The Perception of Sakyamuni

This discovery was made by Sakyamuni when he was thirty years of age. It was after his perception of this truth that Sakyamuni was called the Subordinate Buddha; while, as the Buddha of Original Enlightenment, i.e., as the personification of Truth, he is called the Original Buddha. Then, desiring to teach the people that any one of them could likewise become Buddha, he advanced the doctrines contained in a sacred work called the Kegon Kyo. But they were very slow to understand; their intelligence, in fact, was insufficient to grasp so great a truth; so he was obliged to confine his instructions for more than forty years to the Disciplines, the practice of which was necessary as a preparation for the reception of the higher doctrines. It was only when he was seventy years old that he was able to revert to his former project. Then he taught what will be found in the first [volume] of the [Lotus Sutra]: “It is only Buddhas, i.e., enlightened ones, who can, with the Buddha, investigate the reality of things.” This refers to the doctrine that all things in all times and all departments of space are, in essence, originally identical with the Buddha, and contain in themselves the three bodies of the Buddha, viz., the Spiritual or Noumenal Body, the Compensation Body, and the Body of Transformation or Impermanence.

Doctrines of Nichiren (1893)