Several points in this section merit comment. One is the promise that any woman who upholds the present “Bhaiṣajyarāja” [Medicine King] chapter will never again be born female but will go after death to the realm of the buddha Amitābha (J. Amida), to be freed forever from the three poisons of greed, anger, and ignorance. This passage reflects the idea, already well established at the time of the Lotus Sūtra’s compilation, that there are no women in Amitābha’s pure land; presumably, women are reborn there as men (Kubo and Yuyama signal this in their translation by a switch of pronouns, which Chinese does not employ). This passage, like similar ones in other sūtras, is subject to multiple, not necessarily mutually exclusive, readings. One reading would see it as reflecting the gender hierarchy, if not outright misogyny, of the larger culture. At the same time, those who composed sūtras about Amitābha and his realm may have seen the promise of an end to female rebirths as offering release from the biological and social constraints that bound women in premodern societies, limitations understood at the time as karmically “inherent” in the fact of having a female body. Such statements could also reflect the idea that, in Amitābha’s pure land, one is said to quickly achieve the highest level of bodhisattva practice, in which one is not karmically bound to any particular physical form, male or female, but can assume any appearance needed to benefit others. Whatever the case, we know that many women in medieval Japan who were devoted to Amitābha, as well as the men around them, simply assumed that they would be born in the Pure Land as women — an example of how, on the ground, devotees may ignore uncongenial elements of scripture. Nichiren, however, was quick to point out the rejection of women as a problem in the sūtras praising Amitābha’s pure land. Women who chant the nenbutsu, he warned, are relying upon sūtras that can never lead women to buddhahood and therefore, in effect, are but “vainly counting other people’s riches.”

In addressing the present passage, Nichiren first reminds his reader that the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha’s ultimate teaching, supersedes the Pure Land sūtras dealing with Amitābha, which are all provisional. Invoking the first of the ten analogies given in the “Bhaiṣajyarāja” chapter, he says that the Lotus Sūtra is like the great ocean, while the Amitābha Sūtra, the Visualization Sūtra, and other sūtras dealing with Amitābha are like small streams. Moreover, the “Amitābha” mentioned in the “Bhaiṣajyarāja” chapter is not the Amitābha Buddha of the Pure Land sūtras but an emanation of the primordial Śākyamuni Buddha. In this way, Nichiren was able to dissociate this passage from the Pure Land devotion that he saw as no longer valid in his age. At the same time, he continued to maintain that the Lotus Sūtra enables all women who embrace it to attain buddhahood.