The concept of sowing, maturing, and harvesting suggests a linear process developing over time. Mahāyāna thought traditionally maintained that fulfilling the bodhisattva path requires three incalculable eons. However, as we have seen, Nichiren drew on both Tendai and esoteric notions of realizing buddhahood “with this body” to argue that buddhahood is accessed in the very act of chanting Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō. The daimoku, in other words, is a “seed” that flowers and bears fruit in the very moment of its acceptance. This goes to the heart of how Nichiren understood the Final Dharma age. In the age of the True Dharma and the age of the Semblance Dharma, people practiced according to a linear model, gradually eradicating delusions and accumulating merit, eventually culminating in the attainment of buddhahood after countless lifetimes of practice. But in chanting the daimoku of the Lotus Sūtra, the practice for the mappō era, practice and enlightenment, sowing and harvest, occur simultaneously, and buddhahood is realized in this very body. In other words, in the Final Dharma age, the direct realization of buddhahood becomes accessible to ordinary people. Nichiren’s claim paradoxically inverts the negative soteriological implications of the benighted mappō era and makes it the ideal time to be alive. “Rather than be great monarchs during the two thousand years of the True Dharma and Semblance Dharma ages, those concerned for their salvation should rather be common people now in the Final Dharma age,” he wrote. “It is better to be a leper who chants Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō than to be chief abbot of the Tendai school,” the highest position in the religious world of Japan at the time.