ON AUGUST 14, 1947, ten years to the day before I was born in a small town called Mexico, Missouri, Daisaku Ikeda met Josei Toda for the first time. When I first discovered the date of that meeting, and then learned of Toda’s dying wish to travel to Mexico, I reflected on the humorous coincidence. The tiny town of my birth was, of course, not the Mexico of Toda’s dream, and the image of those 1950s Missouri “Mexicans” waiting in rapt anticipation for the arrival of Nichiren Buddhism was unlikely to say the least. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help wondering if, as the result of Daisaku Ikeda’s tireless efforts to internationalize the movement, sixty years later the Soka Gakkai International hadn’t spread even there. How far could it go?
Out of curiosity I called a friend at the SGI-USA headquarters in Santa Monica, California, to ask if, in fact, the Soka Gakkai had ever penetrated that deep into smalltown Christian America. A few hours later, I heard from a local chapter leader in Columbia, Missouri, who told me that an SGI-USA member had been born in Mexico, Missouri, and moved back there for some years to be with his elderly mother, only to be joined later by Brazilian members who had emigrated to the United States. And so the answer was yes. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo had been chanted twice daily in Mexico, Missouri, and the teachings had almost certainly been shared with others in its homes and workplaces. Having observed the SGI and its members for some years already, none of this surprised me very much. Once you start lighting one candle with another, there is no limit to how far the flame can go.
It is an inevitable part of the evolution of any religious group that a certain mythology grows up around its founders; such figures are inspirational to their followers and pivotal in the history of the organizations they create, and so stories about them naturally tend to take on a life of their own. As these mythologies grow, it usually happens that after as little as one or two centuries have passed, it is no longer possible to say for sure what really happened at the beginning. That is one reason I have felt drawn to the Nichiren Buddhism of the Soka Gakkai. As a modern religion, the foundational events of which have occurred within my lifetime, or only slightly before, the Soka Gakkai offers an unparalleled opportunity to witness a new tradition in the process of being born.
From that point of view, what seems most striking to me about the first encounter between Josei Toda and the nineteen-year-old Daisaku Ikeda is the fact that it took place right at the borderline between the old religious paradigm and the new. As different as Makiguchi and Toda might have been in temperament, both had come of age in prewar Japan. Makiguchi could write about the importance of homeland in 1903, and even speak with affection about the Emperor system as a distinctly Japanese cultural form. And Toda, for all his gritty realism, had not foreseen the persecutions that befell the Soka Gakkai during World War II. Makiguchi’s eyes were opened by the events that followed, and Toda’s whole vision of life and Buddhism was permanently altered thereby. Both were pivotal figures whose ideas influenced modern Japanese society. But both men stood with one foot in the old world and one in the new.
By contrast, Daisaku Ikeda was born with both feet in the world we live in now. There is no ambiguity in his character, no yearning to preserve the traditional aspects of Japanese culture or religion. He is a man of postmodern tastes and sensibility, and I believe this must already have been apparent, probably even to Toda, when Ikeda was only nineteen years of age.
On the night he met Toda, Ikeda had been invited by some friends to what he probably thought was some kind of Cooperation and Friendship Group meeting to discuss the ideas of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. The confusion seems to have come from the title of Toda’s lecture series, “A Philosophy of Life.” Since Ikeda knew that Bergson had written a book by that same title, he naturally assumed that this was the subject of the meeting and agreed to attend and bring along two of his more serious-minded friends. The Soka Gakkai members who had issued the invitation knew, of course, that the subject was really Nichiren Buddhism but didn’t know how to correct Ikeda’s misperception without dampening his enthusiasm, and so they let the matter stand.
When Ikeda showed up at his first Soka Gakkai meeting on the night of August 14, he discovered that, although the subject seemed to be some kind of Buddhism, it was unlike any religious meeting he had ever heard of. There was no sermon or formal lecture. Rather, it seemed to be a discussion group like those frequented by so many Tokyo young people looking for answers (and mostly not finding them) during those early postwar years. Members asked questions, issued challenges, and—in general—seemed free to express themselves in a way that most would have found profoundly out of place, or even distasteful, in an ordinary religious setting, where formality and respect for authority are the rule. And yet the subject was religion, and as Ikeda listened, Toda made good on the promise to outline a coherent religious philosophy of life.
Discussion meetings such as the ones Ikeda had attended had been a feature of Tokyo society before wartime authorities restricted the freedom of speech, and so that aspect of the Soka Gakkai tradition was not, strictly speaking, an innovation. What was new was the pairing of religious worship with a format that allowed for free and open-minded inquiry, one that required participants to show actual proof in their lives of the teachings they were discussing. Such a thing had never existed before in Japanese religious culture. The closest equivalent was the ko system developed by Rennyo Shonin in the fifteenth century to spread the teachings of the Jodo Shinshu (the True Pure Land Buddhist sect). But the discussion groups initiated by Rennyo, although they were religious in nature, lacked a focus on the health and happiness of each individual. It is unlikely that those who attended them would have felt within their rights, for instance, to demand that the Jodo Shinshu teachings show practical application in daily life. In fact, the prohibition against intercessory prayer in Rennyo’s tradition would actually have argued against it. By comparison, Toda’s discussion meetings, a tradition inherited from Makiguchi and augmented by his reinterpretation of the Buddha as life force, were not only unprecedented, they were completely revolutionary. In the blending of religious teaching with freedom of expression and a firm practical resolve, such meetings carried the implicit promise of a completely new kind of religious experience. It was a promise they tended to keep.
This was the kind of meeting that Daisaku Ikeda—a man interested in finding a life philosophy but not necessarily a religion—had wandered into that night. He was young, thoughtful, and somewhat cosmopolitan in the way that big city-dwellers with access to many bookshops are the world over—though, of course, like everyone else in those days, he was poor. As a child of the war years, his very presence was a kind of challenge. “Give me something to believe in,” it said, “some way of life that is truly workable, that gives a sustainable meaning to human existence, one that does not degenerate into poverty, disease, and war.” Ikeda didn’t need to speak those words aloud. They were understood. Young people were looking for answers, and the traditional repositories for such answers—politics, religion, and other cultural traditions—were empty or all but silent.
That night’s discussion centered, appropriately enough, on a treatise on bringing peace to the land written by Nichiren in 1260. But eventually the subject came round to patriotism—a topic of great importance during the war years and great befuddlement later on, when Japan lay in ruins. Toda spoke in a way that neither Ikeda nor anyone else at the meeting had ever heard before. Real patriotism was spiritual patriotism, he insisted—the kind of patriotism that led one to oppose a war rather than join it.
Ikeda was impressed with Toda’s insights and felt that, at last, he had found someone he could look up to, someone who seemed sure of himself and therefore wasn’t put off by the kinds of questions that young people in those days urgently needed to ask. He left the meeting saying that he needed time to reflect on what he had heard—and time also to read about Buddhism, a subject he knew little about. Ten days later he joined the movement.
This is the version of the events found in Daisaku Ikeda’s multi-volume historical novel The Human Revolution. As such, it represents a dramatized retelling of his first meeting with his lifelong mentor, Josei Toda. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it isn’t true. Ikeda’s masterwork is intended to make the story of the Soka Gakkai accessible for the average person who finds it difficult to extract a coherent theme and story line from raw history. The Human Revolution provided something essential to the new movement, without which it probably could not have grown to the size it has. Those who criticize the novel as Ikeda’s “revisionist history” of the Soka Gakkai have simply failed to understand what it is—which is a “gospel.” The Human Revolution’s thematically unified, story-like retelling of the events of the Soka Gakkai’s founding allows members to embrace its message and spiritual lineage as their own. Just as it is difficult to imagine Christianity without the four gospels, it will be impossible for future generations to imagine the Soka Gakkai apart from the story line preserved in this mammoth work and its serialized sequel, The New Human Revolution.
And yet, Ikeda’s fictionalized retelling of his own conversion leaves out … the conversion itself! He doesn’t tell us what he thought about or explain how a single public meeting with a man he had never met before utterly changed the course of his life. Ten days later, he visited a Nichiren Buddhist temple and received the Gohonzon scroll, the sacred “object of devotion” inscribed by Nichiren that followers enshrine in their homes and chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo to each morning and evening. About the conversion itself, he says almost nothing at all.
I was stunned when I first realized this, until I remembered that Ikeda had kept a private journal during those years. At very beginning of his book A Youthful Diary: One Man’s Journey From the Beginning of Faith to Worldwide Leadership for Peace, Ikeda offers a brief but telling recollection of his first encounter with Toda:
I remember being deeply impressed by the fact that, though imprisoned during the war by government authorities because of his religious beliefs, he had adamantly refused to give in to the pressures brought to bear on him.
In the very next sentence he writes, “Some ten days later I expressed a desire to join the Soka Gakkai.”
What is striking about the experience Ikeda reports in A Youthful Diary, brief as it is, is that it is virtually identical to the experience reported by Murata during the “Kansai Campaign” of 1953 (which the three other Kansai veterans I met likewise all confirmed). And this, in turn, was identical to the experience I had when I saw Josei Toda’s bottle cap prayer beads for the first time in 2003 and read about his resistance to the war. That I did not convert to the Soka Gakkai but resolved to raise awareness about the movement and its place in world religion is itself a testament to Human Revolution—that its teachings can inspire even those from other spiritual traditions, bringing the world one step closer to the day when all peoples can live on the same planet in peace. Because if religion doesn’t stand for peace, what does it stand for? If one wanted to “wake the Buddha,” that was always the first question to ask. A religion that stood for something other than peace couldn’t meet the demands of the twenty-first century. A religion that stood for something other than peace was simply fast asleep.