The Amadist salvation movement was confronted by its only truly effective detractor in the person of the extremist Rencho (1222-1282), who later took for himself the name of Nichiren, or Sun Lotus. An early novice in the Tendai monastery, he took a different tack from the Amida teachers, deciding that all essential Buddhist truth was contained in the Lotus Sutra itself. Although the Tendai school had originally been founded on the study of the Lotus Sutra, he believed the school had strayed from the _sutra's _precepts. Denouncing all sects impartially, he took a fundamentalist, back-to-the-Lotus text for his sermons. Sensing that most of his followers might have trouble actually reading a _sutra_, he produced a chanting formula of his own which he claimed would do just as well. This Lotus "_nembutsu_" was the phrase _namu myoho renge-kyo_, or Praise to the Lotus Sutra. The chanting Amidists had met their match. The Tendai monks on Mt. Thei did not receive this vulgarization of their teachings kindly, and their urgings, together with his intemperate pronouncements regarding imminent dangers of a Mongol invasion, led in 1261 to Nichiren's banishment to a distant province. Three years later the truth of his warnings became all too apparent and he was recalled by the government. But on his return he overplayed his hand, offering to save the nation only if all other Buddhist sects were eliminated. This was too much for the Japanese ruling circles; they turned instead to a new band of warriors trained in Zen military tactics who promptly repelled the invasion without Nichiren's aid. Persecution of his sect continued, reaching a high point in the mid- sixteenth century, when a band of rival Tendai monks burned twenty-one Nichiren temples in Kyoto, slaughtering all the priests, including a reputed three thousand in the last temple. The sect has survived, however, and today Nichiren Shoshu and its lay affiliate, the Soka Gakkai, or Value Creation Society, claim the membership of one Japanese in seven and control of the country's third largest political party. The Soka Gakkai recently dedicated a vast new temple at the foot of Mt. Fuji, said to be the largest religious structure in existence. With services that often resemble political conventions, the Nichiren sect has achieved might once have been thought impossible: it has simplified even further the ingenuous philosophy of its founder, embellishing the praise of the Lotus Sutra with marching bands and gymnastic displays in sports-stadium convocations.