If you are a Nichiren Buddhist, I am sorry to be the one to tell you. He got the Three Ages of the Law wrong. Not slightly, and not in the details. He did not even live in the Latter Age.

2500 years ago, Prince Siddhartha had his own what-the-actual-fuck moment. Riding outside his palace walls for the first time, he saw an old man, a sick man, a corpse. He turned to his charioteer with the only question that mattered: is this going to happen to me too? The answer was yes. More on that in a bit. First, a confession: we're all a little like him. We are, most of us, natural egocentrists. We experience our own moment as the moment, our own crisis as unprecedented.

What we pay attention to is incredibly important. And this is especially critical in religion and spiritual matters, whose concern is life and death itself. Said more plainly, what is the meaning of life?