Willingness to give even one’s life if need be took on deep soteriological meaning for Nichiren over the course of his career. By persevering for the Lotus Sūtra’s sake, he taught, one could expiate in a single lifetime one’s evil karma from countless past lifetimes; repay one’s obligations to the Buddha and to all living beings; fulfill the bodhisattva path; and be assured of fully realizing buddhahood in this lifetime. On this theme, he wrote to his followers: “Life flashes by in but a moment. No matter how many powerful enemies may oppose us, never think of retreating or give way to fear. Even if they should cut off our heads with a saw, impale our bodies with lances, or bind our feet and bore them through with a gimlet, so long as we have life, we must chant Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō, Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō. And if we chant up until the very moment of death, Śākyamuni, Prabhūtaratna, and the buddhas of the ten directions will come to us instantly … and surely escort us to the jeweled land of Tranquil Light.”

[The verses] in the “Perseverance” chapter coincided eerily with Nichiren’s own ordeals. He himself had been “disparaged with evil words” and “attacked with sticks and swords.” He had been slandered to the high officials of the shogunate by monks revered as holy by the people at large and been “repeatedly expelled.” Especially during the ordeals of his Sado Island exile, Nichiren wrestled with self-doubts. Had the protective deities abandoned him? Was he, after all, not correctly practicing the Lotus Sūtra? By his own account, however, on recalling the verse section of the “Perseverance” chapter, he realized that he was living out the sūtra’s prophecies in a way unlike any other Lotus devotee. “Without me,” he concluded, “the predictions in these verses would all be lies.” One modern interpreter of Nichiren has termed this a “circular hermeneutic” in which text and reader simultaneously mirror and bear witness to one another. Nichiren validated the truth of the Lotus Sūtra’s words by undergoing in his own person the very trials that it predicted. Yet at the same time, the Lotus Sūtra now validated Nichiren’s practice, as the persecutions he encountered were predicted in the Lotus itself.

Nichiren termed his practice “bodily reading” of the Lotus Sūtra, meaning that he had fulfilled its predictions in his own person and was “not attached to body or life” in his efforts to propagate it. The same applied, he said, to those disciples who shared his commitment. On the eve of his banishment to Sado Island, he wrote to his disciple Nichirō who had also been seized and imprisoned, praising his dedication. “Others read the Lotus Sūtra with their mouths alone, reading only the words, but they do not read it with their mind. And even if they read it with their mind, they do not read it with their body. To read the sūtra as you are doing with both body and mind is truly admirable.”

In Nichiren’s reading, the predictions of future buddhahood that Śākyamuni Buddha confers at the beginning of [Chapter 13, Encouragement for Keeping this Sutra] on the remaining śrāvaka disciples — Mahāprajāpatī, his aunt and foster mother, and Yaśodharā, his former wife and the mother of Rāhula — were further evidence that the Lotus, unlike other Mahāyāna sūtras, guaranteed buddhahood to women, a point he stressed to his female followers. To one woman he wrote that she, practicing as she did in the present, troubled world, far surpassed Mahāprajāpatī, who had vowed in this chapter only to “extensively expound this sūtra in other lands.”

In the development of Tendai Buddhism after Saichō, the implications of the nāga princess’s achievement were analyzed and disputed from many angles. Was the enlightenment to be realized “with this body” full or partial? To which of the stages of bodhisattva practice did it correspond? Was this kind of immediate realization accessible to all, or only to those who had cultivated practice in prior lifetimes? With some exceptions, later Tendai thinking shifted away from Saichō’s notion of attaining buddhahood within three lifetimes to an emphasis on direct realization of buddhahood in one’s present body. By Nichiren’s time, one strand of scholastic argument held that, at least in principle, even ordinary deluded persons might be able to access buddhahood at the beginning stages of faith and practice. Nichiren taught that embracing the Lotus Sūtra would make this a reality: “The Lotus Sūtra is the Buddha’s teaching and the Buddha’s wisdom. When one puts faith in even a single character or brushstroke, one immediately becomes a buddha in one’s present body. … , so [the Lotus Sūtra] transforms ordinary beings into buddhas. That is why it is called the wonderful dharma.”

According to the “Devadatta” chapter, the relationship between Śākyamuni Buddha and his treacherous cousin was not purely a matter of this lifetime. The very fact that he has become the Buddha, Śākyamuni says, is due to Devadatta’s past “good and virtuous friendship.” “Good and virtuous friendship” here translates kalyāvamitra (J. zenchishiki, literally, “good friend”), one who teaches or encourages another on the Buddhist path. In view of the traditional accounts of his repeated betrayals, Devadatta would seem to have been no “friend” at all. Nichiren, however, took this passage as teaching not only the inevitability of meeting enemies in one’s efforts to spread the dharma — “the Buddha and Devadatta are like a form and its shadow; in lifetime after lifetime, they are never separated” — but also the importance of appreciating the opportunity for spiritual development that their hostility makes possible. “In this age as well, it is not one’s allies but one’s bitterest enemies who help one improve,” he wrote. In this context, Nichiren expressed gratitude for the clerics and government officials who had persecuted him, adding that, without them, he could not have proven himself as a votary of the Lotus Sutra.