Nichiren consistently opposed any suggestion that enlightenment or ultimate truth or the Buddha land lies anywhere apart from oneself in the present moment. “There are not two lands, pure or impure in themselves,” he remarked. “The difference lies solely in the good or evil in our minds.” In this way, he saw the individual as fully responsible for his own enlightenment, a view that heavily influenced his position on another of the standard mappō issues—the question of ease versus difficulty of practice.

The daimoku, like the nembutsu, requires neither profound doctrinal understanding nor the institution of monastic life nor even the ability to read. Nichiren himself acknowledged the virtue of its extreme simplicity, which rendered it accessible to all people. However, unlike Hōnen, he rarely argued the authenticity of the daimoku on the basis of its ease of practice. Rather, looking beyond mere mechanical simplicity, he defined the practice of the daimoku as “diffcult.”

Here Nichiren applied to the daimoku the words of the Saddharma Puṇḍarīka, which describes itself as the teaching that is “the hardest to believe, the hardest to understand.” Nichiren analyzed this difficulty in several ways. First. he said, there is doctrinal difficulty; because the daimoku encompasses all truth within itself, it is infinitely profound and therefore “difficult to understand.” Second, he stressed the difficulty of propagation, which in the Final Dharma age invariably entails hardships and misunderstandings. The Lotus Sutra itself enumerates the persecutions that will befall its votaries in the “evil age”—prophecies borne out with almost uncanny accuracy in the lives of Nichiren and his disciples. Third, he warned against the difficulty of sustaining faith, for one’s deluded mind will attempt to thwart him in various ways as he advances in practice. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, Nichiren emphasized the extreme difficulty of believing in one’s own Buddha nature. He wrote, “To believe that Buddhahood exists within Humanity (ninkai) is the most difficult thing of all.”