thought contains three thousand realms of existence. Where Zhiyi prescribed elaborate meditation to perceive this truth, Nichiren argued that in the degenerate age of the Latter Day of the Law, called mappo in Japanese, such contemplative discipline lay beyond the reach of ordinary people. The seed of Buddhahood, he wrote, is already contained within the five characters of Myoho Renge Kyo. To embrace and chant the title is itself the act of observing the mind.

The second half turns to the "honzon," the object of devotion. Here Nichiren describes a mandala centered on the title of the Lotus Sutra, surrounded by buddhas, bodhisattvas, and beings of all ten realms. He had inscribed his first such calligraphic mandalas only months earlier, also on Sado. The treatise supplies the scriptural reasoning behind them, drawing on the Lotus Sutra's account of bodhisattvas who emerge from beneath the earth to spread the teaching after the Buddha's passing.

A passage of forty-five characters near the close of the work distills the teaching: this troubled world itself, not some distant pure land, is where the eternal Buddha dwells. When the manuscript was shown to the public at Hokekyoji in 2008, that very passage was opened for viewing for the first time, and scholars on hand explained its significance to visitors who had waited in line since morning.

Why It Is a National Treasure

The government designated the manuscript a National Treasure on March 29, 1952, under designation number 00062 in the category of calligraphy and classical books. Two reasons stand behind the designation. The first is textual: this is the autograph, the document Nichiren himself brushed, complete with a colophon dated the twenty-fifth day of the fourth month of Bun'ei 10. Almost everything known about how Nichiren actually wrote, revised, and formatted his thought at this decisive moment comes from leaves like these.

The second reason is historical. The treatise was addressed to Toki Jonin, a lay follower serving the Chiba clan in Shimosa Province, in present-day Chiba Prefecture. A cover letter accompanied the manuscript, asking that it be read privately and shared only with believers of strong faith, since its contents were, in Nichiren's words, his most important teaching. That letter survives and is included in the designation as an accessory item, one scroll, together with a maki-e lacquer box decorated with a Kasugayama design that long housed the documents. Few medieval Japanese texts come down to us with their transmission so completely documented: the work, the letter that delivered it, and the box that protected it.

Scholars also point to what the manuscript shows about Nichiren's working method. The handwriting shifts in density and speed across the booklet, with corrections and insertions visible in places. These traces let researchers reconstruct the order of composition in a way no printed edition can.

Toki Jonin and Seven Centuries of Guardianship

The reason the manuscript survives at all is Toki Jonin. After Nichiren's death in 1282, this samurai-administrator took the tonsure under the name Nichijo and devoted his remaining years to gathering his teacher's writings. Hokekyoji, the temple he established at Nakayama, grew from a chapel he had earlier provided as a refuge when Nichiren faced persecution. On his deathbed, Nichijo compiled a catalog of the collected papers and bound his successors to protect them.

They did. For more than seven hundred years the temple has kept the largest surviving body of Nichiren's autograph writings anywhere, including a second National Treasure, the Rissho Ankoku Ron, the remonstrance Nichiren submitted to the Kamakura government in 1260. The two National Treasures under one roof make this suburban temple, rather than any museum, the single most important repository of Nichiren's hand.

Since the early Showa era the collection has been housed in the Shogyoden, a treasure repository completed in 1929. Its architect was Ito Chuta, the scholar-designer behind Tsukiji Honganji in Tokyo and Heian Jingu in Kyoto, working with the structural engineer Uchida Yoshikazu. Built of reinforced concrete in the form of an Indian stupa, the building was a direct response to the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923: fireproof, quakeproof, and unlike anything else on the temple grounds. Even from outside, its pale tower rising behind the trees is worth the short walk past the five-storied pagoda.

Visiting Hokekyoji

Be aware before planning a trip: the Kanjin Honzon Sho is not on regular display. By long custom the Shogyoden was opened once a year on November 3, Culture Day, for an airing ceremony called okazeire, during which selected manuscripts were shown to the public for a few hours. In recent years the public viewing has not always been held, and the building is otherwise closed. Anyone hoping to see the manuscript should contact the temple beforehand or check its announcements around late October.

The temple grounds, by contrast, are open daily and free to enter, and they reward a visit in their own right. The approach from Shimosa-Nakayama Station passes through two gates, the Kuromon and the Akamon, the latter bearing a plaque brushed by the celebrated early Edo artist Hon'ami Koetsu. The Soshido, the great founder's hall rebuilt in 1678, spreads a paired hip-and-gable roof of a type rare in Japan and ranks among the largest wooden buildings in Chiba Prefecture. Nearby stand a five-storied pagoda of 1622, the oldest one in the prefecture, and the Hokkedo, regarded as the oldest surviving main hall of the Nichiren school. All are designated Important Cultural Properties.

Time a visit between November 1 and February 10 and you may glimpse another side of the temple: the hundred-day winter austerities, in which monks in white robes douse themselves with cold water before dawn as part of one of the most severe ascetic regimens in Japanese Buddhism. The temple is also one of Edo's three great sites of Kishimojin devotion, and the sound of drums from the Kishimojin hall carries across the precincts on festival days.

Around the Temple

Hokekyoji sits in a residential quarter of Ichikawa, just across the Edogawa River from Tokyo. From Shimosa-Nakayama Station on the JR Sobu Line the walk takes about ten minutes along a shopping street that doubles as the temple approach; Keisei-Nakayama Station on the Keisei Main Line is closer still, roughly five minutes on foot. Central Tokyo is within forty minutes by train, which makes the temple an easy half-day excursion.

Visitors with a wider interest in Nichiren can extend the journey. Nakayama pairs naturally with Kamakura, where Nichiren preached on street corners and faced execution at Tatsunokuchi, or with Mount Minobu in Yamanashi Prefecture, where he spent his final years. Closer at hand, the Ichikawa City Museum of Literature and the plum groves of nearby parks fill out a leisurely afternoon, and the old post town of Yawata, where Toki Jonin once administered the area, lies one stop away on the Sobu Line.