Nichiren also stressed to his followers that they themselves are the “ambassadors of the Tathāgata” praised by Śākyamuni Buddha in this chapter, the very people who, in an evil era after the Buddha’s passing, will be able to uphold the sūtra and teach it to others. To one individual, borrowing the sūtra’s language in this passage, he wrote: “It is rare to receive human birth, but you have done so. You have also encountered the buddha dharma, which is difficult to meet. And within the buddha dharma, you have found the daimoku of the Lotus Sūtra and now put it into practice. Truly you have ‘already paid homage to tens of myriads of kotis of buddhas of the past.”

The idea that one is an “ambassador of the Tathāgata” and has “already paid homage to tens of myriads of kotis of buddhas” might seem to contradict another of Nichiren’s claims … that people born into the age of the Final Dharma have never before received the seed of buddhahood. Like most founders of religious movements, Nichiren taught according to his audience and circumstances and did not fully systematize his teachings; this would be one way to account for this apparent inconsistency. But there are also other ways to think about it. Past lives are unknowable, and talk about them by Buddhist teachers is intended to cast light on the present. Thus, we might think of the tension between these two ideas as Nichiren offering his followers alternative perspectives on their practice. To say that one has now received the seed of buddhahood for the very first time engenders gratitude for the rare opportunity of having encountered the daimoku of the Lotus Sūtra; to say that one has served countless buddhas in the past and been dispatched to this world as the Tathāgata’s ambassador invests one’s personal practice with the quality of a noble mission.

Nichiren said of himself that, being an ordinary person steeped in delusion, “my mind is far from that of the Tathāgata’s ambassador.” But because he had endured great trials for the Lotus Sūtra’s sake with his body and chanted its daimoku with his mouth, he continued, “I am like the Tathāgata’s ambassador.” His claim to legitimacy as the teacher of the Lotus Sūtra for the Final Dharma age lay not in superior spiritual attainments, something he never asserted, but in the fact that he had fulfilled the sūtra’s own predictions of the hardships its devotees would encounter in a troubled age after the Buddha’s passing.

The opening passage of [Chapter 10, The Teacher of the Dharma] contains the first mention, recurring throughout the sūtra, of what Chinese exegetes would call the “five practices” or ways of upholding and disseminating the Lotus Sūtra after the Buddha’s passing. Though English translations vary, the five practices are as follows: (1) to accept and uphold the Lotus (to “preserve” it, in the Kubo-Yuyama translation), indicating an underlying faith or commitment; (2) to read it; (3) to recite it from memory (Kubo and Yuyama collapse 2 and 3 as “to recite” the sūtra); (4) to explain it, which would include teaching and interpreting it; and (5) to copy it. These were in fact the forms of sūtra practice widely performed in East Asia, where the Lotus and other sūtras were enshrined, read, recited, copied, and lectured upon for a range of benefits, including protection of the realm, good fortune in this life, and the well-being of the deceased. These “five practices” together employ all three modes of action (karma): that is, actions of body, speech, and mind. For Nichiren, the first of the five, “accepting and upholding” — preserving — was the most important: “Embracing the Lotus Sūtra and chanting Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō at once encompasses all five practices.”