In the concluding verse section of [Chapter 11, Beholding the Stūpa of Treasures], now seated in midair within the jeweled stūpa beside Prabhūtaratna, Śākyamuni Buddha again stresses how difficult it will be to uphold the Lotus Sūtra after his passing, setting forth the analogy of what Nichiren summarized as the “nine easy and six difficult acts.” …

Nichiren read this passage as directly addressing his own circumstances and those of his followers, and he stressed that the sūtra was in fact speaking to them. For example, to a lay nun who had asked him a question about the sūtra, he wrote that her query itself was “a root of great good.” He continued: “Now in this Final Dharma age, those who ask about the meaning of even one phrase or verse of the Lotus Sūtra are rarer than those who can fling Mount Sumeru to the worlds of another quarter … or those who can uphold and preach countless other sūtras, causing the monastics and lay people who hear them to attain the six supernormal powers. The chapter called ‘A Jeweled Stūpa’ in the fourth fascicle of the Lotus Sūtra sets forth the important teaching of the six difficult and nine easy acts. Your posing a question about the Lotus Sūtra is among the six difficult acts. You should know thereby that, if you uphold the sūtra, you will become a buddha in your present body.”

Nichiren’s writings suggest two reasons why the Lotus Sūtra is “difficult to accept and to understand.” First, as Saichō had noted, the provisional teachings — those preached before the Lotus Sūtra — were expounded “according to the minds of others,” or in other words, the Buddha had accommodated them to the understanding of his listeners. In contrast, Śākyamuni preached the Lotus Sūtra “in accordance with his own mind,” revealing his own enlightenment. Nichiren took this to mean the Buddha’s insight into the mutual inclusion of the ten realms, or more specifically, the understanding that “our inferior minds are endowed with the buddha realm.” For many of Nichiren’s contemporaries, who believed that buddhahood was to be attained only after death in the Pure Land, this idea must have seemed deeply counterintuitive. “[Among the ten realms], the buddha realm alone is difficult to demonstrate,” he acknowledged. “But having understood that your mind is endowed with the other nine realms, you should believe that it has the buddha realm as well. Do not have doubts about this.”

Another reason why the Lotus Sūtra is “difficult to accept and to understand” is because those who propagate it may encounter antagonism. “People show great hostility toward this sūtra, even in the presence of the Tathāgata,” Śākyamuni declares in [Chapter 10]. “How much more so after the parinirvāṇa of the Tathāgata!” Although cast here in the form of a prophecy of what will happen after the Buddha’s demise, this passage may point to opposition from the Buddhist mainstream encountered by the early Lotus community. For Nichiren, it foretold the hardships that he and his followers encountered in spreading the Lotus Sūtra. Writing from his first exile, to the Izu peninsula, he confessed, “When I first read this passage, I wondered if things would really be so terrible. But now I know that the Buddha’s predictions do not err in the slightest, especially since I have experienced them personally.” For Nichiren, this sūtra passage carried a double legitimation, both of the Lotus Sūtra to which he had committed his life and of his own practice in upholding and propagating the Lotus. The passage is cited nearly fifty times in his extant writings.

At the same time, Nichiren saw the “difficulty” of embracing the Lotus Sūtra as pointing, not merely to the inevitability of hardships, but also to a guarantee of buddhahood. “To accept [the Lotus Sūtra] is easy,” he wrote. “To uphold it is difficult. But the realization of buddhahood lies in upholding faith. Those who would uphold this sūtra should be prepared to meet difficulties. Without doubt, they will ‘quickly attain the highest Buddha path’.”

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.”

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.