In lands at the beginning of the Latter Age, the True Dharma is slandered and those who live there have poor capacity for comprehension and faith in Buddhism. Therefore, instead of relying on bodhisattvas from other worlds, the Buddha called out great bodhisattvas from underground to entrust them with the task of transmitting the five characters of myō, hō, ren, ge, and kyō, the essence of the “The Life Span of the Buddha” chapter, to the people in this world. It was also because those guided by the teaching of the theoretical section were not the original disciples of Śākyamuni Buddha.

As for entrusting the task to bodhisattvas from underground, Grand Master T’ien-t’ai states in his Words and Phrases of the Lotus Sūtra: “These have been My (Śākyamuni’s) disciples since time in the eternal past who should propagate My dharma.” Grand Master Miao-lê says of this in his Annotations on the Words and Phrases of the Lotus Sūtra (Wén-chü-chi): “It will be the joy of the world for a child to propagate his father’s dharma.” And Tao-hsien’s Supplement to the Annotations on the Words and Phrases of the Lotus Sūtra (Fu-chêngchi) says: “Because it was the dharma preached by the Eternal Buddha in the infinite past, the task of spreading it was entrusted to those who received His guidance in the eternal past.”

Kanjin Honzon-shō, A Treatise Revealing the Spiritual Contemplation and the Most Verable One, Writings of Nichiren Shōnin, Doctrine 2, Page 155