Chapter Twenty-Three [states]: “This sūtra is good medicine for the ills of the people of Jambudvipa. If there is any sick person who hears this sūtra, his illness will disappear, and he will neither die nor grow old.” Nichiren, who understood Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō to be the “good medicine” in the parable of the excellent doctor in the “Lifespan” chapter, often cited this passage. On one level, he did so to encourage followers to rouse the power of faith in order to battle actual physical sickness. “Life is the most precious of treasures,” he wrote to a sick follower. “Moreover, you have encountered the Lotus Sūtra. If you can live even one day longer, you can accumulate that much more merit.” But on another level, he understood this matter metaphorically: The people of Japan were “sick” with the illnesses of attachment to provisional teachings and slander of the dharma, which could only be cured by the “medicine” that is the daimoku. The daimoku, Nichiren taught, can also cure sufferings of an existential nature. Of course, it is not the case that Lotus devotees invariably recover from sickness, or “neither die nor grow old” in a literal sense. What the sūtra, and Nichiren, promise here is that the Lotus can, in this chapter’s words, “free sentient beings from every suffering, all the pains and bonds of sickness and of birth and death” and ferry them “across the ocean of old age, illness, and death.” Where there is birth, then old age, illness, and death are inevitable. But through faith and the insight that accompanies it, the sufferings associated with them can be transcended.

Nichiren was adamant that the Lotus Sūtra enables the realization of buddhahood here in this world, not in a pure land after death. And, being implacably opposed to the Pure Land teachings, he could not accept the common idea that the worthy dead go to Amitābha’s realm. Yet, especially in his later years, he was confronted with the need to explain what happens to Lotus Sūtra practitioners after they die. He taught that they join the constantly abiding Śākyamuni Buddha in the “pure land of Vulture Peak.” “Vulture Peak” (Skt. Grdhrakūta; J. Ryōjusen, also translated as “Eagle Peak”) in Rājagrha in India was where Śākyamuni is said to have preached the Lotus Sūtra, and the term “pure land of Vulture Peak” had been used long before Nichiren’s time to designate the realm of the primordial buddha described in the “Lifespan” chapter. Nichiren was not the first to conceptualize this realm as a postmortem destination. It seems to have entered Japan by at least the ninth century, as the courtier Sugawara no Michizane (845-903) once composed a poem of parting expressing the hope of reunion after death at Vulture Peak. After Nichiren’s time, “Vulture Peak” became virtually the proprietary pure land, so to speak, of his followers. But it was not merely a Lotus-inflected substitute for Amitābha’s Land of Bliss. For Nichiren, the pure land of Vulture Peak is not a distinct realm posited in contrast to the present world; unlike Amitābha’s pure land in the west or the Tathāgata Bhaisajyaguru’s (J. Yakushi Nyorai) vaidūrya world in the east, it has no specific cosmological location. Rather, it exists wherever one embraces the Lotus Sūtra. This pure land is the realm of the constantly abiding primordial buddha, a land that “never decays,” even in the fire at the kalpa’s end; it is the ever-present Lotus assembly and the three thousand realms in a single thought-moment depicted on Nichiren’s mandala. Accessible in the present, it also extends to encompass the faithful dead, a realm transcending life and death. The “pure land of Vulture Peak” thus also offered devotees the promise of reunion. To a young man who had just lost his father, Nichiren wrote: “Even strangers, if they embrace this [Lotus] sūtra, will meet at the same Vulture Peak. How much more so, in the case of you and your father! Both believing in the Lotus Sūtra, you will be born together in the same place.” And some years later, he wrote to the young man’s mother, who had lost not only her husband, but also another son, “Now he [your son] is with his father in the same pure land of Vulture Peak; how happy they must be to hold one another’s hands and place their heads!”

Several points in this section merit comment. One is the promise that any woman who upholds the present “Bhaiṣajyarāja” [Medicine King] chapter will never again be born female but will go after death to the realm of the buddha Amitābha (J. Amida), to be freed forever from the three poisons of greed, anger, and ignorance. This passage reflects the idea, already well established at the time of the Lotus Sūtra’s compilation, that there are no women in Amitābha’s pure land; presumably, women are reborn there as men (Kubo and Yuyama signal this in their translation by a switch of pronouns, which Chinese does not employ). This passage, like similar ones in other sūtras, is subject to multiple, not necessarily mutually exclusive, readings. One reading would see it as reflecting the gender hierarchy, if not outright misogyny, of the larger culture. At the same time, those who composed sūtras about Amitābha and his realm may have seen the promise of an end to female rebirths as offering release from the biological and social constraints that bound women in premodern societies, limitations understood at the time as karmically “inherent” in the fact of having a female body. Such statements could also reflect the idea that, in Amitābha’s pure land, one is said to quickly achieve the highest level of bodhisattva practice, in which one is not karmically bound to any particular physical form, male or female, but can assume any appearance needed to benefit others. Whatever the case, we know that many women in medieval Japan who were devoted to Amitābha, as well as the men around them, simply assumed that they would be born in the Pure Land as women — an example of how, on the ground, devotees may ignore uncongenial elements of scripture. Nichiren, however, was quick to point out the rejection of women as a problem in the sūtras praising Amitābha’s pure land. Women who chant the nenbutsu, he warned, are relying upon sūtras that can never lead women to buddhahood and therefore, in effect, are but “vainly counting other people’s riches.”

In addressing the present passage, Nichiren first reminds his reader that the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha’s ultimate teaching, supersedes the Pure Land sūtras dealing with Amitābha, which are all provisional. Invoking the first of the ten analogies given in the “Bhaiṣajyarāja” chapter, he says that the Lotus Sūtra is like the great ocean, while the Amitābha Sūtra, the Visualization Sūtra, and other sūtras dealing with Amitābha are like small streams. Moreover, the “Amitābha” mentioned in the “Bhaiṣajyarāja” chapter is not the Amitābha Buddha of the Pure Land sūtras but an emanation of the primordial Śākyamuni Buddha. In this way, Nichiren was able to dissociate this passage from the Pure Land devotion that he saw as no longer valid in his age. At the same time, he continued to maintain that the Lotus Sūtra enables all women who embrace it to attain buddhahood.

The “Bhaiṣajyarāja” [Medicine King] chapter … offers ten analogies illustrating the supreme status of the Lotus Sūtra among all the Buddha’s teachings. It surpasses them just as the ocean is greater than all streams, rivers, and other bodies of water; as Mount Sumeru towers over all other mountains; and so forth. Then follow ten vivid similes illustrating the powers and blessings of the sūtra. Nichiren was deeply struck by these passages and often cited or elaborated on them to stress the merits of upholding the Lotus. Here, for example, in a personal letter to a follower called Shiiji Shirō, he expands on the statement that the Lotus Sūtra is “like a boat for a traveler.” This boat, he says, might be described as follows. Note how he weaves together Buddhist technical terms and phrases from different portions of the Lotus Sūtra:

The Lord Buddha, a shipbuilder of infinitely profound wisdom, gathered the lumber of the four flavors and eight teachings, planed it by “openly setting aside skillful means,” cut and assembled the planks, using both right and wrong in their nonduality, and completed the craft by driving home the spikes of the single truth that is like the supreme flavor of ghee. Then he launched it upon the sea of birth and death. Unfurling its sails of the three thousand realms on the mast of the single truth of the middle way, driven by the fair wind that is the “real aspect of the dharmas,” the vessel surges ahead, carrying aboard all sentient beings, who can “understand through faith.” The tathāgatha Śākyamuni takes the helm, the tathāgatha Prabhūtaratna mans the sails, and the four bodhisattvas led by Viśiṣṭacāritra strain in unison at the creaking oars. This is the vessel in “a boat for the traveler.” Those who can board it are the disciples and lay followers of Nichiren.