According to conventional Buddhist thinking, moral conduct is the beginning and foundation of the path; persons can achieve liberation only by first renouncing evil and cultivating good. It is said that one cannot control one’s mind until one first learns to control one’s body and speech. The Buddhist ethical code seeks to provide such control. However, some Buddhist thinkers in Nichiren’s time were concerned with the problem posed by evils that one cannot avoid. This concern had to do with a keen awareness of human limitations, heightened by a sense of living in an age of decline. It also spoke to the situation of warriors, who were gaining influence both as a social group and as an emergent body of religious consumers. From a Buddhist perspective, warriors were trapped in a hereditary profession that was inherently sinful, requiring them to kill animals as a form of war training and kill humans on the battlefield. Thus, they could not escape violating the basic Buddhist precept against taking life. Nichiren, who had a number of samurai among his followers, stressed that, as long as one chants the daimoku, one will not be dragged down into the hells or other evil paths by ordinary misdeeds or unavoidable wrongdoing. To one warrior, a certain Hakii (or Hakiri) Saburō, he wrote: “In all the earlier sūtras of the Buddha’s lifetime, Devadatta was condemned as the foremost icchantika in all the world. But he encountered the Lotus Sūtra and received a prediction that he would become a tathāgata called Devarāja. … Whether or not evil persons of the last age can attain buddhahood does not depend upon whether their sins are light or heavy but rests solely upon whether or not they have faith in this sūtra.”