[A]ll three of the single practices are said to offer direct access to the goal: That is, they enable one to attain enlightenment “quickly.” Here we have an extremely important aspect of the new Buddhism of the Kamakura period. To understand the dramatic conceptual shift that it implies, we must remember that traditional Buddhism views the attaining of enlightenment as an effort spanning a great many lifetimes. Numerous Mahayana texts inform us, for example, that the six paramitas or bodhisattva practices of almsgiving, upholding precepts, forbearance, assiduity, meditation and wisdom are to be perfected one by one, mastery of each requiring a hundred kalpas (one kalpa being generally reckoned a 15,998,000 years). Or, according to another popular explanation, one advances toward full enlightenment through fifty-two successive stages of bodhisattva practice, systematically extirpating illusions and evil karma and acquiring enlightened virtues along the way. Such views regard the attaining of Buddhahood as a linear process with a beginning and an end, commencing with one’s bodhisattva vows and concluding with the achievement of perfect liberation. The concept of attaining Buddhahood in one’s present form, though already present in Indian Mahayana Buddhism, had until this point never gained the same widespread acceptance as the notion of practice spanning countless lifetimes.

In the doctrines of the three new Kamakura schools, this vast length of time is progressively shortened until, in the teachings of Dōgen and Nichiren, it vanishes altogether, and practice and enlightenment become simultaneous.