Samantabhadra specifically promises to protect those who “preserve this sūtra in the troubled world of five hundred years after.” … [T]he phrase “five hundred years after” was no doubt originally intended to designate the five hundred years following Śākyamuni’s parinirvāṇa, when the sūtra’s compilers believed they were living. However, East Asian commentators took the “five hundred years after” (which can also be read in Chinese as “the last five hundred years”) to mean the last of five five-hundred-year periods in the gradual decline of Buddhist practice and understanding said to take place over the 2,500 years following the Buddha’s passing. For Nichiren, it designated the beginning of the Final Dharma age, when he and his contemporaries believed they were living. This expression “five hundred years after” occurs twice in the “Bhaiṣajyarāja” chapter and three times in the present chapter. For Nichiren it predicted in the Buddha’s very words both the task being shouldered by himself and his disciples and the surety of its fulfillment. It designated the time when the buddhahood of ordinary people could be realized. As he wrote: “Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō will spread for ten thousand years and beyond, far into the future. Its merit can open the blind eyes of all sentient beings in the country of Japan and block the road to the Hell without Respite [Avici]. … A hundred years’ practice in the Land of Bliss cannot equal the merit gained from one day’s practice in this defiled world, and propagation [of the dharma] throughout the two thousand years of the True and Semblance Dharma ages is inferior to a single hour’s propagation in the Final Dharma age. This is in no way because of Nichiren’s wisdom, but solely because the time makes it so.”