While chronologies differed, in Japan, widespread opinion held that the Final Dharma had begun in 1052. Thus, the bodhisattvas who emerged from underground could be expected to appear at any time. Indeed, were they not overdue? “Should they fail to appear in the Final Dharma age, they would be great liars, and the prophecies made by Śākyamuni, Prabhūtaratna, and the buddhas of the ten directions would prove as empty as foam on the waters,” Nichiren wrote. In observing that no one other than himself was enduring the great trials predicted in the Lotus Sūtra, Nichiren concluded that he himself must be the representative of the bodhisattvas of the earth, or might even be one of them, a conviction that sustained him through years of danger and privation. Usually he referred to himself only in modest terms as a forerunner or emissary of their leader, the bodhisattva Viśiṣṭacaritra [J. Jōgyō, Superior Conduct], but there is little doubt that he identified his efforts with the work of this bodhisattva. Much of the later Nichiren tradition identifies him as a manifestation of Viśiṣṭacaritra in this world.

Nichiren observed that these four bodhisattvas [who are leaders of the Bodhisattvas from beneath the earth] were not present at the Buddha’s first sermon nor at the last. They appear in no sūtra other than the Lotus, and even there, they are present only to receive the Buddha’s transmission of the sūtra and his charge to propagate it after his parinirvāṇa. Based on his understanding of the Buddha’s teaching process, Nichiren argued that these bodhisattvas could only appear in the Final Dharma age. During the two thousand years following the Buddha’s passing, that is, the True Dharma and Semblance Dharma ages, persons who had received the seed of buddhahood from Sakyamuni Buddha were led to the stages of maturation and harvesting through provisional teachings. Had the bodhisattvas from beneath the earth appeared and spread the daimoku during that time, many of those people would have reviled it, thereby destroying the merit gained through the maturing of the seeds that they had already received. During those two thousand years, Nichiren said, some of the bodhisattvas from other worlds remained to teach the Lotus Sūtra in this world. Specifically, Zhiyi and his teacher Huisi, long revered as manifestations of the bodhisattvas Bhaiṣajyarāja (J. Yakuō; Medicine King) and Avalokiteśvara (Kannon), respectively, had taught the three thousand realms in a single thought-moment from the abstract perspective of the trace teaching. But by the beginning of the Final Dharma age, those able to achieve liberation through the provisional teachings had vanished, and the bodhisattvas from other worlds had all returned to their original lands. Now, in the present, mappō era, “Hinayāna is employed to attack Mahāyāna, and the provisional used to destroy the true. East and west are confused, and heaven and earth turned upside down. … At this time, the bodhisattvas who emerged from the earth will make their first appearance in the world, solely to have the children drink the medicine of the five characters Myōhō-renge-kyō.”