[The verses] in the “Perseverance” chapter coincided eerily with Nichiren’s own ordeals. He himself had been “disparaged with evil words” and “attacked with sticks and swords.” He had been slandered to the high officials of the shogunate by monks revered as holy by the people at large and been “repeatedly expelled.” Especially during the ordeals of his Sado Island exile, Nichiren wrestled with self-doubts. Had the protective deities abandoned him? Was he, after all, not correctly practicing the Lotus Sūtra? By his own account, however, on recalling the verse section of the “Perseverance” chapter, he realized that he was living out the sūtra’s prophecies in a way unlike any other Lotus devotee. “Without me,” he concluded, “the predictions in these verses would all be lies.” One modern interpreter of Nichiren has termed this a “circular hermeneutic” in which text and reader simultaneously mirror and bear witness to one another. Nichiren validated the truth of the Lotus Sūtra’s words by undergoing in his own person the very trials that it predicted. Yet at the same time, the Lotus Sūtra now validated Nichiren’s practice, as the persecutions he encountered were predicted in the Lotus itself.

Nichiren termed his practice “bodily reading” of the Lotus Sūtra, meaning that he had fulfilled its predictions in his own person and was “not attached to body or life” in his efforts to propagate it. The same applied, he said, to those disciples who shared his commitment. On the eve of his banishment to Sado Island, he wrote to his disciple Nichirō who had also been seized and imprisoned, praising his dedication. “Others read the Lotus Sūtra with their mouths alone, reading only the words, but they do not read it with their mind. And even if they read it with their mind, they do not read it with their body. To read the sūtra as you are doing with both body and mind is truly admirable.”