CHAPTER XXV

"RISSHo ANKOKU RON"

THE "Rissho Ankoku ron" is the title of Nichiren's essay which, being presented to the Kamakura Regent, brought down upon its author all manner of persecutions and troubles. It was Nichiren's warning against the evil courses which were bringing his country to decay. It has by no means ceased to have its prophetic value in the present day. I have, during the last few months, met with two new editions in Japanese of this essay, which, so the Nichirenists tell us, is as applicable to the Japan of to-day as it was to the Japan of Nichiren's time. The essay has, to the best of my belief, never been translated into any European language up to the present.

It is in the form of a dialogue. The reader must imagine the master of a house, who must be Nichiren himself, seated before his books in his study. The house is probably the hermitage which Nichiren built for himself among the sandhills behind Kamakura, where he gathered round him his earliest disciples, and where he actually composed this historic treatise. To him comes in a visitor, who at once plunges into the subject that lies nearest to his heart.

The Visitor. We have seen many signs in heaven and in earth:--a famine, a plague; the whole country is filled with misery. Horses and cows are dying on the roadsides, and so are men, and there is no one to bury them.

[paragraph continues] One half of the population is stricken, and there is no house that has escaped scot-free.

Hence many minds are turning to religion. "A sharp sword is the Name of Mida," say some, and turn in prayer to the Lord of the Western land, whilst others take up the magic charms and formula against disease, which belong to the Lord of the Eastern Quarter. Others, again, comfort themselves with the thought that disease is but a short-lived phenomenon, that old age and death are but phantasies, and stay themselves with the comfortable doctrines of the Hokke Truth. Others, again, say that "the seven troubles come merely as a matter of rotation, soon to be succeeded by the seven forms of prosperity," and with this thought they set themselves to the details of countless services and litanies. Others, again, in accordance with the doctrines of the Secret Shingon, use copious sprinklings of Holy Water from the

five vases. Then, again, some enter into ecstatic meditation, and calmly contemplate the truth free from all care. Some write the names of the Seven gods of luck on pieces of paper, and affix them by the hundreds to the doorposts of their houses, whilst others do the same with the pictures of the Five Dairiki and the various (Shinto) gods of Heaven and Earth.