QUESTION: You say that epidemics spread in Japan because this country persecutes the practicer of the Lotus Sūtra causing the protective deities to leave the country. If so, why is it that not only nonbelievers of the Lotus Sūtra but also your disciples suffer or even die from the disease?

ANSWER: Your question seems most reasonable, but it is like knowing only one side of a coin. Virtue and evil have originally been incompatible but inseparable.

Looking at it from this point of view, we see that provisional teachings of sūtras other than the Lotus Sūtra and Buddhist sects based on them maintain that bodhisattvas up to the second highest rank (tōgaku: equivalent to enlightenment) have merits as well as demerits. However, according to the doctrine of “3,000 existences contained in one thought” based on the Lotus Sūtra, each of our minds is equipped with virtue as well as evil. Even bodhisattvas of the highest rank (myōgaku: wonderful enlightenment) have evil in mind. The Dharma-nature originally existing in our mind appears as the protective deities of the Lotus Sūtra such as the King of the Brahma Heaven and Indra, whereas the fundamental ignorance innate in us becomes the king of devils in the Sixth Heaven.

Virtuous deities dislike evil persons, and evil spirits hate virtuous people. In the Latter Age of Degeneration, demons naturally prevail over the land like useless pieces of tile and stone or weeds and bushes.

Toki Nyūdō-dono Go-henji: Chibyō-shō, A Response to Lay Priest Lord Toki: Treatise on Healing Sickness, Writings of Nichiren Shōnin, Doctrine 2, Page 254-255