As with Chapter Three, Nichiren’s references to this chapter focus, not on the parable from which it takes its name, but on another element entirely, in this case, the story of the buddha Mahābhijfiājfiānābhibhū [Great-Universal-Wisdom-Excellence Tathāgata].

Nichiren drew three chief conclusions from this narrative. The first is that beings of our own, Sahā world have a karmic connection solely to Śākyamuni Buddha and not to the buddhas of other words. Everything about the dharma known in this world originated with Śākyamuni. None of the great Pure Land teachers, Nichiren said, had ever actually met the buddha Amitābha or renounced the world to practice the way under his guidance. The name Sahā, from the Sanskrit word meaning “to bear or endure,” refers to the tradition that this world is an especially evil and benighted place where it is difficult to pursue the Buddhist path — quite unlike the radiant pure lands with which the Mahāyāna imagination populated the cosmos. Thus, Śākyamuni was said to have displayed exceptional compassion in appearing in this world. In the Greater Amitābha Sūtra or Sūtra of Immeasurable Life, Amitābha Buddha vows to accept into his pure land all who place faith in him except those persons who have committed the five heinous deeds or disparaged the dharma. Nichiren accordingly suggested that these most depraved of evil persons had been excluded from the pure lands of the ten directions and were gathered instead in the present, Sahā world, where Śākyamuni had undertaken to save them. This was the meaning, he said, of Śākyamuni Buddha’s statement in Chapter Three, “I am the only one who can protect them.” To forsake the original teacher Śākyamuni was a grave error, as the people of this world cannot escape samsāra by following any other buddha.

Nichiren explained that these four great śrāvakas “had not even heard the name of the delicacy called ghee,” but when the Lotus Sūtra was expounded, they experienced it for the first time, savoring it as much as they wished and “immediately satisfying the hunger that had long been in their hearts.” Nichiren’s reference here to “ghee,” or clarified butter, invokes the concept of the “five flavors,” an analogy by which Zhiyi had likened the stages in human religious development to the five stages in the Indian practice of making ghee from fresh milk. As we have seen, like other educated Buddhists of his day, Nichiren took the Tendai division of the Buddha’s teaching into five sequential periods to represent historical fact. From that perspective, Nichiren sometimes described the sufferings that he imagined the Buddha’s leading śrāvaka disciples must have endured during the period when Śākyamuni began to preach the Mahāyāna, seeing their status plummet from that of revered elders to targets of scorn and reproach for their attachment to the inferior “Hinayāna” goal of a personal nirvāṇa. Some Mahāyāna sūtras excoriate the śrāvakas as those who have “destroyed the seeds of buddhahood” or “fallen into the pit of nirvāṇa” and can benefit neither themselves nor others. Their “hunger” then would have represented their chagrin and regret at not having followed the bodhisattva path and thus having excluded themselves from the possibility of buddhahood.

At the same time, Nichiren imagined them suffering hunger in the literal sense. As monks, they would have had to beg for their food each day. Nichiren imagined that on hearing the érävakas rebuked as followers of a lesser vehicle, humans and gods no longer viewed them as worthy sources of merit and stopped putting food in their begging bowls. “Had the Buddha entered final nirvāṇa after preaching only the sūtras of the first forty years or so without expounding the Lotus Sūtra in his last eight years, who then would have made offerings to these elders?” he asked. “In their present bodies, they would have known the sufferings of the realm of hungry ghosts.” Serious hunger was a condition that Nichiren had experienced at multiple points in his life and with which he could readily sympathize. But when the Buddha preached the Lotus Sūtra and predicted buddhahood for the śrāvakas, Nichiren continued, his words were like the brilliant spring sun emerging to dissolve the ice of winter or a strong wind dispersing dew from all the grass. “Because [these predictions] appear in this phoenix of writings, this mirror of truth [i.e., the Lotus], after the Buddha’s passing, the śrāvakas were venerated by all supporters of the dharma, both humans and gods, just as though they had been buddhas.”

Because the consequences of slandering the Lotus Sūtra are so frightful, in the verse section of this third chapter of the sūtra, after summarizing the karmic retribution that would attend that offense, the Buddha admonishes Śāriputra “never to expound this sūtra to those who have little wisdom. … You should teach the Lotus Sūtra to those who are able to accept it.” Some among Nichiren’s disciples wondered why he himself failed to follow this injunction. Would one not do better to lead people gradually through provisional teachings, as Śākyamuni Buddha himself had done, rather than insisting on immediately preaching the Lotus Sūtra to persons whose minds were not open to it? In Nichiren’s understanding, however, the sūtra’s warning against preaching the Lotus Sūtra to the ignorant had applied only to the Buddha’s lifetime and to the subsequent two thousand years of the ages of the True Dharma and the Semblance Dharma, when people still had the capacity to achieve buddhahood through provisional teachings. Now, in the age of the Final Dharma, he argued, no one can achieve liberation through such incomplete doctrines. Therefore, the Buddha had permitted ordinary teachers such as himself to preach the Lotus Sūtra directly, so that people could establish a karmic connection with it, “whether by acceptance or rejection.” Here Nichiren invoked and assimilated to the Lotus Sūtra the logic of “reverse connection” (J. gyakuen), the idea that even a negative relationship to the dharma, formed by rejecting or maligning it, will nonetheless eventually lead one to liberation. Persons who have formed no karmic connection to the true dharma may perhaps avoid rebirth in the lower realms but lack the conditions for attaining buddhahood; those who slander the dharma paradoxically form a bond with it. Though they must suffer the fearful consequences of disparaging the Lotus Sūtra, after expiating that offense, they will be able to encounter the Lotus again and achieve buddhahood by virtue of the very karmic connection to the sūtra that they formed by slandering it in the past. Now, in the age of the Final Dharma, Nichiren maintained, most persons are so burdened by delusive attachments that they are already bound for the hells. “If they must fall into the evil paths in any event, it would be far better that they do so for maligning the Lotus Sūtra than for any worldly offense. … Even if one disparages the Lotus Sūtra and thereby falls into hell, the merit gained [by the relationship to the sūtra that one has formed thereby] will surpass by a billion times that of making offerings to and taking refuge in Śākyamuni, Amitābha, and as many other buddhas as there are sands in the Ganges River.” Thus in this age, Nichiren maintained, one should persist in urging people to embrace the Lotus Sūtra, regardless of their response, for the Lotus alone can implant the seed that bears the fruit of buddhahood.

In the Lotus Sūtra’s narrative, Śāriputra is the first śrāvaka to receive the Buddha’s prediction of his future buddhahood. “When Śāriputra heard this,” Nichiren wrote, “he not only cut off the illusions arising from primal ignorance and reached the stage of the true cause [for liberation] but was acclaimed as the [future] tathāgata Padmaprabha [Lotus Light]. … This was the beginning of the attainment of buddhahood by all beings of the ten realms.”

For Nichiren, … the Lotus Sūtra’s message that persons of the two lesser vehicles could attain buddhahood was not about extending this possibility to a group of previously excluded individuals but, rather, established the mutual inclusion of the ten realms as the ground that, for the first time, opened buddhahood as a real possibility to anyone.