Grand Master T’ien-t’ai for the first time in China spread the perfect meditation and wisdom of the Lotus Sūtra, supreme of all sūtras preached by the Buddha during His lifetime. No commentators have ever propagated this sūtra before during the 1,400 years after the death of the Buddha, that is, the 1,000-year Age of the True Dharma and the first 400 years of the Age of the Semblance Dharma. Moreover, Grand Master T’ien-t’ai’s fame has reached as far as India. It appears that the Lotus Sūtra was widely propagated, but the Grand Master did not establish the “perfect and sudden” precept dais. It will not do for Hinayāna precepts to be side by side with the perfect meditation and wisdom of Mahāyāna Buddhism. It is just like an eclipse of the sun or the moon. Moreover, the time of Grand Master T’ien-t’ai was in what the Sūtra of the Great Assembly called the period of “wide reading and much hearing,” that is, the third 500-year period after the death of the Buddha. It was not yet the fifth 500-year period, when the Lotus Sūtra was predicted to spread widely.

Senji-shō, Selecting the Right time: A Tract by Nichiren, the Buddha’s Disciple, Writings of Nichiren Shōnin, Doctrine 1, Page 214-215