The sal trees (shala) that appear in Buddhist scriptures are said to have gone extinct due to environmental destruction, with their true identity deemed a mystery, and in Japan the Japanese stewartia is treated as sal, and...
The "shalashōju" that appears in Buddhist scriptures had gone extinct due to environmental destruction and its true identity was shrouded in mystery, and in Japan the natsutsubaki (Stewartia pseudocamellia) was treated as the salasōju, and on TV programs and the like they would do projects to track down the true identity of the shalashōju, and a scholar nailed it down as a tree in the family Dipterocarpaceae from genetic analysis of a Hindu goshintai (sacred object) made of sala wood, and he was even thanked by the Indian government as a discovery of the century—or so it should have been—but now it has become a plant that actually exists. Or, in the West, mandrake/mandragora should have been a non-existent, imaginary, fictional plant, the kind that even shows up in Harry Potter, but it seems to have become a plant that actually exists. ○ Around August 2020, there was a report that, retroactively into the past, bam, Tendai had changed into a religion that worships the Lotus Sutra. It is said to be called Tendaī Hokke Enshū, Hokke Enshū, Tendai Hokke Shū, or simply Hokke Shū. Hokke is the Lotus Teaching, with Nichiren-san as the starting point, and it should not have been an alias of Tendai. For the record, the author, up through about elementary school, thought Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei was Nichiren-shū, and also there are quite a few people who don’t know that Nichiren-shū was a new religion created in the Meiji period; many people should think the Lotus Sutra is post-Nichiren. There is also a reporter who remembers that Tendai wasn’t in China, but that Saichō-san either revived in Japan the original sect that Tendai came from (which had already died out), or newly created Tendai as a uniquely Japanese sect with origins in Hie Shrine (Hiyoshi Taisha), and that Japan’s Tendai was just that. Zhiyi’s Tiantai (in China) and Japan’s Tendai should have been different things. According to one reporter whose family temple was Shingon, Saichō-san and Kūkai-san had an age…
This case is part of the Mandela Effect case database based on "The Window of Opportunity: A Guidepost to the Mandela Effect — The Ultra-Secret X-Files" by Aoyama Takuto.