He therefore constantly condemned the already existing sects of Buddhism. He denounced them in his first sermon; he continued his denunciations to the very end. Nembutsu wa mugen no go. The Nembutsu was consistently deprecated as a practice which leads men to the lowest of the hells. Nichiren never treated Amida as being in any sense a Buddhist divinity. He looked on him, in the garb which the Shinshu made him wear, as an unauthorized importation from somewhere outside of Buddhism, and his Paradise as a pure fancy. At the very best he held him to be but a partial manifestation of S'akyamuni, the One and Eternal. It was not likely that the peculiar Jodo tenet of salvation by faith alone, without repentance or works, would commend itself to Nichiren's mind.

Zenshu wa tenma ha-jun no setsu. "The Zen," he continued, "is a doctrine of demons and fiends." We are familiar with the illustration of the man whose house, "empty, swept, and garnished," stood open for the return of a company of evil spirits larger than the one that had been cast out. The Zen house was just in that position. Bodhidharma had cast out of his Buddhism all the superstitious books and doctrines with which the miracle-mongering of Central Asia and China had overlaid the original simplicity of S'akyamuni's teaching. He had put nothing in its place, and had bidden his followers look within to see what form they should see, and to listen for what voice they should hear, coming to them from the empty chambers of their own minds. The practice of Zazen leads to spiritual pride, a

failing not rare amongst bushi and samurai, in spite of their other great virtues, and the many things that Nichiren had to suffer at the hands of Zenshu priests and laymen will perhaps account for the extreme bitterness of this sentence.