THE TIME (ji). This category encompasses Nichiren’s understanding of the Final Dharma age, which, like most Buddhist scholars of the time, he held to have begun in 1052. Here again, the comparison with Hōnen is instructive. For Hōnen, in the time of mappō, people are of limited capacity, and the easy practice of the nenbutsu is therefore appropriate. For Nichiren, the Buddha specifically intended the daimoku of the Lotus Sūtra for the Final Dharma age; thus this age is the very time when the daimoku is destined to spread. This element of historical inevitability is a key aspect of Nichiren’s thought and would later form the topic of one of his major treatises: Senji shō (The selection of the time). By defining the beginning of the Final Dharma age as the precise historical moment when the Buddha’s ultimate teaching, the Lotus Sūtra, shall spread, Nichiren was able to reverse the conventional gloomy connotations of the last age and celebrate it as the best possible time to be alive. He represented great teachers of the past, such as Chih-i, Chan-jan, and Saichō, as lamenting their inability to see the dawn of this age. “Rather than be great rulers during the two thousand years of the True and Semblance Dharma ages, those concerned for their salvation should be common people now in the Final Dharma age. … It is better to be a leper who chants Namu-myōhō-renge-kyō than be chief abbot (zasu) of the Tendai school.” (Page 254)