Robin Beck

I wish you had the commentary in Nichiren's Childhood activated so my comment/question could have appeared there.
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Done

My question is most trivial but I'm curious as to whether Nichiren's siblings practiced his teachings?
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All I can find is that he was the "4th son." I heard that a fire at Seicho-ji destroyed those kind of detailed records.

Robin:

I nominate you for having the best blog on FWP. Week in and out, your vision, balance, research, and excellence in quality comes through. I wish you had the commentary in Nichiren's Childhood activated so my comment/question could have appeared there.

My question is most trivial but I'm curious as to whether Nichiren's siblings practiced his teachings?

Superb work, Robin.

Charles

Bruce,

I would agree that Nichiren ought to be understood
in context.

Biographical Studies of Nichiren
Jacqueline Stone reviews disparate biographies of Nichiren in this article published in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. (PDF
file, Adobe Acrobat).
http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/publications/jjrs/pdf/555.pdf

"ACCOUNTS OF NICHIREN'S LIFE go back to the early fourteenth century. Perhaps the earliest, the Goden dodai, was written by Nichido (1283–1341), a third-generation disciple. What purports to be an autobiographical account contained within the apocryphal Hokke honmonsho yosho probably dates from around the same time. Hagiographies of Nichiren continued to appear throughout the medieval and early modern periods. Over the centuries, the dramatic events of his life have been represented not only in written accounts but also in painting, sculpture, plays, novels,\ poetry, and, more recently,
films ..."

"Takagi summarizes the major difficulties encountered in an attempt to place Nichiren in historical context.

First, there are no extant, external sources of the time that refer to him. This leaves Nichiren's own writings as the biographer's major primary source."

"Here, a second difficulty arises in that critical textual studies of this corpus are not yet complete or definitive, and the authenticity
of some texts remains to be determined."

"Third is the issue of Nichiren's own retrospective editing in his autobiographical reflections, which in some cases appear to
reconstruct his earlier thought and actions in light of his later conclusions."

"And fourth, data for Nichiren's early years, a formative period, are extremely limited."

Every culture has its language, and Nichiren I am afraid was a victim of his culture. He played with toys in the Burning House just like you and I as he was just a human being, flesh, blood and bone, and he enjoyed a rumble now and then as we have seen via his writings. His writings were not sacred, they were just writings, remember Nichiren never wrote or read the Gosho.. I really enjoy your diving into history and relics..

Bruce