Nichiren taught a doctrine of exclusive devotion to the Lotus Sūtra and stressed as a primary practice the chanting of its daimoku or title in the formula, “Namu-myōhō-renge-kyō.” In medieval Japan, the Lotus Sūtra, with its promise that “all shall achieve the Buddha Way,” was widely revered as the highest of the Buddha’s teachings, reconciling all others within itself. For Nichiren, however, the Lotus Sūtra was not simply one teaching supreme among many but the sole Dharma that could lead to Buddhahood now in the Final Dharma age (mappō), preached by the Buddha expressly for the people of this degenerate time. In his estimation, the other Buddhist forms current in his day—Pure Land, Zen, and the esoteric teachings—being provisional and incomplete, no longer led to liberation in the mappō era; to embrace them and reject the Lotus Sūtra was a pernicious inversion of high and low, a form of “disparaging the Dharma” (hōbō) that could only invite suffering. Drawing on traditional Mahāyāna ideas of the nonduality of individuals and their container world, the “realm of the land” (kokudo seken), Nichiren insisted that it was precisely this evil, a neglect of the Lotus Sūtra’s perfect teaching, that had brought down on the populace the calamities of his day: drought, famine, earthquakes, and the threat of invasion by the Mongols. Conversely, Nichiren held that the spread of exclusive faith in the Lotus Sūtra would banish such disasters and manifest this world as an ideal realm:

When all people throughout the land enter the one Buddha vehicle, and the Wonderful Dharma [of the Lotus] alone flourishes, because the people all chant Namu-myōhō-renge-kyō, the wind will not thrash the branches nor the rain fall hard enough to break clods.

The age will become like the reigns of [the Chinese sage kings] Yao and Shun. In the present life, inauspicious calamities will be banished, and the people will obtain the art of longevity. There can be no doubt of the sūtra’s promise of “peace and security in the present world.

Nyosetsu shugyō shō