Chapter Twenty-Three [states]: “This sūtra is good medicine for the ills of the people of Jambudvipa. If there is any sick person who hears this sūtra, his illness will disappear, and he will neither die nor grow old.” Nichiren, who understood Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō to be the “good medicine” in the parable of the excellent doctor in the “Lifespan” chapter, often cited this passage. On one level, he did so to encourage followers to rouse the power of faith in order to battle actual physical sickness. “Life is the most precious of treasures,” he wrote to a sick follower. “Moreover, you have encountered the Lotus Sūtra. If you can live even one day longer, you can accumulate that much more merit.” But on another level, he understood this matter metaphorically: The people of Japan were “sick” with the illnesses of attachment to provisional teachings and slander of the dharma, which could only be cured by the “medicine” that is the daimoku. The daimoku, Nichiren taught, can also cure sufferings of an existential nature. Of course, it is not the case that Lotus devotees invariably recover from sickness, or “neither die nor grow old” in a literal sense. What the sūtra, and Nichiren, promise here is that the Lotus can, in this chapter’s words, “free sentient beings from every suffering, all the pains and bonds of sickness and of birth and death” and ferry them “across the ocean of old age, illness, and death.” Where there is birth, then old age, illness, and death are inevitable. But through faith and the insight that accompanies it, the sufferings associated with them can be transcended.

Nichiren was adamant that the Lotus Sūtra enables the realization of buddhahood here in this world, not in a pure land after death. And, being implacably opposed to the Pure Land teachings, he could not accept the common idea that the worthy dead go to Amitābha’s realm. Yet, especially in his later years, he was confronted with the need to explain what happens to Lotus Sūtra practitioners after they die. He taught that they join the constantly abiding Śākyamuni Buddha in the “pure land of Vulture Peak.” “Vulture Peak” (Skt. Grdhrakūta; J. Ryōjusen, also translated as “Eagle Peak”) in Rājagrha in India was where Śākyamuni is said to have preached the Lotus Sūtra, and the term “pure land of Vulture Peak” had been used long before Nichiren’s time to designate the realm of the primordial buddha described in the “Lifespan” chapter. Nichiren was not the first to conceptualize this realm as a postmortem destination. It seems to have entered Japan by at least the ninth century, as the courtier Sugawara no Michizane (845-903) once composed a poem of parting expressing the hope of reunion after death at Vulture Peak. After Nichiren’s time, “Vulture Peak” became virtually the proprietary pure land, so to speak, of his followers. But it was not merely a Lotus-inflected substitute for Amitābha’s Land of Bliss. For Nichiren, the pure land of Vulture Peak is not a distinct realm posited in contrast to the present world; unlike Amitābha’s pure land in the west or the Tathāgata Bhaisajyaguru’s (J. Yakushi Nyorai) vaidūrya world in the east, it has no specific cosmological location. Rather, it exists wherever one embraces the Lotus Sūtra. This pure land is the realm of the constantly abiding primordial buddha, a land that “never decays,” even in the fire at the kalpa’s end; it is the ever-present Lotus assembly and the three thousand realms in a single thought-moment depicted on Nichiren’s mandala. Accessible in the present, it also extends to encompass the faithful dead, a realm transcending life and death. The “pure land of Vulture Peak” thus also offered devotees the promise of reunion. To a young man who had just lost his father, Nichiren wrote: “Even strangers, if they embrace this [Lotus] sūtra, will meet at the same Vulture Peak. How much more so, in the case of you and your father! Both believing in the Lotus Sūtra, you will be born together in the same place.” And some years later, he wrote to the young man’s mother, who had lost not only her husband, but also another son, “Now he [your son] is with his father in the same pure land of Vulture Peak; how happy they must be to hold one another’s hands and place their heads!”