The Nirvana Sūtra, fascicle 22, preaches: “You should not be afraid of evil elephants but should be fearful of the ‘evil friend.’ Why is this? It is because an evil elephant may hurt your body but not your heart. The ‘evil friend,’ however, may destroy both your body and mind. (…) Killed by evil elephants, you will not fall into the three evil realms, but if you are killed by an ‘evil friend,’ you will never fail to fall in the three evil realms.” Grand Master Chang-an interprets this in his Annotations on the Nirvana Sūtra: “Evil elephants cannot cause one to harbor an evil mind, but an ‘evil friend’ can cause one to have an evil mind through sweet words and flattery destroying the virtuous mind. The destruction of one’s virtuous mind is referred to as killing the man. Namely, the man goes to hell.” The meaning of this passage of Chang-an is that ‘evil friends’ destroy the virtuous mind of the ignorant by skillful use of words. To sum up the spirit of the Nirvana Sūtra, it warns us that those who slandered the Lotus Sūtra, which is the True Dharma, and icchantika are worse sinners than those who commit the sin of the ten evil acts and the five rebellious sins. The icchantika means those who slander the Lotus and Nirvana Sūtras.

Shō Hokke Daimoku-shō, Treastise on Chanting the Daimoku of the Lotus Sūtra, Writings of Nichiren Shōnin, Faith and Practice, Volume 4, Page 11