Posted on 10/17/2021 7:27:55 AM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1271, the Japanese Buddhist priest Nichiren was taken away to be executed by his political foes … only to find them spooked off completing their mission by terrifying heavenly signs.
He’s the founder of the still-extant school of Nichiren Buddhism, his name concatenating the words for Sun (Nichi) and Lotus (Ren) — for he centered his philosophy on the Lotus Sutra.
Nichiren (English Wikipedia entry | Japanese) was a major, and controversial, teacher in the mid-13th century: attributing a series of devastating natural disasters in the 1250s to the enervated spiritual condition of the populace owing to non-Lotus Sutra strains of Buddhism attracted enough enmity that he faced multiple assassination attempts, and was exiled to the Izu Peninsula in 1261. (He was suffered to return a couple of years later.)
Nichiren’s doomsaying got a lot more credible — a lot more dangerous — by the end of that decade when the expanding Mongols reached the coasts of China and Korea and started threatening Japan. He’d literally forecast foreign invasion as a consequence for failing to get your lotus right and the arrival of that very prospect drew followers to Nichiren. He intensified his preaching against the rival, but state-favored, varietals of Buddhism....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
And there are those who think Buddhism is the perfect “non-judgmental” religion! No religious persecution with Buddhism - Yes Sir None !
All BS & non-historical of course !
Yeah. If they get kissed off at you they set themselves on fire.
What an interesting story!
Buddhists can be pretty down and dirty, in fact - you’ve probably heard of them rioting from time to time in India and committing acts of violence against moslems. Which, uh, gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, to be honest.
Nichiren is to Japanese Buddhism what Joseph Smith is to American Christianity, the main difference (other than no polygamy) being that since Buddhism is not generally concerned with doctrine, more traditional Buddhists don’t think of Nichiren Buddhists as heretics, the way small-o orthodox Christians think of Mormon teaching as heresy.
A more recent off-shoot of Nichiren Buddhism is Soka Gakkai, whose heyday was in the hippie era when it became the form of Buddhism most popular on Euro-American college campi, similar in popularity with the Krishna Consciousness offshoot of Hinduism (”hare Krishnas”).
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