Though the persecution of dissenters by the orthodox party was by no means unknown in the history of Buddhism in China or Japan, it would nevertheless be a great injustice to maintain that Buddhism as a doctrine ever encouraged its adherents to propagate their creed with fire and sword. On the contrary, what has generally distinguished Buddhism, and especially Mahāyāna Buddhism, is a remarkable latitudinarianism, which acknowledged the heterodox standpoint as not altogether bad and in some ways as even necessary and right! All extraneous religions are accordingly considered as propaedeutic steps for the Buddhist religion, which itself is divided into lower and higher steps, representing inferior and superior degrees of the Buddhist truth.

This evolutionary view of Buddhism had been already maintained with the utmost determination by Tendai Daishi. In conformity with it, the lower type of religion, and above all the lower type of Buddhism, must be broken by the higher type—not by annihilating the lower teachings, but by incorporating them as aufgehobene Momente (to speak with Hegel) into the more perfect teaching.

Nichiren—as we have seen from the Kenhōbō shō–justifies the breaking of the Hinayāna Sūtras from the standpoint of the Mahāyāna and the breaking of the General Mahāyāna Sūtras from the standpoint of the Hoke-kyō. In this respect he is entirely in agreement with the Tendai School and does not show any particular intolerance. However, he goes a step further than Tendai Daishi by expressly censuring the opposite method, of breaking Mahāyāna by Hinayāna and breaking the Hoke-kyō by the General Mahāyāna, i.e. the breaking of the higher teaching by the lower. Here his attack against other sects comes in. Carried away by his religious zeal, Nichiren accuses them of having deserted the true teaching of Śākyamuni and having compromised the very fundamentals of Buddhism. They committed the crime which seemed to him the most heinous and which the Mahāparinirvāṇa sūtra exhorts all virtuous priests to extirpate.