Nichiren emphasized, not the literal performance of self-sacrifice in offering to the sūtra as exemplified by Bhaiṣajyarāja’s [Medicine King] self-immolation, but the willingness to face abuse, ostracism, verbal and physical attacks, or indeed, any sort of hardship in order to uphold and spread the sūtra’s teachings. In his reading, the offering that ordinary people can make, done with firm resolve, is the moral equivalent of the advanced bodhisattva’s sacrifice of his body, and it yields identical merit.

From another perspective, Nichiren concluded that the acts of Bhaiṣajyarāja and other bodhisattvas in the sūtras who relinquished eyes, limbs, and life itself for the dharma’s sake were no longer appropriate to his own era. As a young man, he wrote, he had taken the statement in the “Perseverance” chapter, “We will not be attached to our bodies or our lives,” to mean heroic undertakings on the order of making the perilous sea crossing to China to study the dharma, as pioneering Japanese monks like Saichō and Kūkai had done, or offering up one’s body in self-sacrifice like the bodhisattva Bhaiṣajyarāja. But over time, he concluded that this was not the sūtra’s true intent: “At a time when the country is filled with respected persons who declare that there are other sūtras that surpass the Lotus Sūtra and join in attacking its votary, and when such persons are revered by the ruler and his ministers while the votary of the Lotus Sūtra, being poor and humble, is despised by the entire country, if he persists in his assertions as did [the bodhisattva] Sadāparibhūta or the scholar-monk Bhadraruci, it may well cost his life. [To maintain one’s resolve at such at time] is the most important thing of all.” What counts, in short, is upholding the Lotus, no matter what.