scriptures, which had been transmitted to Japan in classical and often very difficult Chinese. This same priest also founded discussion groups among the lay believers, which in time evolved into large, influential lay congregations.
These congregations were perhaps the chief organs of intellectual life for the lower classes during the feudal period. In time some even became the agencies through which the people asserted themslves in politics. Congregations of the True Pure Land Sect killed their feudal leaders in two west coast provinces of Japan in 1488 and thereafter controlled this area themselves. During the sixteenth century the great temple-castle of the sect, located in a town which later became the commercial city of Osaka, was able to defy siege by the strongest feudal faction in Japan for a period of ten years.
Side by side with the two Pure Land Sects, there soon developed a third popular sect, founded in 1253 by the priest Nichiren and usually known by his name. Basically much like the other two, it relied even more on street-corner preaching, but differed radically from them in its religious fanaticism, which was the legacy of its dynamic but bellicose founder. Nichiren, in sharp contrast to the pacifistic, tolerant, and all-embracing spirit which Buddhism had always shown, was an intolerant fighting man of religion, who openly attacked other Buddhist sects as leading men only to damnation. His sect became a fighting church, often engaging in acts of open warfare with the members of other sects during the turbulent feudal period. Nichiren, again in contrast to the dominant international spirit of Bud-