The Ryūsen-ji Petition Chapter6

In general, these are the sort of actions carried out by Gyōchi. He had Izumi-bō Renkai, the priest who officiates in the Lotus Meditation Hall, take the copy of the Lotus Sutra, tan the paper in persimmon juice, carve it up into fixed shapes, and use it to repair the halls and smaller buildings. Nichiben had been obeying a written order instructing him to set aside eight thousand inches of the twelve thousand inches of upper roofing, but Gyōchi used it for his personal needs. Gyōchi incited the official in charge of the Shimokata administration office to attack Shirō, a practitioner of the Lotus Sutra, with a knife and wound him at the time of the religious rites in the fourth month.³⁰ And in the eighth month he had the head of Yashirō cut off, spreading word around that this was the work of Nisshū and the others.³¹

After extracting fines from a witless and talentless thief named Hyōbu-bō Jōin,³² he announced that Jōin was a man of outstanding ability and appointed him as an officiating priest. In addition, he employed a number of peasants attached to the temple to catch quail, hunt raccoon dogs, and slay a deer that had been caught in a boar trap, and then had these creatures served up as food in the quarters of the superintendent, the chief priest. He also had poison placed in the pond in front of the Buddhist halls, killing a certain number of fish thereby and then dispatching them for sale in the nearby village.

Of the people who observed or heard of these actions, there were none whose eyes and ears were not alarmed, so great was their grief at these flagrant violations of the Buddhist teachings.

As evil and unworthy actions such as these on the part of Gyōchi continued to pile up day after day, Nisshū and the others, distressed in the extreme, sought to inform the authorities of the matter. But Gyōchi, anxious to hide his various offenses, resorted to a variety of secret schemes, enlisting the aid of his associates, circulating false rumors that have no basis in fact and attempting to bring about the ruin of Nisshū and the others. The situation is so grave that it defies description. In the light of both the religious and the secular law, some form of remonstrance seems surely to be required, does it not?