The Dharma as Gohonzon

The Gohonzon as a matrix of Interpenetration

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Philosophers and psychologists have long known that whatever one holds most dear, whatever one pays the most attention to, one becomes like that thing. We take on the characteristics of what we pay attention to. While this may sound like mumbo-jumbo, it's a basic tenet of Buddhism that we are all interconnected. Said another way, everything is always influencing everything. Nothing stands completely alone. Obsessed with money one becomes greedy. Eat junk food one becomes ill. Listen to rage fueled posts one becomes angry.

What we pay attention to is incredibly important. And this is especially critical in religion and spiritual matters, whose concern is life and death itself. Said more plainly, what is the meaning of life?

Buddhism describes this as a point of focus, or in Japanese a honzon. A honzon could be anything, like we just read. Ideally, it is something of virtuous and ethical value, that will bring out the best in someone and even perhaps enlightenment.

Nichiren Buddhism calls this a Gohonzon, or honorable focus of devotion. And there are two types, one focused on the person of the Buddha and one focused on the Dharma, or Law.

Set these two Gohonzons side by side and compare. A carved figure of the Buddha, seated, serene, the eyes half open in meditation. And a paper scroll covered in bold vertical calligraphic brushstrokes, Chinese characters running down the center with Sanskrit letters and further names ranked around them, and not a single face or body anywhere upon it. Both are Gohonzons, the focus of devotion. A practitioner will bow toward one or the other, sit before it morning and evening, chant before it, and orient a whole life around it. So, the question is, does it matter which one?

The gentle answer treats it as a matter of preference, or simply which school one happens to belong to. I want to make a different case. The choice between a figure and a field of names is not a simple matter of taste or of lineage habit. It is a choice about what reality is. Nichiren inscribed a mandala rather than carving a Buddha, and the reasons for it reach all the way down to the very central core of the teaching. Once we see why, the mandala stops looking like an unusual focus of worship and starts looking like the one that keeps faith most completely with what the Buddha taught.

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The traditional, and beautiful, way of reading the calligraphic mandala Gohonzon is the Ceremony in the Air made visible, the great assembly lifted into the boundless dimension, the Treasure Tower risen with the two Buddhas seated side by side within it, the guardians stationed at the four quarters, the whole cast from the Lotus Sutra arranged around the sacred title. We enter that space in imagination and stand inside the cosmic drama of awakening.

There is a second way of reading the calligraphic mandala, quieter, and it is the one I want to hold up here. Look again at what is inscribed. There is no scene. There is no depicted moment, no landscape, no bodies caught in the midst of an event. There are just names. The mandala arranges characters, the title down the center and the various names of bodhisattvas, gods, demons and humans each representing one of the ten worlds ranked around it, and it sets them in relation to one another. It is less a picture of the realms than a matrix of how they stand to one another. The visionary reading gives us a place to enter. This second reading gives us something deeper. The calligraphic mandala is an abstraction of the structure of reality. A matrix of interpenetration and of mutual holding.

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This matrix has a name: the mutual possession of the ten worlds (J. Jikkai Gogu). The teaching that each of the ten realms of existence, from hell at the depth, through the hungry ghosts and the animals and the human and heavenly states, up to Buddhahood at the height, contains within itself all ten of the others. Hell holds Buddhahood. Buddhahood holds hell. No realm stands alone as a sealed and separate condition. Each is what it is only by containing and being contained by the rest. The ten realms then are not a linear hierarchical ladder to climb, but a fluid flux of relational interconnected states we experience at any one moment in time.

The calligraphic mandala shows this visually without exposition. It just is. It is such. The way things are. The ten worlds are inscribed together in a single field, so that their mutual possession is present at a glance, as a feature of how things are, and not as a conclusion we labor toward by contemplation. Read this way, the mandala beautifully abstracts Buddhism's most basic claim. When a realm is constituted entirely by its relations to the others, it has no independent self-nature of its own. And having no independent self-nature is what emptiness means, which is what dependent origination means. Mutual possession is interdependence painted in the vocabulary of the ten worlds.

This carries a consequence that guards the teaching from a familiar error. If each world is only its relations, then nothing on the mandala is self-existent, and nothing on it stands still. Whatever is constituted by relation is empty of own-being, and whatever is empty of own-being is impermanent, arising through causes and conditions and passing as those conditions change. The mandala is not a static diagram of fixed realms. It is the matrix of a process, mutual arising and ceasing all the way through. Mutual possession and impermanence are one fact seen from two sides.

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Here is the significance of what Nichiren did and how far he moved from the Tendai tradition he was trained in. The Tendai tradition he came from carried a great contemplative doctrine called kanjin. Literally stopping and seeing. Kanjin uses the three thousand realms present in a single thought-moment (J. ichinen sanzen) as the point of focus. A practiced meditator meditates thus by turning their attention inward and holding the vast interpenetration of all things within one moment of awareness. It is demanding, and only those with the capacity, training, and time can master it.

Nichiren's genius and true contribution to the greater Buddhist religion was translating this incredibly difficult and powerful kanjin practice to the mutual possession of ten realms in the form of a mandala. Where the older practice rested on kanjin, the mind that observes the three thousand realms, he set it instead on jikkai gogu itself, the realms holding one another as an objective structure of reality, centered on the daimoku as the Dharma manifested and made available to us. The movement is from contemplating a principle to manifesting a reality that one can enter into. From a truth the mind must generate to a truth the mandala displays and the voice enters. This is why the Gohonzon can serve someone who will never master a meditative discipline. The interpenetration no longer rests upon a rare inner act. It is already there, inscribed, mutually possessed, and we take our place within it by faith and by chanting rather than by contemplative attainment. That is a real development, and it is the one I would honor. Not a new truth, an old truth given a body that anyone can stand before. The calligraphic mandala functions as a portal into the same mental state that years and years of disciplined silent kanjin practice required.

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Being clear about the history makes this stronger rather than weaker, so it needs saying plainly. Nichiren did not invent the pieces he assembled. The configuration of the ten worlds joined to the chanted title was already moving through the Tendai stream he came out of, which itself carried the esoteric coloring of the age. There survives a medieval Tendai text allegedly based on Saicho's teaching called the Shuzenji-ketsu, of contested date and uncertain authorship, which describes a practice of enshrining images of the ten realms and, before each of them in turn, bowing with the body, chanting Namu-myoho-renge-kyo with the mouth, and contemplating each realm through the threefold truth, morning and evening. The ten worlds, the title, the threefold contemplation, the daily rhythm, all of it is present there, perhaps well before Nichiren gave us the mandala. He stood in a line, receiving what the tradition held and handing it on transformed, as is the proper way of all Buddhist teachers since the beginning.

This does not diminish him. It recognizes and honors his gift. Others before him had arrayed the ten realms in ten places and walked among them one image at a time. Nichiren gathered the many stations into a single field, so that mutual possession is held all at once rather than approached in sequence, setting the sacred title itself at its center. The process given a voice. The distance between the older practice and the mandala is the distance between walking a doctrine and seeing it whole. That gathering is his, and it is a brilliant and lasting contribution to Buddhism.

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The humility runs deeper still, past the question of what predates him and into the question of what we know for sure he actually wrote. Among the writings that carry this relational vision, some of the most luminous are among those we are not sure he actually wrote because none are extant in his own hand or holographs done by immediate disciples. One of them speaks, poignantly and clearly, to what this whole essay has been circling. The Sokanmon Sho takes the oldest of contrasts, sleeping and waking, and turns it to unexpected use. We live, it tells us, in the dream of birth and death, asleep at each passing thought, mistaking the shifting figures of the dream for solid things and moving from darkness into darkness after them. The awakened one (Buddha) does not stand outside the dream and call to us across a distance. He enters it. He comes into the same place as the dreaming beings and speaks to them in the language of the dream, because a dreamer can hear it no other way. Even the highest teaching reaches us as dream-speech, words shaped for sleepers, whose whole intent is waking.

The point worth catching is what waking then means. We do not wake up and leave. There is no other place to go. Waking is not an exit from the dream of birth and death into some changeless realm standing behind or underneath or above it. It is a change in how we observe the very world we were already in. We wake within the dream, and the dream, seen now with open eyes, is no longer a prison. It is the very medium of awakening, the only place awakening was ever going to happen. This is why the Sokanmon Sho never lets waking reality harden into a permanent ground beneath the flux. Were it such a ground, we would have slipped the permanent self back in through the door marked awakening. Because we wake within birth and death and keep waking, the waking is not a destination we reach and keep. It is a relation we enter and re-enter, thought-moment after thought-moment. Waking reality is not a substance under the dream. It is the awakened way of standing in it, the same world held in open hands instead of clutched.

Here is the part that should give us pause, and gladly. Of all the writings gathered into this discussion, the Sokanmon Sho is among the least securely Nichiren's. It carries features that sit oddly against his mature hand, and careful scholars have set it among the doubtful. And it is the one that opens the relational vision most luminously of all. I take real comfort in that. It means the truth of the reading was never resting on the pedigree. A text can wake us whether or not we can name the sleeper who first set it down. We can hold the teaching close and hold the authorship loosely, and lose nothing in the holding, because what the Sokanmon shows us about waking within the dream is true in the one way that finally matters, by opening our eyes where we already stand.

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Now we can say why the object of devotion is a calligraphic field of names and not a carved figure, and why the difference is doctrine and not decoration.

A statue is a someone. However exalted, a carved Buddha is a person, present, seated there, facing us. And a someone facing us restores the very thing the whole teaching works to dissolve. There is a self here, bowing, and a Buddha there, receiving, and a gap between them across which our devotion travels. That arrangement quietly returns own-being to the picture, the awakened one's Buddhahood held as a possession lodged in that form, set over against us who seem to lack it. It invites the reaching toward a source outside ourselves that the first word of the chant, namu, read with care, refuses.

The mandala allows none of this, because there is no one upon it to face us. What is inscribed is the relational field itself, the ten worlds mutually holding, grounded in the title. When we sit before it there is no second party across a gap. There is the structure of reality, and we are already a node within it, never outside it, never apart. And so the encounter cannot settle into a self addressing a Buddha. When we chant before the Gohonzon, it is not in the end our own voice that chants. No separate self stands outside the relational field, authoring the sound and aiming it at a Buddha elsewhere. The voicing is the field sounding itself. What we call our chanting is the unborn-undying suchness giving voice through this breath, this mouth, this life, with no separate agent behind it doing the saying. The five characters were never somewhere else, waiting to be received across a distance. The receiving is the falling away of the distance. Namu, read this way, is a refuge that cancels its own direction, for there is no source over there to reach toward and no supplicant over here to send the reaching. There is one relational event, and the sense of a separate voice is the last thing to dissolve within it.

This is jikkai gogu turned inward and made personal. Standing before the mandala, we are not a person contemplating an external matrix. We are the matrix's own reality manifesting, for these breaths, as this life and this voice. The honzon with no one in it turns out to be the honzon that leaves no one out, for it has quietly gathered in the very one who came to bow.

This is something that only the calligraphic mandala can do, because it doesn't subliminally carry the weight of ego, permanent self and separation.

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One consequence follows worth naming, because it shields everything above from the machinery that so often grows up around holy things.

A Dharma-honzon offers nothing for institutional control to grasp. One can hold custody of a line of persons, a chain of transmission running back to a founding saint, a relic, a succession, an office. These can be owned and gatekept, and a great deal of religious politics is the long business of owning and gatekeeping them. No one can hold custody of the relational structure of reality. It is not a possession that passes down a guarded line. It is simply how things are, open to anyone who sits before the mandala and chants, needing no priesthood to broker the meeting and no certificate of descent to make it real. By its very nature, the Dharma-honzon is the object of devotion that cannot be monopolized.

Which is finally why I follow this teacher without canonizing him. I do not need Nichiren to be a flawless origin, and the historical record, examined with care, will not allow him to be one. He was a human being, with a human being's faults, standing in a long line, handing on what he had received. What draws me is not a spotless saint. It is the one thing he did better than anyone before him or since, taking a meditative discipline, an ontology, and a dialectic, and crystallizing them into a single object we can stand before and chant. That achievement needs no origin myth to defend it, and the politics that gathers around it cannot touch it, because it rests on the Dharma and not on his person. The mandala teaches the same lesson about him that it teaches about us. Look past the figure to the field. The greatness was never a possession lodged in the man. It is the truth he gave a body, and that truth is here, now, open to anyone willing to sit down before it and begin.

Nichiren was not the first to hand on what he had not made, and he will not be the last. The whole of the Buddhist canon works this way. The Pali suttas and the Mahayana sutras alike were written down generations after the Buddha fell silent, remembered, shaped, and set down by those who came after. This is not a flaw in the tradition. It is the tradition. Buddhism is a living thing, changing and evolving, each awakened mind building on the ones before it and passing the flame to the next. So I care little whether any single text's provenance can be proven to a certainty. What I care about is whether it holds true to the four seals, whether it opens the reality it claims to open. In a world that is constantly changing there can be no permanent coda, no final and fixed last word. Only the process can be trusted, and the process is the Dharma itself, which we give the name Myoho-renge-kyo.

Namu Myoho Renge Kyo

Namu Myoho Renge Kyo

Namu Myoho Renge Kyo