Waking the Buddha (11 page)

“Sensei was completely frank and open at these meetings, and it was wonderful to see how relaxed everyone was with him. And even though he was exhausted at the end of the day, the members at the final meeting would always ask him for advice on a variety of personal issues, and so he would end up giving guidance well into the night. For me to have guided Sensei in this way was a very great honor. Everything I am today—every single thing I have been able to accomplish in my life—I feel it all goes back to those days.”

T
HERE
ARE
TWO EVENTS
in the broader history of the Soka Gakkai movement and the life of its third president, Daisaku Ikeda, which are sure to be paired together by future historians of the movement, even though they took place more than fifteen years apart. The first was the founding of the Soka Gakkai International on the island of Guam on January 26, 1975. The second was the excommunication by Nichiren Shoshu of the full combined membership of the Soka Gakkai and the SGI on November 28, 1991, a date subsequently referred to in Soka Gakkai lore as the “Day of Spiritual Independence.” Naturally, the first event is celebrated annually by the SGI. But why the latter? Surely excommunication is nothing to be proud of.

When the Soka Gakkai was launched as a lay movement associated with Nichiren Shoshu, no one could have predicted that it would grow to the size it did. Prior to World War II, there was no history of any lay religious organization, in Japan or elsewhere, outgrowing its sponsor organization to the extent that it virtually dwarfed it, all but marginalizing the former religious ethos and replacing it with its own. There are doubtless many reasons why such a thing had never happened— cultural inertia, the sheer weight of priestly authority, and the difficulty (in Japan at least) of creating religious organizations independent of existing traditions. But, then, no one before Toda had ever offered an alternative to temple-based religious practice that could hold together—and even grow vigorously—in the absence of priestly direction.

As much as anything, it was neighborhood discussion meetings, held in members' homes, that accounted for the difference. The Soka Gakkai grew outward from hundreds, then thousands of such meeting places— and it grew very
quickly
from those nexus points, following the natural lines of human relationships. Members spoke to their neighbors about Nichiren Buddhism, or to their coworkers, or to their friends or extended families, and nothing was more natural than asking such people to attend a meeting at their home or at the home of a friend. It was utterly unlike being invited to attend a service or a lecture at a temple. True, the Soka Gakkai had a compelling message of optimism and hope— moreover, one that had “gone viral” in the early ‘50s and was therefore capable of leaping quickly across traditional boundaries. But without a post-tribal delivery system to match that viral message, the movement could not have grown as it did. Having to funnel the whole thing through a priest or a temple would have clogged the flow of the movement until it slowed to a trickle and finally came to a stop.

But it didn't. And once it became clear that the Soka Gakkai's vision for Buddhism would outgrow the Japanese religious sensibility of its Nichiren Shoshu sponsors, it was just a matter of time before the Soka Gakkai International was born.

The third and final phase in the development of the Soka Gakkai—the phase of completion—could not have taken place without the internationalization of the movement, which began formally with the creation of the SGI on Guam in 1975, and informally in 1960, with Ikeda's first trip to America. Follow a linear history of the movement, and it is easy to see how the Soka Gakkai began as an educator's association in and around Tokyo; how it then developed into a stable organization with a unified, compelling religious message and a large, influential membership throughout Japan; and finally how it spread quickly around the globe. But I don't believe that linear approach to the Soka Gakkai's history can account for the size, strength, and diversity of the organization we see today. The potential for the Soka Gakkai to become a global movement was implicit from the very beginning, in much the same way that the plan for an entire oak—or even a
forest
of oaks—is there inside of the acorn from the moment it first strikes the ground.

Already, in the discussion group model formulated by Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, there was a post-tribal agenda at work. Whether he intended it or not, the combining of a discussion format with religious worship could have led nowhere else. It was a decisive step outside the older religious paradigm, which tended to center upon temple affiliation. In the absence of priestly oversight, it was only a matter of time before the people meeting in such groups would begin to develop goals and ideas of their own. Likewise, it was also only a matter of time before they came to reinterpret such core Nichiren Buddhist teachings as “Bodhisattvas of the Earth” and “the Buddha as an ordinary human being” in terms of their own self-empowerment as lay people. Absent the priestly, temple-centered religious culture, it was natural that the Soka Gakkai's approach to converting others to the faith would become less ideologically driven over time. Perhaps Toda had anticipated this when he posed his challenge to the young Ikeda: “It is a vast world. There are many peoples, many races…. We'll have to start thinking about how to disseminate the Mystic Law in such places.” But even to Toda it was probably not clear how powerful a shaping force that global destiny was to become in the future of the SGI.

The SGI stretched the old priestly religious paradigm to the point of breaking. Like Jesus's “old wineskins,” that priestly model could not contain a global mission like that of the SGI. In his final days, Toda seems to have intuited all of this. His last conversations with Ikeda focused on two seemingly unrelated matters: the globalization of the movement's outreach efforts and the need for the Soka Gakkai to oppose corruption within the Nichiren Shoshu priesthood. In
The Human Revolution,
Ikeda records Toda's “final injunction” to him: “You must fight adamantly against any evil that takes root within the priesthood…. You must never retreat a single step. Never slacken in your struggle against such evil.”

With the benefit of fifty years' hindsight, I think it is possible to see in Toda's final directives to his young disciple a concern not simply with priestly corruption in its more ordinary guises like pride or greed—to which the Nichiren Shoshu priesthood is surely no more susceptible than the Catholic hierarchy or other groups where money and property are involved—but rather that such corruption would somehow impede the spread of Buddhism. It's not clear that Toda connected the two issues directly in his mind, but the fact that he was thinking so urgently about these matters at the end of his life suggests that, on some level at least, he foresaw that the Soka Gakkai would need its autonomy from the priestly tradition in order to continue on the trajectory he had established for it. In that case, the real evils Toda was referring to were those conservative religious impulses that might try to bring Human Revolution down to the scale of traditional piety or ritual observance, rather than allowing it to develop into the kind of full-blown Buddhist humanism that could transcend barriers of race, religion, or creed.

It was always unrealistic to expect that a conservative religious institution like Nichiren Shoshu would be able to keep pace with an empowered lay movement that was more than willing to sacrifice Japanese cultural attitudes and customs for the sake of spreading Buddhism around the globe. From the beginning, Toda saw priestly authority as purely supplemental to that freer, more dynamic style of outreach. The founding of the Soka Gakkai International in 1975 by his successor, Daisaku Ikeda, was therefore right in line with the trajectory of the movement. But creation of the SGI virtually guaranteed its ultimate excommunication by Nichiren Shoshu. In a perfect world, such a painful and acrimonious split would not have been necessary. But, then, in a perfect world the priests themselves would have realized the limits of their own authority. That the priesthood was unwilling or unable to do so says much about the degenerative effects of religious authoritarianism and privilege. But mostly it shows that the old religious model was in deep decline. That decline was itself an invitation to the populist, egalitarian reforms of the Soka Gakkai. The logic for such reforms had, after all, already been suggested by the Lotus Sutra. It only remained for these latter day bodhisattvas to light a candle from the flame on the altar, then carry it outside of the temple where it could spread freely to the many peoples of the world.

O
N THE
TABLE
next to my bed, along with texts like the Bible, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad-Gita, and
The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin,
there is a pale purple paperback I have consulted so frequently over the past several years that it is now almost falling apart. This is volume four of
The Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra.

Because I have read the passage so many times, the book often falls opens to the lines I highlighted in red ink on the day I bought it in 2003. They were the first words of teaching I ever saw from Daisaku Ikeda:

When we realize that our lives are one with the great and eternal life of the universe, we are the Buddha. The purpose of Buddhism is to enable all people to come to this realization.

I understood those words the first time I read them and even had a sense that they represented a shift in the way people might begin to think about religion, but it was only during a conversation with Soka Gakkai General Director Masaaki Masaki that I began to grasp the model they described.

Masaki recalled that after the break with the Nichiren Shoshu priesthood in 1991, he was inspired to reflect more deeply on the history of Buddhism and its various reform movements. It was a mistake to suppose that there was only one Lotus Sutra, he told me. President Toda had taught that there were at least three versions of the sutra already: the Lotus Sutra of Shakyamuni, the Lotus Sutra of T'ien-t‘ai, and the Lotus Sutra of Nichiren.

“The essence of the various Lotus Sutras is, of course, the same,” he explained. “But the way in which the sutra needs to be presented depends on the conditions of the age and the capacity of the people who read it. Shakyamuni taught the four noble truths and the eightfold path. Later, the Chinese sage T'ien-t'ai explained the ever-present nature of all reality in terms of ‘three thousand realms in a single moment of life.' And still later, Nichiren taught Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. My own feeling is that there is a contemporary expression of the Lotus Sutra based on these and that this is what the three presidents of the Soka Gakkai have appeared in the world to teach. They have an obligation to teach the same essence as the other three sutras, of course, but in accordance with modes of expression that are appropriate to this age.”

Masaki asked if I agreed that it was legitimate to adapt the teachings in this way, and I replied by quoting the opening line of one of Nichiren's most famous treatises: “When it comes to studying the teachings of Buddhism, one must first learn to understand the time.” Masaki explained that President Toda had taken the essence of these earlier teachings and revealed them in the doctrine that “the Buddha is life itself.” This was the core message of the Soka Gakkai and the essence of its approach to the Lotus Sutra. “All these point to the same thing—the same reality that is common to all,” he said. “Through his emphasis on the path of mentor and disciple, President Ikeda is teaching us how to put that new Lotus Sutra into practice.”

I told him that, based on my study of the Soka Gakkai and its teachings, I believed that it was not merely Shakyamuni Buddha who was “always in the world,” as the sixteenth chapter of the Lotus Sutra taught, but the Lotus Sutra itself. It was the nature of that sutra to remain always
alive
in the world; therefore, it found a way to get taught in each new epoch. I suggested it was possible to establish a kind of test to prove the appearance of a new sutra, not so much in terms of what it said as what it did.

When a new Lotus Sutra was born, that recalibrated message was so perfectly suited to the time and to the needs of the people that it could travel “up to the fiftieth person,” as the sutra had predicted, and still retain its message. In other words, the revolutionary flame of that message would tend to pass very quickly from person to person without losing any of its force and effect, “waking the Buddha” inherent in each individual as it traveled from hand to hand and heart to heart. As centuries passed, however, inevitably such a message would come to be understood by fewer and fewer people, until at last it could travel to only one other person. At that point a new version would be born in order to preserve its message. The way we know that a new Lotus Sutra has been born is that, suddenly, it can travel fifty people deep again. And the way I knew that a new expression of the Lotus Sutra has been born during the latter part of the twentieth century was that its message had spread in this way, reaching deep into the societies where it had traveled. This I had seen with my own eyes. The spirit of Human Revolution as taught by Daisaku Ikeda—empowering individuals and the championing of common human values—could be communicated to anyone, anywhere across the globe. How? Simply by telling them that what mattered was the dignity and value of their own lives—that if they could affirm that value and that dignity, the message would spread … and the world would change around them.

I had many opportunities to speak with the Soka Gakkai leadership about this “new sutra” on my visits to Japan, including the late Soka Gakkai Study Department Chief Katsuji Saito. The most significant part of our conversation involved Ikeda's teachings on religious humanism. As Saito explained: “Buddhism is a humanistic religion, and the Soka Gakkai is the form of Buddhism that most clearly expresses Buddhism's humanistic aspect. The basic stance of Buddhism, from a humanistic point of view, is that an ordinary human being can become a Buddha. Ikeda has consistently stressed that Buddhism exists for the sake of ordinary human beings and that the mission of the Soka Gakkai is to clarify that fact and bring it to the fore.”