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.

Like his contemporaries, Nichiren embraced the idea that human beings are an integral part of the cosmos, and their actions affect both society and the natural world. He attributed the disasters confronting Japan during his lifetime — famine, epidemics, earthquakes, and the Mongol threat — to this fundamental error of “disparaging the Lotus Sutra.” Rejection of the sutra, in his eyes, would destroy the country in this life; in the future, it would condemn its people to countless rebirths in the Avici hell. The horrific sufferings described in the verse section of [Chapter 3] were for him not mere rhetorical hyperbole but an actual account, coming from the Buddha’s own mouth, of the fate that awaited the great majority of his contemporaries, something that grieved him deeply.

What particularly drew Nichiren’s attention in the “Parable” chapter was the long segment of the final verse section detailing the horrific karmic retribution incurred by those who disparage the Lotus Sūtra. The act of “disparaging the dharma” (S. saddharmapratiksepa, J. hōbō, also translated as “slandering” or “maligning” the dharma) was considered so grave a sin that in East Asia it was sometimes appended to the list of the five heinous deeds. The term occurs frequently in the Mahāyāna sūtras, where it often means maligning the Great Vehicle scriptures; in its Indic context, it was probably intended to counter the mainstream Buddhist criticism that the Mahāyāna was not the Buddha’s teaching.

Japanese Buddhists, however, understood theirs to be a “Mahāyāna country.” Unlike the situation faced by the Lotus Sūtra’s compilers, no one questioned the Mahāyāna’s legitimacy. Nichiren therefore took the term “dharma slander” in a different sense, to mean rejecting the Lotus Sūtra in favor of provisional teachings.