One can imagine how identification with the task of the bodhisattvas of the earth must have inspired and sustained those followers of Nichiren, in his own lifetime and later, who upheld their faith in the face of opposition. Its implication, that one has been born into this world to aid in a vast salvific task, could invest even the most ordinary life with immense meaning. This dimension of Nichiren’s teaching helps explain its ongoing attraction in the contemporary world. However humble one’s place in society or how limited one’s personal resources or abilities, to be a follower of Nichiren was to stand in the vanguard of history as someone who, having embraced the sole teaching leading to buddhahood in the present age, shoulders the responsibility to preserve and transmit it.

The claim that those who chant the daimoku are Śākyamuni Buddha’s disciples from the remotest past might initially seem at odds with Nichiren’s idea that people in the Final Dharma age have never before received the seed of buddhahood. The apparent contradiction resolves, however, when we recall that for Nichiren and other Buddhist thinkers of the time, the term “remotest past” (kuon) signified not merely an immensely long time ago in linear, historical terms, but also carried the meaning of timelessness, and thus, of the Buddha’s constant presence. The practice and propagation of the Lotus Sūtra in the mappō era is the juncture where the linear time of ordinary experience and the timeless realm of the Buddha intersect. In embracing the daimoku with the “same mind” as Nichiren, one immediately becomes a disciple of the ever-present primordial Śākyamuni Buddha and is encompassed in his enlightened realm.

Nichiren maintained that those who shared his practice and commitment were also to be counted among the bodhisattvas who emerged from the earth: “If you are of the same mind as me, then are you not a bodhisattva of the earth? And if you are a bodhisattva of the earth, then without doubt you have been a disciple of Śākyamuni Buddha since the remotest past. … There should be no discrimination as to men or women among those who spread the five characters Myōhō-renge-kyō in the Final Dharma age, for unless they were bodhisattvas of the earth, they could not chant the daimoku. At first, I alone chanted Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō, but then gradually two, three, and a hundred began to chant and transmit it. This will happen in the future as well. Isn’t this what it means to ’emerge from the earth’?”

While chronologies differed, in Japan, widespread opinion held that the Final Dharma had begun in 1052. Thus, the bodhisattvas who emerged from underground could be expected to appear at any time. Indeed, were they not overdue? “Should they fail to appear in the Final Dharma age, they would be great liars, and the prophecies made by Śākyamuni, Prabhūtaratna, and the buddhas of the ten directions would prove as empty as foam on the waters,” Nichiren wrote. In observing that no one other than himself was enduring the great trials predicted in the Lotus Sūtra, Nichiren concluded that he himself must be the representative of the bodhisattvas of the earth, or might even be one of them, a conviction that sustained him through years of danger and privation. Usually he referred to himself only in modest terms as a forerunner or emissary of their leader, the bodhisattva Viśiṣṭacaritra [J. Jōgyō, Superior Conduct], but there is little doubt that he identified his efforts with the work of this bodhisattva. Much of the later Nichiren tradition identifies him as a manifestation of Viśiṣṭacaritra in this world.