The Priest Nichiren’s Miraculous Escape from Death and Its Modern Skeptics: Negotiating History and Myth in a Japanese Buddhist Tradition

The Danforth Lecture in the Study of Religion

The Priest Nichiren’s Miraculous Escape from Death and Its Modern Skeptics:
Negotiating History and Myth in a Japanese Buddhist Tradition

Jacqueline I. Stone

In the year 1271, the dissident Buddhist teacher Nichiren was arrested by officials of Japan’s warrior government and taken under cover of night to the execution grounds. Tradition holds that his attempted beheading was foiled when a luminous object suddenly shot across the sky, terrifying his would-be executioners. For more than seven hundred years, this dramatic episode has been celebrated in hagiographies, paintings, kabuki plays, woodblock prints, novels, and manga. In recent times, however, its historicity has been questioned; naturalistic explanations for the “luminous object” have also been proposed. These responses invite reflection on the hermeneutic shifts that occur when religious accounts of miraculous events are assessed by modern critical and scientific standards. They also raise challenging questions about what responsibility the historian of religion bears in analyzing a tradition’s foundational narratives.

Register here.