Responses to Various People (written by Nichiren, March 21,

A Letter Written in a Single Evening

In the spring of 1278, a courier climbed the wooded slopes of Mount Minobu in Kai Province carrying news that could not wait. The monk who received it, Nichiren, read the message and sat down the same night to answer. What he wrote runs to barely twenty-one lines. It survives today as Shonin Gohenji, the "Reply to the Various Believers," a single handscroll kept at Hondoji temple in Chiba Prefecture and registered as an Important Cultural Property of Japan.

The scroll measures 31.5 centimeters tall and 137 centimeters wide, written in Nichiren's own hand and closed with his kao, the cursive monogram that served a medieval Japanese writer as a personal seal. He dated it precisely: the twenty-first day of the third month, Koan 1, at the hour of the dog, around eight in the evening. That timestamp is not a formality. It records the very evening the news arrived, and the speed with which he replied.

The News That Reached the Mountain

To understand why the letter carries such urgency, it helps to know where Nichiren stood in 1278. Born in 1222, he had spent decades preaching that the Lotus Sutra alone held the full teaching of the Buddha, and attacking rival schools with a directness that drew repeated punishment from the Kamakura shogunate. After years of exile on Sado Island, he was pardoned in 1274 and withdrew to Mount Minobu, where he taught and guided his followers largely through correspondence.

The years around him were tense. The first Mongol invasion had struck in 1274, and a second would come in 1281; the country lived between those two blows. Into that atmosphere came a report from a disciple: the shogunate was said to be planning a formal public disputation, a shuron, in which Nichiren's school would argue doctrine against the established sects, the Shingon and Zen teachers among them.

For most religious leaders such a summons might have meant danger. For Nichiren it meant the opposite. He had spent his life calling for exactly this: an open contest of doctrine settled in front of the authorities. His reply reads as pure relief and triumph. If the rival teachers were called together and the question of right and wrong decided, he wrote, then all Japan would turn to his teaching. He ends with a phrase that translates roughly as "how fortunate, how fortunate."

Why the Scroll Matters

Among the founders of Japan's Buddhist schools, none left behind as many documents in his own hand as Nichiren. His disciples, mourning him, gathered his letters and writings and guarded them across the generations as something close to the master himself. Temples such as Hokekyoji in Chiba and Taisekiji in Shizuoka hold large collections; the items at Hondoji were designated together with other significant pieces on the twenty-fifth of April, 1968.

What sets this particular letter apart is its completeness. Many surviving Nichiren documents are fragments. This one carries a clear date, runs from opening to close without loss, and is short enough to take in at a glance. Scholars value that wholeness. A reader can follow the whole arc of his thought, from the moment the news arrived to the burst of confidence at the end, in a single uninterrupted hand.

There is a quieter historical footnote worth keeping in mind. The grand public debate Nichiren welcomed so warmly is generally thought never to have taken place. The letter preserves a hope, captured at its height, rather than the record of an event. That gap between expectation and outcome is part of what makes it moving to read.

Visiting Hondoji

The scroll itself is not on regular display. Like most of Hondoji's holdings, it is kept in storage and brought out only for occasional special exhibitions, so a casual visitor should not expect to see the original. What draws people to the temple instead is the ground it sits on.

Hondoji was founded in 1277 on the former estate of a local lord, Hiraga Tadaharu, with Nichiren's senior disciple Nichiro installed as its first teacher. It ranks among the historic temples of the Nichiren school and is counted, together with Myohonji in Kamakura and Honmonji in Ikegami, as one of a celebrated trio. Today it is better known by a nickname: the Hydrangea Temple. Some fifty thousand hydrangea plants fill the grounds in June, alongside thousands of irises, and in autumn around a thousand maples turn the precinct red. A five-story pagoda rises 18 meters above the gardens.

If seeing Nichiren's handwriting is your real goal, plan around a special exhibition, or look to museums and temples elsewhere that periodically show his autograph works. But a walk along the 700-meter approach lined with old pines and cedars, ending in those famous gardens, is reward enough on its own.