In keeping with Nichiren’s increased emphasis on the Lotus Sūtra as the exclusive vehicle of salvation in the Final Dharma age, his writings during the Izu period also show a growing concern with the evil of “slander of the Dharma” (hōbō), a sin elaborated in detail in a number of Mahāyāna sūtras but which Nichiren understood as willful disbelief in or rejection of the Lotus Sūtra. Believers in the Lotus Sūtra, in his thought, ordinarily need not fear rebirth in the hells, whatever their mis deeds: “Apart from discarding faith in the Lotus Sūtra to follow an advocate of provisional teachings, all other worldly evil acts cannot equal [in weight] the merit of the Lotus; thus those who have faith in the Lotus Sūtra will not fall into the three evil paths.” Slander of the Lotus Sūtra, however, “exceeds a thousand times” the five perverse offenses (gogyakuzai) of killing one’s mother, father, or an arhat; causing the body of the Buddha to bleed; or disrupting the harmony of the sangha; and is the cause for falling into the Avici Hell. Thus the practitioner of the Lotus has a duty to rebuke slander, whatever the personal consequences: “No matter what great good one may produce, even if one reads and transcribes the entire Lotus Sūtra a thousand or ten thousand times, or masters the way of contemplating the three thousand realms in one thought-moment, if one fails to rebuke enemies of the Lotus Sūtra, one cannot attain the Way.” (Page 255)