After the ten analogies and ten similes, the Lotus goes on to extol the merits of embracing the “Bhaiṣajyarāja” chapter [The Previous Life of Medicine-King Bodhisattva] specifically, suggesting that it may have been composed by a group of Lotus practitioners particularly devoted to this bodhisattva. Nichiren, however, read the passage as applying to his own time and to the Lotus as a whole. For example, a statement near the end of this chapter reads, “During the period of five hundred years after my parinirvāṇa, you must spread it far and wide in Jambudvipa [i.e., this world] and not allow it to be destroyed.” The “five hundred years after my parinirvāṇa” here probably indicates the time in which the Lotus Sūtra’s compilers understood themselves to be living, that is, within five centuries of the historical Buddha’s death. But in Kumārajīva’s Chinese translation, “the period of five hundred years after” can also be read as “the last five hundred years.” Nichiren, like other later East Asian interpreters, took this phrase to mean the last of five consecutive five-hundred-year periods following the parinirvāṇa as described in the Great Collection Sūtra (Skt. Mahāsamnipāta Sūtra; Ch. Daji jing, T 397); the “last five hundred years” is predicted to be a time of dissension among the Buddha’s followers, corresponding to the beginning of the mappō era, when the true dharma will be obscured. In other words, Nichiren took this passage as referring to his own, present time. Repudiating the idea that mappō is necessarily an age of Buddhism’s decline, he drew on the third analogy of the “Bhaiṣajyarāja” chapter, which compares the Lotus Sūtra to the moon that outshines all stars. “The blessings of the Lotus Sūtra surpass those of other sūtras even during the two thousand years of the True and Semblance Dharma ages,” he wrote. “But when the spring and summer of the two thousand years of the True Dharma and Semblance Dharma ages are over and the autumn and winter of the Final Dharma age have arrived, then the light of this moon [i.e., the Lotus] will shine even more brightly.” In the sūtra text, the “it” which is to be “spread far and wide” (J. kōsen-rufu) refers specifically to the “Bhaiṣajyarāja” chapter. Nichiren, however, took it as referring to the sūtra itself, and more specifically, to its title or daimoku, Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō.