The “six perfections” systematize the practices required of Mahāyāna bodhisattvas to achieve buddhahood: giving, good conduct, perseverance, effort, meditation, and wisdom, in the Kubo and Yuyama translation. Traditionally, each perfection was said to require a hundred eons to complete, one eon being explained, for example, as the time required for a heavenly goddess to wear away great Mount Sumeru, the axis mundi, if she brushes it lightly with her sleeve once every hundred years. Such was the vast effort that Śākyamuni was said to have expended over staggering lengths of time in order to become the Buddha; the perfections represent his “causes” or “causal practices” and form the model for bodhisattva practice more generally. The wisdom, virtue, and power that he attained in consequence are his “resulting merits” or “effects.” Nichiren’s claim here is that all the practices and meritorious acts performed by Śākyamuni over countless lifetimes to become the Buddha, as well as the enlightenment and virtuous attributes he attained in consequence, are wholly contained within the daimoku and are spontaneously transferred to the practitioner in the act of chanting it.