In the East Asian reception of the Lotus Sūtra, the works of Zhiyi, Saichō, and Nichiren can be seen as three great attempts to draw out the scripture’s vision of universal Buddhahood and to anchor it in concrete doctrine and practice. Zhiyi, the founder of the Tiantai school, produced the most systematic Lotus-based corpus. His *Fa Hua Xuan Yi* (Profound Meaning of the Lotus Sūtra) offers a grand doctrinal architecture for understanding the sutra as the Buddha’s supreme and final teaching, while *Fa Hua Wen Ju* (Words and Phrases of the Lotus Sūtra) unfolds a detailed, passage-by-passage exegesis of its language and structure. Alongside these, *Mohe Zhiguan* (Great Calming and Contemplation) functions as a meditative manual grounded in Lotus principles, presenting the practice of calming and insight as the experiential realization of what the sutra proclaims, including the thoroughgoing interpenetration of all phenomena and the universality of Buddhahood.

Saichō, who transmitted Tiantai as Tendai in Japan, received Zhiyi’s Lotus-centered synthesis and reshaped it for a new cultural and institutional setting. Rather than composing a single, exhaustive commentary, he embedded Lotus doctrine into the very framework of Japanese Tendai monastic life and ordination. Texts such as the *Kenkairon* (Treatise on Revealing the Precepts) argue for a system of bodhisattva precepts grounded in Mahāyāna and inspired by the Lotus Sūtra’s vision that all beings are destined for Buddhahood, while works like the *Sange Gakushō Shiki* (Regulations for Students of Mount Hiei) set out a course of study and practice with the Lotus at its core. Through such writings, the sutra is treated as the “perfect and sudden” teaching that should guide both personal cultivation and the religious life of the nation.

Nichiren, drawing on this Tiantai–Tendai heritage, radicalized the Lotus Sūtra’s claim to universality by insisting on its exclusive efficacy in the age of decline. His major treatises—such as *Kaimoku-shō* (On Opening the Eyes), *Kanjin no Honzon-shō* (On Establishing the Object of Worship for Observing the Mind), and *Senji-shō* (On the Selection of the Time)—re-read the sutra as a living drama in which the practitioner’s own struggles and the fate of society are inseparable from the acceptance or rejection of the Lotus. In these writings, the title *Namu Myōhō-renge-kyō* becomes the distilled essence of the scripture, and chanting it is upheld as the direct means to awaken inherent Buddhahood and to transform the surrounding world. Works such as *Risshō Ankoku-ron* (On Establishing the Correct Teaching for the Peace of the Land) and *Ichidai Shōgyō Tai’i* (The Outline of All the Holy Teachings of the Buddha’s Lifetime) extend this vision to the social and historical sphere, arguing that only a society aligned with the Lotus Sūtra’s “correct teaching” can know genuine peace and protection.