Day 17 covers all of Chapter 12, Devadatta, and opens Chapter 13, Encouragement for Keeping this Sutra.
Having last month greeted the daughter of the dragon king, we hear Śāriputra’s objection to the daughter of the dragon-king becoming a Buddha.
Thereupon Śāriputra said to the daughter of the dragon-king:
“You think that you will be able to attain unsurpassed enlightenment [and become a Buddha] before long. This is difficult to believe because the body of a woman is too defiled to be a recipient of the teachings of the Buddha. How can you attain unsurpassed Bodhi? The enlightenment of the Buddha is far off. It can be attained only by those who perform the [Bodhisattva] practices with strenuous efforts for innumerable kalpas. A woman has five impossibilities. She cannot become 1. the Brahman-Heavenly-King, 2. King Śakra, 3. King Mara, 4. a wheel-turning-holy-king, and 5. a Buddha. How can it be that you, being a woman, will become a Buddha, quickly [or not]?”
Ryusho Jeffus Shonin in his Lecture on the Lotus Sutra has this to say about prejudice:
In the example of the dragon girl, it is worthy of considering how prejudices can enter our way of thinking and influence us in negative ways. Because a woman bleeds, which is the result of giving birth, she was considered impure, and yet giving birth, bringing new life into the world is one of the purest things. I once heard someone say that women bleed giving birth and men bleed killing. Perhaps we should give this some thought. Nichiren wrote a response to a woman believer saying that because a woman bleeds she is considered impure by society, but in the eyes of the Buddha that distinction does not apply.
Lecture on the Lotus Sutra