Zhiyi, in sixth-century China, made the Lotus Sutra the organising principle of an entire Buddhist system. Faced with a mass of translated Indian scriptures teaching visibly different things, he arranged them into a sequence of periods in which the Buddha adapted his message to his audience, with the Lotus Sutra as the final and complete statement that explains all the rest. The school built on that reading, Tiantai, became one of the dominant traditions of Chinese Buddhism, and Saicho carried it to Japan in the ninth century as Tendai, which trained most of the founders of later Japanese schools.
Nichiren, a thirteenth-century Tendai-trained monk, drew a sharper conclusion. If the Lotus Sutra is the complete teaching, then in the degenerate age of mappo other practices are not merely lesser but obstructive, and what is required is faith in the sutra expressed by chanting its title, the daimoku, Namu Myoho Renge Kyo, homage to the Lotus Sutra of the Wonderful Dharma. Chanting the title, in this understanding, contains the whole sutra. Nichiren pressed the claim on the Kamakura authorities in writing, was exiled twice and nearly executed, and the confrontational style is part of what he bequeathed.
The lineages descending from him are now the most visible carriers of the text. Soka Gakkai, founded in 1930 as a lay educational society and reorganised after the war, grew into a large lay movement in Japan with an international arm, a political party in its orbit, and a rupture with the Nichiren Shoshu priesthood in 1991 that left the two bodies separate. Its members chant the daimoku and portions of the sutra's second and sixteenth chapters daily, precisely the chapters on the one vehicle and the Buddha's immeasurable life.