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南無妙法蓮華経 namu myōhō renge kyō Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō

南無妙法蓮華経 (namu myōhō renge kyō) is the daimoku of the Nichiren schools, devotion to the Lotus Sutra. The formula is older than Nichiren. It is a homage in a Chinese Lotus rite of the sixth century, and it closes a court poet's prayer of 881.

Japanese Scroll of Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō (namu myōhō renge kyō) — Calligraphy by Eri Takase
Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō南無妙法蓮華経namu myōhō renge kyō

Original art by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase

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Abstract

南無妙法蓮華経, namu myōhō renge kyō, is the daimoku of the Nichiren schools, seven characters of homage to the Lotus Sutra chanted as the schools' central practice; the dictionaries' word for its sense is 帰依, taking refuge in, devotion to the Sutra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Law. The formula is older than the school that made it famous: it is a line of homage in the Lotus repentance rite credited to the Chinese Tiantai master Zhiyi 智顗 (538–597), and in Japan a court poet, Sugawara no Michizane 菅原道真, closed a prayer for his dead parents with the same seven characters in 881, three hundred and seventy-two years before Nichiren (1222–1282) first declared his teaching; the sources read here show no line of descent between these uses. Nichiren's own letters date that declaration to the twenty-eighth day of the fourth month of 1253 at Kiyosumi temple, and the later of them to noon, and in 1260 he wrote that a believer's ordinary practice should be to chant the seven characters. The English has not settled on one word: adoration, devotion, hail and glory all stand in print.

Overview

The sense. The dictionaries give it one sense, and the commentators differ in how much they load onto it. Nichiren in 1260 makes the chant a believer's ordinary practice, with a verse of the sutra read by those who can and homage to the Buddhas as its support, and in the 一生成仏抄, a letter in his collected writings, chanting it is polishing the mirror of the mind [1]. The Britannica entry puts the school's claim in a sentence: even the ordinary person, 凡夫, is saved by chanting these words alone [2]. Anesaki wrote that, according to Nichiren, the formula is not merely a title but an adequate embodiment of the whole truth revealed in that unique book, when the formula is uttered with a full belief [3]. The Japanese encyclopedia Nipponica adds that on Nichiren's own mandalas the seven characters are written with their strokes drawn out, the whisker daimoku, to show the title's light reaching all of creation, and that only the Nichiren schools chant it [2], though a Zen master urged it on a nun of the school in 1747.

The words. 南無 is namu, the Chinese spelling of Sanskrit namas, homage. The Japanese dictionaries translate it 敬礼 and 帰命, reverence and taking refuge [4]; Hepburn's dictionary of 1888 rendered it I adore thee [5]; Nichiren Shu says adoration [6] and Soka Gakkai to devote or dedicate oneself [7]. 妙法蓮華経 is Myōhō Renge Kyō, the title Kumārajīva gave the Lotus Sutra when he translated it into Chinese in 406: the Sutra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Law [8]. The English has called that law True (Kern, 1884, translating the Sanskrit title, Saddharma) [9], Good (Hearn, 1898) [10], Perfect Truth (Anesaki, 1916) [3] and Mystic (Soka Gakkai today) [7]. Together the seven characters are the 題目, daimoku, the title; the 言海 dictionary of 1889 defines the word as in the Nichiren school, the title of the Lotus Sutra, that is, the phrase 南無妙法蓮華経, called the seven-character title [11]. In ordinary Japanese お題目 also means empty words, and a writer who uses odaimoku in English should know that [12].

The text in English. The chant reached English dictionaries early, in Hepburn's editions of 1872 and 1888 and Brinkley's of 1896 [13][5][14], then in Chamberlain, Murray's handbook, Hearn, Lloyd and Anesaki through the turn of the century [15][16][17][18][19][3]. A mission scholar's study of 1917 gives it as the sect's formula [20]; Kanzō Uchimura's English essay on Nichiren of 1908 hears it beaten on drums through Kamakura [21]; Anesaki's history of 1930 gives the formula with its gloss and its etymology [22]; and the Nichiren of the university presses in 1958, 1990 and 2001, and the school's own translation of 2004, carry both spellings [23][24][25][26]. The renderings in the entries below run from Oh, the scripture and Hail to Glory, I worship, adoration and devotion; no count of them has been made for this history. The two school spellings, Namu Myoho Renge Kyo and Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, are one chant; the difference is whether the u of namu is written or swallowed.

The historical record

Sixth to eighth centuries. A Chinese Lotus rite and a Tang tale. The seven characters are Chinese before they are Japanese. The Lotus repentance rite credited to the Tiantai master Zhiyi 智顗 (538–597), the 法華三昧懺儀, has the practitioner walk around the seat and call out, in order, 南無釋迦牟尼佛　南無多寶佛　南無釋迦牟尼分身佛　南無妙法蓮華經　南無文殊師利菩薩　南無普賢菩薩, homage to Śākyamuni Buddha, homage to Many Jewels Buddha, homage to the emanations of Śākyamuni, homage to the Sutra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Law, homage to Mañjuśrī, homage to Samantabhadra [27]. There the title is one homage among six, beside the same Buddhas Nichiren would name as the supporting practice in 1260. The Tang collection of Lotus tales, the 法華傳記 of 僧詳, tells of an old woman of a fish-selling family brought before the judge of the dead, who 舉聲唱如是言。南無妙法蓮華經, raised her voice and cried, Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō, and the sinners around her vanished [28]. Okada 岡田文弘 (2022) notes that this tale and a second from the same collection, in which a dull novice chants the title in hell, have often been cited as precedents for Nichiren's chant (this one by Tokoro Shigemoto 戸頃重基 in 1970, the novice's by Takagi Yutaka 高木豊 in 1973); that Nichiren never quotes either; and that the novice's tale was retold in a set of Lotus sermons given in Japan around 1110 [29]. Japanese Tendai practiced Zhiyi's rite as the 法華懺法, which a record of the 980s names among the rites the monk Ennin 円仁 brought from China [30]. The Japanese text of that rite was not read for this history, and no source read here shows the seven characters passing from these Chinese witnesses to the Japanese uses below.

881. Sugawara no Michizane, a prayer for his dead parents. In the tenth month of 881 Michizane, then a scholar and junior official of the Ministry of Ceremonial and not yet the god of learning, held a Lotus rite at 吉祥院 for his parents: his mother, who had died in 872, and his father, who had died the year before. The rite dedicated two gifts, a new image of Kannon that his mother had vowed when he was a sick child, and the Lotus Sutra his father had had copied for her first anniversary. The rite was his father's plan: he meant to build a hall for lectures on two sutras and left the Lotus to his son, and his last instruction was that the tenth-month rite not be missed. The prayer he wrote for it survives in his collected works, the 菅家文草, and it ends, after the grief, with two lines of homage: 南無觀世音菩薩 南無妙法蓮華經 如所説, homage to Kannon, homage to the Sutra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Law, as the sutra says [31]. A 1700 printing of the text carries it [31]. That is the formula, written as a formula, three hundred and seventy-two years before Nichiren's declaration of 1253. The Japanese Wikipedia says Heian monks already chanted it as a practice [32]. The encyclopedias at 題目 divide on it. One, by Takagi Yutaka, finds chanting the title already in the mid-Heian period, 唱題の事例はすでに平安時代中期にみられる, and gives Nichiren its meaning; the 日本国語大辞典 says chanting the title was long done on Mount Hiei, but that chanting it aloud as the nenbutsu is chanted begins with Nichiren, 口誦念仏の形での唱題は…日蓮にはじまる [12]. Neither names the words chanted, the five characters of the title or the seven. A modern history of Japanese religion finds the title chanted by sutra copyists and preached by Tendai priests at the hour of death in the late Heian period, and its English glosses the title as Namu-myoho-renge-kyo [25].

1253–1279. Nichiren's own letters on how it began. Nichiren (1222–1282) is the reason anyone chants it now, and his own words on how it began are plainer than the legend's. In a letter of 1279 he wrote: on the twenty-eighth day of the fourth month of 1253, in the province of Awa, on the south side of the Buddha hall of Shobutsu-bō at Kiyosumi temple, at the hour of the horse, I began to declare this teaching; it is now twenty-seven years [33]. An earlier letter to the monks of Kiyosumi, of 1276, gives the same day and the south side of a Buddha hall at Kiyosumi, which it calls the hall of Dōzen-bō 道善房 where the later letter names Shobutsu-bō 諸仏坊; it names the audience, a priest called Jōen-bō and a few of the brethren, and says what he began to declare: his charge against the Zen and Pure Land schools [34]. The encyclopedia Nipponica says he first chanted the seven characters at Kiyosumi in 1253 [2]. Neither letter quotes them at the founding, and only the later one names the hour: noon.

1260. 唱法華題目抄, written at Nagoe in Kamakura. Seven years after the founding, asked what a believer's ordinary practice should be, Nichiren answers: let the ordinary practice be to chant the title as Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō, with a verse or a line read by those who can, and homage to Śākyamuni, Tahō and the assembly as the supporting practice [35].

1275. 撰時抄. By 1275 Nichiren calls it the heart of the Lotus Sutra, and predicts it will spread through the world as the nenbutsu now sounds in every mouth in Japan; that sentence is the dictionary's earliest citation for the phrase [36].

Fifteenth century and after. The seven characters go everywhere the school goes. A fifteenth-century collection of tales closes a story of the merit of hearing the Lotus with the seven characters [37]; a picture scroll of about 1550 that debates wine against rice has a Lotus believer end his speech with it [38]; Ōze Hoan 小瀬甫庵's 信長記, printed in 1622, a retelling of Ōta Gyūichi's chronicle of Oda Nobunaga embellished as a story, says Nobunaga's standard bore the Eiraku coin on yellow silk and his nine beckoning banners carried the seven characters in the springing hand, はね題目, which the dictionaries give as another name for the whisker daimoku [39][40][41]; Lafcadio Hearn, in 1894, saw it on temple charms and knew it as the text of Katō Kiyomasa's flag [17].

Seventeenth century and after. The founding becomes a story. A sightseers' guide to Kyoto printed in the seventeenth century says Nichiren first chanted the seven characters of Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō at thirty-two, on the twenty-eighth of the third month [42]; a later miscellany says the twenty-first of the third month, aged twenty-two, facing the morning sun [43]; Anesaki's English life of 1916 keeps Nichiren's day and has him preach at noon in a hall facing south, and puts before the sermon a cry of the seven characters at dawn, making the all-illumining sun his witness [3]. Across these tellings the month, the day, the age and the hour move, and the seven characters enter the founding; Nichiren's own letters have the fourth month, noon, and this teaching.

1747. A Zen master to a nun of the Nichiren school. Hakuin, in a letter answering an old nun of the Hoke sect, urges her to intone without interruption the title of the Sutra alone: Reverence to the Lotus of the Wondrous Law (Namu Myoho renge kyo), and closes, If you think that this old monk has any Dharma principle better than this to write of, you are terribly mistaken [44].

What is not a source. The dawn: in the tellings read here it appears in the later miscellany and in Anesaki, who sets it before the noon of Nichiren's letter of 1279. The seven characters at the founding: the tellings' and Nipponica's, and a reasonable inference, but not in his two accounts. The lineage's own words are adoration and devotion.

The text in English

1872. Hepburn, A Japanese-English and English-Japanese Dictionary, second edition. Gives it twice: under NICHI-REN-SHŪ as the sect's formula of prayer, and under DAIMOKU as the title of the prayer of the Nichi-ren sect [13].

1888. Hepburn, A Japanese-English and English-Japanese Dictionary, fourth edition. Keeps both entries, and glosses namu, I adore thee [5].

1890. Chamberlain, Things Japanese, first edition. Quotes the physician Baelz watching devotees at Minobu ceaselessly repeat the same invocation, Namu myōhō renge kyō! Namu myōhō renge kyō!, a passage the fifth edition of 1905 still carries [15].

1891. Basil Hall Chamberlain and W. B. Mason, Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Japan, John Murray, third edition, Route 5, Hommonji. At the temple where the Buddhist saint Nichiren died in A.D. 1282, the Daimoku-dō, where some of the faithful are generally to be heard beating the drum and reciting the formulary of the sect—Namu myoho renge kyo, and elsewhere the formula glossed Oh, the scripture of the Lotus of the Wonderful Law; the fourth edition of 1894 keeps the Hommonji sentence [16].

1894. Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. The famous text Namu-myo-ho-ren-ge-kyo, inscribed of old upon the flag of the great captain Kato Kiyomasa [17], and what a pilgrim chants to his gong through every village.

1894. Arthur Lloyd, Developments of Japanese Buddhism, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan XXII, p. 438. The founding sermon as the legend tells it: Commencing with the new formula "Namu myo hō renge kyo," "Hail to the scripture of the Lotus of Good Law," he preached on the shortcomings of all the existing sects [18]. It is the earliest Hail in any book read for this page, and in the books the Internet Archive's full-text index reaches on two spellings of the formula, four years before Hearn's.

1896. Brinkley, An Unabridged Japanese-English Dictionary. Adds the verb daimoku wo tonau and the daimokukō, a fraternity of Nichiren's followers [14].

1898. Lafcadio Hearn, Exotics and Retrospectives. In his essay on tomb inscriptions, The Literature of the Dead, the Nichiren often preface their inscriptions with the famous invocation, Namu myo ho renge kyo [10].

1899. Lafcadio Hearn, In Ghostly Japan. The chant on a girl's lips [45].

1908. Kanzō Uchimura, Representative Men of Japan, Keiseisha, Tokyo, pp. 223–224. A reprint, its preface says, of what had appeared as Japan and Japanese during the war with China; in the essay on Nichiren, the sect's monks at Kamakura: Each carries a drum in his hand, and all in unison repeat their prayer, with — Nam-Myo-Ho-Ren-Ge-Kyo, — five strikes to accompany its five syllables. Twenty of them is stunning to our ears [21].

1911. Arthur Lloyd. Called it the name carved on stone or painted on wood, which is found all over Japan [19].

1914. Tasuku Harada, The Faith of Japan, Macmillan, New York, pp. 108–109. Namu myo ho renge kyo, Glory to the Sutra of the Mysterious Lotus Law: the earliest Glory among the books read for this history [46].

1916. Anesaki, Nichiren, the Buddhist Prophet. "Namu Myoho-renge-kyo," that is, "Adoration be to the Scripture of the Lotus of the Perfect Truth!" [3].

1917. August Karl Reischauer, Studies in Japanese Buddhism, Macmillan, pp. 93–94. one believer may preface his meditations and prayers by the formula, "Namu Amida Butsu," "I adore Thee Thou Buddha of Eternal Life and Light" and another believer may use the equally popular form of, "Namu-Myoho Renge-kyo," "I worship Thee Thou Scripture of the Wonderful Lotus"; the former being to-day the special prayer of the Amida sects, and the latter the "vain repetition" of the Nichiren Sect [20].

1930. Masaharu Anesaki, History of Japanese Religion, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner (Tuttle printing, 1963), pp. 192–193 and 230. he reduced the whole of his religion to a simple method, that of uttering the formula "Sacred Title" of the scripture, Namu Myo-Horenge-kyo, which meant "Adoration to the Lotus of Perfect Truth." It was for him not a mere oral utterance but a real embodiment of the truths revealed in that book, with the footnote Namu is a corruption of the Sanskrit Namah, "Adoration," and Myo-Horenge-kyo is the Sino-Japanese form of Sad-Dharma-pundarika-Sutra. This was calling on the name of the Scripture instead of calling on the name of Buddha; and at p. 230 the chant as a battle-cry of 1536, Shouts of "Namu Myo-Horenge-kyo," the slogan of the Nichirenites, vied with "Namu Amida-butsu", the prayer of the Ikko men [22].

1958. Ryusaku Tsunoda, Wm. Theodore de Bary and Donald Keene (comp.), Sources of Japanese Tradition, Columbia University Press, pp. 213 and 222. The compilers' own sentence: "Namu myoho rengekyo" is the Buddha's pledge of salvation, which Nichiren often called out to the beat of a drum—"dondon dondoko dondon"; and at p. 222, under the credit From Anesaki, Nichiren, pp. 83–85, Anesaki's translation of 1916 reprinted: Namu Myoho-renge-kyo! Namu Myoho-renge-kyo! (Adoration to the Lotus of Perfect Truth) — one witness with 1916, not a second [23].

1974. Two Japanese-English dictionaries. Kenkyūsha's New Japanese-English Dictionary, fourth edition, glosses the formula Glory to the Sutra of the Lotus of the Supreme Law! [47]; Nelson's Modern Reader's Japanese-English Character Dictionary, in the revised edition read here (first published 1962), Hail Lotus Sutra [48]. The online dictionary JMdict glosses it Glory to the Sutra; Hail Lotus Sutra, the two dictionaries' words side by side; it names no source [49].

1990. Philip B. Yampolsky (ed.), Selected Writings of Nichiren, translated by Burton Watson and others, Columbia University Press, p. 94. From 開目抄, The Opening of the Eyes: when the two syllables Namu are prefixed to the title Myoho-renge-kyo, we have the formula Nam-myoho-renge-kyo — the hyphenated Nam- spelling in a university press, in translations Watson made with the Gosho Translation Committee of the Nichiren Shoshu International Center [24].

2001. Kazuo Kasahara (ed.), A History of Japanese Religion, Kosei Publishing, p. 98. The title chanted before Nichiren: In the late Heian period we find devotees involved in sutra copying who chant the sacred name of Amitabha or the daimoku, the sacred title of the Lotus Sutra (in Japanese, Namu-myoho-renge-kyo), and Tendai priests who preach the efficacy of reciting the title of the sutra at the hour of death [25].

2004. Burton Watson (tr.), The Record of the Orally Transmitted Teachings, Soka Gakkai, translator's preface. The school's spelling as the one exception to the translator's own system: with the exception of the formula Nam-myoho-renge-kyo or Myoho-renge-kyo, all Japanese words are shown, where appropriate, with macrons to indicate the long vowels [26].

2023. Ralph H. Craig III, Tricycle. In 1973 Tina Turner was introduced to the Nichiren Buddhist practice of chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo ("Devotion to the Mystic Law of the Lotus Sutra") [50].

Today. The dictionaries' word for the formula's sense is 帰依, and a rendering must keep that sense of taking refuge, whether it says adoration or devotion; the two school spellings, Nichiren Shu's Namu Myoho Renge Kyo and Soka Gakkai's Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, are one chant, the difference being whether the u of namu is written or swallowed. The house's rendering, Devotion to the Lotus Sutra, keeps it. Hail and Glory are the other line in English print, from Lloyd's Hail of 1894 and Harada's Glory of 1914 to Kenkyūsha's Glory and Nelson's Hail of 1974, which JMdict's gloss sets side by side [18][46][47][48][49].

A reading

The seven characters are older than Nichiren: a grieving son wrote them in 881, and a Chinese rite had them three centuries before. Nichiren's own account of the founding is plainer than the legend, and better for it: a teaching declared at noon on a spring day in 1253, and the chant as a believer's ordinary practice seven years later. The English has not settled on one word; adoration and devotion render 帰依, and hail and glory have their own line in English print.

References

  1. 日蓮, 一生成仏抄, in 『日蓮上人御遺文』, 日明編, 祖書普及期成会, 1904, p. 119. National Diet Library pid 823848, scan 75. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/823848/1/75
  2. 「南無妙法蓮華経」, 精選版日本国語大辞典・デジタル大辞泉・ブリタニカ国際大百科事典・日本大百科全書, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/南無妙法蓮華経-108527
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  28. 僧詳, 法華傳記 (Taishō Tripiṭaka T2068), fascicle 9, 潯陽湖海女, vol. 51, p. 90c. CBETA. https://cbdata.dila.edu.tw/stable/juans?work=T2068&juan=9
  29. 岡田文弘, 「唱題功徳譚：『法華伝記』と日蓮を中心に」, 『印度學佛教學研究』 71-1, 2022, pp. 111–116. https://doi.org/10.4259/ibk.71.1_111
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Authors

Tim Jackowski (Systems Architect, Takase Studios, LLC) · 典 Ten (Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1, Takase Studios, LLC)

AI written · Ten wrote the history. Tim Jackowski commissioned it and answers for it.

Checked · Claude Sonnet (Anthropic), 2026-09-15, citations — every item tested at its address; some resolve; the rest not openable; one claim the check could not find, found here at the address the record already held (the s101 state of that date; superseded by the s259 gate and the ten-s735 coding)

Cite as: Tim Jackowski and Ten, "Philology of 南無妙法蓮華経 (namu myōhō renge kyō)," Takase Studios, 2026, https://takase.com/library/philology/namu-myoho-renge-kyo.