Nichiren was adamant that the Lotus Sūtra enables the realization of buddhahood here in this world, not in a pure land after death. And, being implacably opposed to the Pure Land teachings, he could not accept the common idea that the worthy dead go to Amitābha’s realm. Yet, especially in his later years, he was confronted with the need to explain what happens to Lotus Sūtra practitioners after they die. He taught that they join the constantly abiding Śākyamuni Buddha in the “pure land of Vulture Peak.” “Vulture Peak” (Skt. Grdhrakūta; J. Ryōjusen, also translated as “Eagle Peak”) in Rājagrha in India was where Śākyamuni is said to have preached the Lotus Sūtra, and the term “pure land of Vulture Peak” had been used long before Nichiren’s time to designate the realm of the primordial buddha described in the “Lifespan” chapter. Nichiren was not the first to conceptualize this realm as a postmortem destination. It seems to have entered Japan by at least the ninth century, as the courtier Sugawara no Michizane (845-903) once composed a poem of parting expressing the hope of reunion after death at Vulture Peak. After Nichiren’s time, “Vulture Peak” became virtually the proprietary pure land, so to speak, of his followers. But it was not merely a Lotus-inflected substitute for Amitābha’s Land of Bliss. For Nichiren, the pure land of Vulture Peak is not a distinct realm posited in contrast to the present world; unlike Amitābha’s pure land in the west or the Tathāgata Bhaisajyaguru’s (J. Yakushi Nyorai) vaidūrya world in the east, it has no specific cosmological location. Rather, it exists wherever one embraces the Lotus Sūtra. This pure land is the realm of the constantly abiding primordial buddha, a land that “never decays,” even in the fire at the kalpa’s end; it is the ever-present Lotus assembly and the three thousand realms in a single thought-moment depicted on Nichiren’s mandala. Accessible in the present, it also extends to encompass the faithful dead, a realm transcending life and death. The “pure land of Vulture Peak” thus also offered devotees the promise of reunion. To a young man who had just lost his father, Nichiren wrote: “Even strangers, if they embrace this [Lotus] sūtra, will meet at the same Vulture Peak. How much more so, in the case of you and your father! Both believing in the Lotus Sūtra, you will be born together in the same place.” And some years later, he wrote to the young man’s mother, who had lost not only her husband, but also another son, “Now he [your son] is with his father in the same pure land of Vulture Peak; how happy they must be to hold one another’s hands and place their heads!”

A marginal, often persecuted figure with only a small following, Nichiren himself had to abandon expectations that this goal would be achieved soon. Nonetheless, he introduced into the tradition of Lotus Sūtra interpretation what might be called a millennial element, a prophecy or vision of an ideal world based on the spread of exclusive faith in the Lotus Sūtra. Especially since the modern period, that vision has undergone multiple reinterpretations from a range of social and political perspectives. Nichiren’s ideal of manifesting the buddha land in the present world gives his doctrine an explicitly social dimension that sets it apart from other Buddhist teachings of his day. It is also the aspect of his teaching that speaks most powerfully to the “this-worldly” orientation of today’s Buddhist modernism.

[F]or Nichiren, the immanence of the buddha land was not merely a truth to be realized subjectively, in the practice of individuals; it would actually become manifest in the outer world as faith in the Lotus Sūtra spread. We have already seen how he saw the disasters of his age as stemming fundamentally from rejection of the Lotus Sūtra in favor of inferior, provisional teachings no longer suited to the age. Conversely, he taught that — because people and their environments are inseparable — spreading faith in the Lotus Sūtra would transform this world into an ideal buddha realm. He famously argued this claim in his treatise Risshō anokoku ron, written early in his career, and maintained it throughout life. This was the conviction that underlay his aggressive proselytizing and that prompted him to risk his life in repeated confrontations with the authorities.

“The originally enlightened buddha of the perfect teaching abides in this world,” Nichiren wrote. “If one abandons this land, to what other land should one aspire? Wherever the practitioner of the Lotus Sūtra dwells should be considered the pure land.” Based on such thinking, Nichiren opposed the idea, extremely common in his time, of shunning this world as wicked and impure and aspiring to birth in the pure land of a buddha or bodhisattva after death. Because the various sūtras preached before the Lotus do not teach the perfect interpenetration of the buddha realm and the nine deluded realms, Nichiren asserted, the superior realms of buddhas and bodhisattvas that they mention, such as Amitābha’s Sukhāvati realm or Maitreya’s Tusita heaven, are merely provisional names; the “Lifespan” chapter of the Lotus reveals that the true pure land is to be realized here in the present, Sahā world.

By devotion to the Lotus Sūtra and to its daimoku practice, Nichiren taught, one manifests the reality of ichinen sanzen — or more simply stated, the Buddha’s enlightened state — within oneself, opening a ground of experience that is joyful and meaningful, independent of whether one’s immediate circumstances are favorable or not. Nichiren called this the “joy of the dharma.” In the Lotus Sūtra’s language, even in a world “ravaged by fire and torn with anxiety and distress” one can, so to speak, experience the gardens, palaces, and heavenly music of the buddha realm.