Chapter Twenty-Three [states]: “This sūtra is good medicine for the ills of the people of Jambudvipa. If there is any sick person who hears this sūtra, his illness will disappear, and he will neither die nor grow old.” Nichiren, who understood Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō to be the “good medicine” in the parable of the excellent doctor in the “Lifespan” chapter, often cited this passage. On one level, he did so to encourage followers to rouse the power of faith in order to battle actual physical sickness. “Life is the most precious of treasures,” he wrote to a sick follower. “Moreover, you have encountered the Lotus Sūtra. If you can live even one day longer, you can accumulate that much more merit.” But on another level, he understood this matter metaphorically: The people of Japan were “sick” with the illnesses of attachment to provisional teachings and slander of the dharma, which could only be cured by the “medicine” that is the daimoku. The daimoku, Nichiren taught, can also cure sufferings of an existential nature. Of course, it is not the case that Lotus devotees invariably recover from sickness, or “neither die nor grow old” in a literal sense. What the sūtra, and Nichiren, promise here is that the Lotus can, in this chapter’s words, “free sentient beings from every suffering, all the pains and bonds of sickness and of birth and death” and ferry them “across the ocean of old age, illness, and death.” Where there is birth, then old age, illness, and death are inevitable. But through faith and the insight that accompanies it, the sufferings associated with them can be transcended.