On May 12, 1261, the Japanese military government arrested Nichiren, who was forty years old at the time. His arrest was followed by exile to Ito on the Izu Peninsula. During his exile, he wrote his essay, “Four Debts of Gratitude,” in which he says:

In the Age of Degeneration of the Buddha’s teachings, anyone who believes so much as a word or a phrase of the Lotus Sutra is destined to be envied and hated. That is why the Lotus Sutra says, “Many people begrudge [the sutra] even in my lifetime. Needless to say, more people will do so after my extinction.” When I [Nichiren] first read this phrase, I doubted it. But now my experience has convinced me that the Buddha’s words are true. … Although I do not eat meat or fish, and have never harmed a living thing, and although I do not go about with a wife and child, I am treated as a criminal monk, just because I am propagating the teaching of the Lotus Sutra. … But when I realize that I am suffering persecutions by demons who have entered the bodies of my tormentors, just because I believe in the Lotus Sutra and follow its teachings, exactly as the Sutra expounds [in Chapter Thirteen, “Encouragement for Keeping the Sutra”], then I feel joy beyond words. I rejoice because I have found that even a man of low birth [such as Il, one who is ignorant and uneducated, was forecast in the Lotus Sutra some two thousand years ago. The Buddha predicted that such a person [as I] “will suffer religious persecutions.”

Here Nichiren expresses his pleasure at seeing his own experience vindicating the teachings of the Lotus Sutra. For example, Chapter Ten predicts, “If you expound the Sutra after the Buddha’s extinction, many people will begrudge it,” and Chapter Thirteen foretells, “Three kinds of devils will enter the bodies of monks and cause them to persecute the teachers of the Dharma.” Such adversities actually befell Nichiren, as the words of the Sutra had foretold. So Nichiren accepted his misfortunes as living proofs of the words of the Sutra.