In [Chapter 27, King Wonderful-Adornment as the Previous Life of a Bodhisattva], the Buddha recounts that, once awakened to the dharma, King Śubhavyūha said that his two sons were his “good friends,” because they had enabled him to meet the Buddha. The Buddha underscores the point, saying: “You should know that a good friend is indeed the great spur [literally, “the great cause and condition”] that brings inspiration to others, causing … the thought of highest, complete enlightenment to awaken in them.” This passage has often been quoted to stress the importance of a “good friend” on the Buddhist path. This expression (Skt. kalyāvamitra; J. zenchishiki), also translated as “teacher” or “spiritual advisor,” broadly refers to one who assists another on the Buddhist path. Zhiyi, for example, divides “good friends” into the three categories of patrons, fellow practitioners, and teachers. The term has been variously interpreted. For example, in premodern Japan, in addition to its broader meaning of one who assists another’s practice, a “good friend” meant the ritual attendant who assisted someone at the time of death, helping that person to focus his or her thoughts on a buddha — usually Amitābha — in order to achieve birth in his pure land.

Nichiren gave considerable thought to the concept of a “good friend” and interpreted it in light of his understanding of the Final Dharma age. In an early but important essay called “On Protecting the Country,” he poses the question: In this deluded age, the Buddha has departed, and great teachers such as Nāgārjuna or Zhiyi no longer make an appearance. How then can one escape samsaric suffering? Because there are no worthy human teachers, Nichiren concluded that, in this age, the Lotus and Nirvāṇa sūtras are to be accounted “good friends,” in accord with Zhiyi’s statement: “At times following a good friend, and at times following the sūtra scrolls, one hears … the single truth of enlightened wisdom.” Nichiren’s insistence that the Lotus Sūtra is the “good friend” for the present age is perfectly in line with his frequent admonition, drawn from the Nirvāṇa Sūtra, to “rely on the dharma and not on the person.”

What one should most avoid, Nichiren asserted, were “evil friends,” teachers such as Kūkai, who had said that the Lotus Sūtra was inferior to the esoteric teachings, or Hōnen, who had insisted that the Lotus should be set aside as beyond human capacity to practice in the latter age. When Nichiren spoke of such people as “evil friends,” he meant, not that they were morally corrupt or insincere, but that they were promoting incomplete teachings that, in his understanding, no longer led to buddhahood in the Final Dharma age. Occasionally he cited a passage from the Nirvāṇa Sūtra, which says that “evil friends” are more to feared than mad elephants. It states, “Even if you are killed by a mad elephant, you will not fall into the three evil paths. But if you are killed by an evil friend, you are certain to fall into them. A mad elephant is merely an enemy of one’s person, but an evil friend is an enemy of the good dharma. Therefore, bodhisattvas, you should at all times distance yourselves from evil friends.” For his part, Nichiren expressed the fervent hope that people would “not mistakenly trust in evil friends, adopt false teachings, and spend their present life in vain.” This was the impetus behind his assertive proselytizing.

[I]n asking their parents’ permission — a requirement of the monastic rule — to renounce household life and become Buddhist monks, the two princes state that it is “difficult to meet a buddha, just as it is to see udumbara flowers or for a one-eyed turtle to find the hole in a floating piece of wood.” The uḍumbara tree was said to bloom once every three thousand years and thus stands as a symbol for an extremely rare opportunity. The same analogy occurs in the “Skillful Means” chapter to illustrate the rarity of hearing the Lotus Sūtra.

The analogy of the turtle and the floating piece of wood appears in a number of sūtras and commentaries, where it is used to illustrate the rarity of being born human and encountering the Buddha’s teaching. In a letter to a follower, the wife of the same Matsuno Rokurōzaemon mentioned above, Nichiren develops the analogy in great detail and applies it specifically to the Lotus Sūtra. To summarize his expanded version: A large turtle with only one eye and lacking limbs or flippers dwells on the ocean floor. His belly is burning hot, but the shell on his back is freezing cold. Only the rare red sandalwood has the power to cool the turtle’s belly. The turtle yearns to cool his belly on a piece of floating red sandalwood and at the same time to warm his back in the sun. However, he can rise to the ocean’s surface only once in a thousand years, and even then, he can rarely find a piece of floating red sandalwood. When he does so, it may not contain a hollow, or at least not one of the proper size to hold him. Even when he finds a floating sandalwood log with an appropriate hollow place, without limbs, he cannot easily approach it, and having only one eye, he mistakes east for west; thus, he cannot accurately judge the direction of the log’s drift and winds up moving in the wrong direction. Nichiren interprets: “The ocean represents the sea of the sufferings of birth and death, and the turtle is ourselves, living beings. His limbless state indicates our lack of good roots. The heat of his belly represents the eight hot hells of anger, and the cold of the shell on his back, the eight cold hells of greed. His remaining for a thousand years on the ocean floor means that we fall into the three evil paths and are unable to emerge. His surfacing only once every thousand years illustrates how difficult it is to emerge from the three evil paths and be born as a human even once in immeasurable eons, at a time when Śākyamuni Buddha has appeared in the world.”

The turtle mistaking east for west, Nichiren continues, means that ordinary people in their ignorance confuse inferior and superior among the Buddha’s teachings, clinging to provisional teachings that have lost their efficacy and rejecting the one teaching that can lead to enlightenment. And the rarity of the turtle finding a floating sandalwood log with a hollow in it just big enough to hold him means that “even if one should meet the Lotus Sūtra, it is rarer and more difficult still to encounter the daimoku, which is its heart, and chant Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō.” In this way, Nichiren stressed the inconceivable good fortune of his followers, who had not only been born as humans and met the Lotus Sūtra but, although living in a degenerate age in a remote country far from the Buddha’s birthplace, were able to chant the wonderful dharma of the daimoku.

Some of Nichiren’s followers actually found themselves [at odds with their parents]. Among them were two brothers, samurai of the Ikegami family living in Kamakura. They may have been direct vassals of the Hōjō family who ruled the Bakufu or military government. The elder was called Munenaka, and the younger, Munenaga. Their father, Yasumitsu, was a supporter of the eminent monk Ryōkan-bō Ninshō, widely acclaimed as a holy man for his acts of public charity and scrupulous adherence to the precepts. By Nichiren’s account, however, Ninshō’s machinations had brought about his second arrest and exile to Sado Island; Nichiren and his followers had learned to regard Ninshō as an enemy. Because their father revered this cleric, the two brothers, like Śubhavyūha’s two sons, must have felt that they had been born into a “house of wrong views.” Yasumitsu demanded that Munenaka, whose faith was the stronger, renounce his commitment to the Lotus Sūtra and to Nichiren. When Munenaka refused, his father disowned him. At this point, the younger brother began to waver, swayed perhaps by a more conventional understanding of the obedience owed to one’s father and by the unexpected opportunity to replace Munenaka as his father’s heir. Nichiren admonished him, “If you obey your father who is an enemy of the Lotus Sūtra and abandon your brother who is a votary of the one vehicle, are you really being filial? In the end, you should resolve single-mindedly to pursue the buddha way like your brother. Your father is like King Śubhavyūha, and you brothers are like the princes Vimalagarbha and Vimalanetra. Their situation occurred in the past while yours is happening in the present, but the principle of the Lotus Sūtra remains unchanged.”

In the end, perhaps strengthened by Nichiren’s admonishment, the younger brother stood firmly by his elder brother and refused to abandon his faith. Eventually the two were even able to convert their father, and Nichiren praised them as Vimalagarbha and Vimalanetra reborn.

Cases of family discord inevitably arose among Nichiren’s followers when their relatives opposed his teaching. Nichiren often cited [Chapter 27, King Wonderful-Adornment as the Previous Life of a Bodhisattva] to stress that, when faced with the choice between following one’s parents’ wishes or being faithful to the Lotus Sūtra, the Lotus Sūtra must take precedence. Such a stance flew in the face of common understandings of filial piety, an important cultural value of Nichiren’s time. A writing attributed to him, possibly authored by a close disciple with his approval, states:

“King Śubhavyūha, the father of Vimalagarbha and Vimalanetra, adhered to heretical teachings and turned his back on the buddha-dharma. The two princes disobeyed their father’s orders and became disciples of the buddha Jaladharagaritaghoṣasusvaranakṣatrarājasaṃkusumitābhijn͂a, but in the end they were able to guide their father so that he became a buddha called Sālendrarāja [“King of the Sāla Trees”]. Are they to be called unfilial? A sūtra passage explains: ‘To renounce one’s obligations and enter the unconditioned is truly to repay those obligations.’ Thus, we see that those who cast aside the bonds of love and indebtedness in this life and enter the true path of the buddha-dharma are persons who truly understand their obligations.”

The logic here is that abandoning the Lotus Sūtra to satisfy one’s parents might please them in the short run, but by so doing, one severs both them and oneself from the sole path of liberation in the present age. Because such an act constitutes “slander of the dharma,” it can only lead to suffering for all concerned in this and future lifetimes. By upholding faith in the Lotus Sūtra, however, one can realize buddhahood oneself and eventually lead one’s parents to do the same.

[In Chapter 26, Dhārānis,] Nichiren was struck by the words in the vow made by the ten rāksasis that if anyone troubles those who expound the Lotus Sūtra, “his head will be split into seven pieces just like a branch of the arjaka tree.” Zhanran, in summarizing the powers of the Lotus referred to in the sūtra text, had written, “Those who trouble [Lotus devotees] will have their heads split into seven pieces; those who make offerings to them will enjoy good fortune surpassing [that represented by the Buddha’s] ten titles.” The two parts of this sentence are inscribed as “passages of praise” on either side of a number of Nichiren’s mandalas. We can think of them as illustrating the principle of karmic causality as applied to the Lotus Sūtra.

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!”

Several points in this section merit comment. One is the promise that any woman who upholds the present “Bhaiṣajyarāja” [Medicine King] chapter will never again be born female but will go after death to the realm of the buddha Amitābha (J. Amida), to be freed forever from the three poisons of greed, anger, and ignorance. This passage reflects the idea, already well established at the time of the Lotus Sūtra’s compilation, that there are no women in Amitābha’s pure land; presumably, women are reborn there as men (Kubo and Yuyama signal this in their translation by a switch of pronouns, which Chinese does not employ). This passage, like similar ones in other sūtras, is subject to multiple, not necessarily mutually exclusive, readings. One reading would see it as reflecting the gender hierarchy, if not outright misogyny, of the larger culture. At the same time, those who composed sūtras about Amitābha and his realm may have seen the promise of an end to female rebirths as offering release from the biological and social constraints that bound women in premodern societies, limitations understood at the time as karmically “inherent” in the fact of having a female body. Such statements could also reflect the idea that, in Amitābha’s pure land, one is said to quickly achieve the highest level of bodhisattva practice, in which one is not karmically bound to any particular physical form, male or female, but can assume any appearance needed to benefit others. Whatever the case, we know that many women in medieval Japan who were devoted to Amitābha, as well as the men around them, simply assumed that they would be born in the Pure Land as women — an example of how, on the ground, devotees may ignore uncongenial elements of scripture. Nichiren, however, was quick to point out the rejection of women as a problem in the sūtras praising Amitābha’s pure land. Women who chant the nenbutsu, he warned, are relying upon sūtras that can never lead women to buddhahood and therefore, in effect, are but “vainly counting other people’s riches.”

In addressing the present passage, Nichiren first reminds his reader that the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha’s ultimate teaching, supersedes the Pure Land sūtras dealing with Amitābha, which are all provisional. Invoking the first of the ten analogies given in the “Bhaiṣajyarāja” chapter, he says that the Lotus Sūtra is like the great ocean, while the Amitābha Sūtra, the Visualization Sūtra, and other sūtras dealing with Amitābha are like small streams. Moreover, the “Amitābha” mentioned in the “Bhaiṣajyarāja” chapter is not the Amitābha Buddha of the Pure Land sūtras but an emanation of the primordial Śākyamuni Buddha. In this way, Nichiren was able to dissociate this passage from the Pure Land devotion that he saw as no longer valid in his age. At the same time, he continued to maintain that the Lotus Sūtra enables all women who embrace it to attain buddhahood.

The “Bhaiṣajyarāja” [Medicine King] chapter … offers ten analogies illustrating the supreme status of the Lotus Sūtra among all the Buddha’s teachings. It surpasses them just as the ocean is greater than all streams, rivers, and other bodies of water; as Mount Sumeru towers over all other mountains; and so forth. Then follow ten vivid similes illustrating the powers and blessings of the sūtra. Nichiren was deeply struck by these passages and often cited or elaborated on them to stress the merits of upholding the Lotus. Here, for example, in a personal letter to a follower called Shiiji Shirō, he expands on the statement that the Lotus Sūtra is “like a boat for a traveler.” This boat, he says, might be described as follows. Note how he weaves together Buddhist technical terms and phrases from different portions of the Lotus Sūtra:

The Lord Buddha, a shipbuilder of infinitely profound wisdom, gathered the lumber of the four flavors and eight teachings, planed it by “openly setting aside skillful means,” cut and assembled the planks, using both right and wrong in their nonduality, and completed the craft by driving home the spikes of the single truth that is like the supreme flavor of ghee. Then he launched it upon the sea of birth and death. Unfurling its sails of the three thousand realms on the mast of the single truth of the middle way, driven by the fair wind that is the “real aspect of the dharmas,” the vessel surges ahead, carrying aboard all sentient beings, who can “understand through faith.” The tathāgatha Śākyamuni takes the helm, the tathāgatha Prabhūtaratna mans the sails, and the four bodhisattvas led by Viśiṣṭacāritra strain in unison at the creaking oars. This is the vessel in “a boat for the traveler.” Those who can board it are the disciples and lay followers of Nichiren.

[T]he daimoku of the Lotus Sūtra is the source of all buddhas. One who chants it directly receives its transmission from the primordial buddha on Vulture Peak, and the place where one chants it is that buddha’s pure land. This claim is in keeping with the logic that “the assembly on Vulture Peak is awesomely present and has not yet dispersed” or of the primordial buddha’s realm of “original time” depicted on Nichiren’s mandala that can be entered through faith. Another of Nichiren’s personal letters explains the inner transmission in this way: “To chant Myōhō-renge-kyō with the understanding that these three — Śākyamuni Buddha who realized enlightenment in the remotest past, the Lotus Sūtra that enables all to attain the buddha way, and we ourselves, living beings — are altogether inseparable and without distinction is to receive the transmission of the one great purpose of birth and death.” “Transmission” in this sense does not pass through a single historical lineage of teachers but is immediately accessible to any practitioner who chants the daimoku.