The Truth abides eternally, but it is an abstraction, a dead law, without the person who perpetuates the life of the Truth. The Buddha Sakyamuni, in his human manifestation, was the one, the Tathagata par excellence; but who shall be the one in the future, nay in the present, in these days of degeneration and vice? This was the question of Nichiren, who at last, as the result of his hard experience and perilous life, arrived at the conclusion that he himself was the man destined to achieve the task of the Tathagata’s messenger.