Agon Shu

Agon Shū believes that, it takes its principles directly from the Buddha's teachings, which in the original Sanskrit language are called the Agamas or the Agama Sutras which literally means "the teaching of the Buddha". According to Agon Shū, these sutras are the true records of the teachings of Gautama Buddha, whereas Mahayana Buddhism is a deviation from the original teachings of the Buddha.The word Hinayana, meaning "Lesser Vehicle" is rejected as a derogatory term. ==Seiyū Kiriyama==

The founder of Agon Shū is Seiyū Kiriyama (birth name, Masuo Tsutsumi) born in 1921 in Yokohama. His poor health prevented him from serving in the army, and he survived through several odd jobs. In 1953, he was accused of producing alcohol illegally and arrested. He prepared to commit suicide in jail but changed his mind at the last minute. Later, he attributed this to an intervention of the bodhisattva of compassion Juntei-Kannon, who entrusted him with a religious mission. He developed friendly relations with the Jōdo Shinshū Yōgen-in temple in Kyoto, and established the headquarters of its society near the temple. In 1978, Kiriyama announced the "discovery" that the Agamas are the keys to Buddha's teachings, and that Buddhist groups that do not recognize this mislead their followers. In 1980, Kiriyama visited the holy Buddhist site of Sahet Mahet in India and reported that the Buddha had appeared to him and passed to him the mantle of leader of universal Buddhism. These events led Kiriyama to establish and promote Agon Shū, founded in 1978, as a new global Buddhist movement and build a "new Sahel Mahet" in Yamashina-ku, Kyoto. In 1995, the Tokyo subway sarin attack perpetrated by Aum Shinrikyo led to a hostile attitude in Japan towards new religious movements in general, and particularly affected Agon Shū when it became known that Aum Shinrikyo's founder, Shoko Asahara, had been for a short time a member of Kiriyama's movement. Scholars, Ian Reader and Erica Baffelli, suggested that to dissociate himself from Asahara, Kiriyama in his later years emphasized Japanese nationalism and devoted several rituals to pacify the souls of Japanese soldiers who died during World War II. ==After Kiriyama's death==

The same scholars, Reader and Baffelli, have studied what they believe is a transformation of Agon Shū after the death of Kiriyama in 2016 by his successors, senior priest Fukada Seia and chief female disciple Wada Naoko, into a cult of its founder, with Kiriyama's relics becoming increasingly more important than those of the Buddha, and with his messages from the spirit world received by some of the movement's leaders becoming normative sacred texts. ==References==