Abstract
After his defeat in the war, the Retired Emperor Gotoba, who had brought unprecedented suffering to the Nembutsu order, converted himself not to a traditional Buddhist sect, but to the Nembutsu teaching, which had been oppressed by himself, and represented his own view on the mutability of life (Mujokan) in his Mujokoshiki, in the desolate land of exile.
The aim of the present paper is to compare the conception of the Mujokan of Gotoba and Ren'nyo, a restorer of the Shin Buddhist denomination, and to ascertain the difference between them.
The reason why I arranged the Religious Persecution of the Jogen era and the Mujokoshiki in the title is that I wanted to remark on the artificiality of the fact that both Zonkaku (Zonkaku hogo) and Ren'nyo (Hakkotsuno Ofumi) quoted a passage from the Mujokoshiki, a work by Gotoba, who once prohibited the practice of Nembutsu.
