Where Hōnen and Shinran had based their religious quest on their own sense of sin and personal shortcomings, Nichiren’s search for a teaching valid in the mappō era stemmed from a desire for objective truth. Contention among rival Buddhist sects—exemplifying the Ta-chi-ching’s prediction of an age when “quarrels and disputes will arise among the adherents to my teachings” — along with the glaring failure of the established religious institutions to alleviate the nation’s suffering, awoke in him a resolve to discover which, among the so-called ‘”eighty-thousand teachings,” represented the Buddha’s true intention and could benefit people in the last age. Setting aside for the moment the claims of rival teachers and turning to the texts themselves, he devoted sixteen years to exhaustive study of the sutras and commentaries. Eventually he concluded that the Lotus Sutra, and none other, represented the pinnacle of Shakyamuni’s teachings.