In [Chapter 10, The Teacher of the Dharma], Śākyamuni declares: “There are immeasurable thousands of myriads of kotis of sūtras I have taught in the past, which I teach now, and which I will teach in the future. Among them, however, this Lotus Sūtra is the most difficult to accept and to understand.” As a literary device, this statement cleverly preempts possible challenges to the Lotus Sūtra’s authority. Other sūtras might claim to be the Buddha’s highest teaching, but such claims could always be dismissed by saying that any sūtra might be the “highest” that the Buddha had preached up until that point and yet had been superseded by later ones. The inclusion of both present and future teachings here precludes such a dismissal. East Asian interpreters, however, did not see this claim on the Lotus Sūtra’s part as a mere literary device. For Nichiren, it was nothing less than the Buddha’s own statement of the relative ranking of the sūtras that he had expounded during his fifty years of teaching.