The modern reader may quickly grow impatient with Nichiren’s harping on the Avici hell. People at the time, however, envisioned the hells as actual postmortem destinations and depicted their torments in gruesome detail in narrative scroll paintings and didactic tales. Many thought that, without some form of earnest effort in Buddhist practice, rebirth in the lower realms would be inevitable. Hell had come to stand for the entire samsaric process. Although inflected through his Lotus exclusivism, Nichiren’s frequent references to frightful karmic retribution in the afterlife were consistent with his larger religious milieu. The resolve to close off that terrible possibility both for himself and others was part of what motivated his aggressive proselytizing.