The one practice that was the “excellent medicine” for expressing the Lotus Sutra truth for Nichiren was recitation and veneration of the syllables “Namu Myōhōrengekyō,” the homage to the name of the Lotus Sutra that Nichiren saw as a symbolic embodiment of this enduring Śākyamuni and called “the essence of the chapter, ‘Duration of the Life of the Buddha.’ ” He declared that these five characters were transmitted only to the underground bodhisattvas, who would proclaim them in the future “evil age,” which had now arrived in Kamakura-period Japan. Nichiren says, “At this time, the bodhisattvas who sprang up from the earth will appear for the first time in the world to bestow upon the children the medicine of the five characters Myōhōrengekyō.”

For Nichiren, the leap of faith expressed in the Lotus Sutra is grounded in the mappō theory, a pressing reality for him that was completely rejected by Dōgen. Nichiren believed that the importance of Śākyamuni’s remaining presence, and even more, of the proclamation of it by the underground bodhisattvas, was that the teaching was still available, even in the present evil age of mappō. Thanks only to the underground bodhisattvas and the enduring Śākyamuni, the faithful still had the opportunity to hear the teaching and to express their faith through veneration and chanting of the name of the Lotus Sutra. But Nichiren went even further: “By defining the beginning of the Final Dharma age as the precise historical moment when the Buddha’s ultimate teaching, the Lotus Sutra, shall spread, Nichiren was able to reverse the conventional gloomy connotations of the last age and celebrate it as the best possible time to be alive.