In Chapter Eight [The Assurance of Future Buddhahood of the Five Hundred Disciples], to express their understanding of the one vehicle teaching, five hundred arhats who have just received a prediction from the Buddha relate the parable of the jewel hidden in the garment. Like the other parables of the Lotus Sūtra, this one was well known to educated Japanese and provided a frequent subject for traditional waka poems based on the sūtra, as in this twelfth-century example:

if the wind
from Vulture Peak
had not blown
my sleeves inside out—
would I have found
the jewel
inside the reverse
of my coat?

Here the poet expresses his recognition that, without the Buddha’s preaching of the Lotus Sūtra, he would never have discovered the treasure he had possessed all along.

For Nichiren, the daimoku of the Lotus Sūtra is what enables that discovery. He writes that living beings “have never for an instant been separated from the wish-granting jewel.” Although they could quickly realize buddhahood simply by chanting Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō, being deluded by the wine of ignorance, they do not realize this and are instead satisfied with trivial gains, such as achieving rebirth in the heavens as the gods Brahmā or Indra or the status of rulers or great ministers of state in the human world. But the Buddha taught that these are mere illusory pleasures. Rather, “we should simply uphold the Lotus Sūtra and quickly become buddhas.” In the sūtra text, the man being “satisfied if he just obtains a very meagre amount” represents the Buddha’s disciples accepting the teachings of the two lower vehicles and being content with the arhat’s goal of nirvāṇa, not aspiring to the bodhisattva path. It thereby conveys an implicit criticism of the Indian Buddhist mainstream at the time of the sūtra’s compilation. Nichiren reorients the parable to suggest that any transient acquisition — including all the wealth, pleasures, and power to be had in the human or heavenly realms — is vastly inferior to realizing buddhahood by embracing the Lotus Sūtra.