FROM THE BEGINNING, one of the most remarkable things about the Soka Gakkai has been the close relationship between mentor and disciple. In itself this is not at all unusual. Buddhism has tended to focus on such relationships throughout its history, defining its various schools and sects according to the lineages by which they have been handed down. What is unique about the mentor-disciple relationship in the Soka Gakkai is the way it functions to empower members at every level of the organization, instead of just at the top.
Why does the Soka Gakkai have such a “mentorship culture,” and what does that kind of culture mean? Like many simple questions, these have profound answers.
It is a natural human tendency once a tradition has been firmly set in place not to question how it came to be. Even when it functions well, there is a tendency to take it for granted. And so, to begin with, it is worth asking what the Soka Gakkai would look like without such relationships.
Suppose, for instance, that Tsunesaburo Makiguchi had had a number of associates in developing the Soka Gakkai but that none of these had followed him to prison. Suppose further that, following the war, several of these followers who had managed to avoid persecution decided to revive the organization. They would have no choice but to build upon the principles of value-creating education outlined in Makiguchi’s writings (those aspects of Makiguchi’s thought and character that could be grasped apart from a long-term commitment to the man himself).
Following that alternative history, it is always possible that the organization could have instituted some kind of educational reform in postwar Japanese society. However, it is unlikely that this would have gone through the necessary phases of development to become a dynamic international movement. Even if it had done so, it is doubtful that such a movement could have become any more influential than the one founded by Makiguchi’s Italian contemporary Maria Montessori. The Montessori Method thrives today in a number of countries around the world—especially in the United States, where there are currently around eight thousand Montessori schools—and few would dismiss its contributions to the educational community. Nevertheless, it remains today what it was when Montessori developed it: an alternative to mainstream education practiced by relatively few.
When we think of it this way, the question is easy to answer. Why did the Soka Gakkai develop its tradition of close mentor-disciple relationships? Because in the absence of such relationships (and the feelings of responsibility and gratitude they engender), there would be little apart from pure ideological ambition to motivate its growth and development. The movement would then have become driven by ideology instead of by people. Returning to our earlier analogy, it is not possible to light another person’s candle unless you are standing close enough to do so. For lighting one candle with another is not the same as seeing another’s lit candle from a distance and deciding to light a candle of one’s own. In such cases there is no companionship, no community, no continuity—and no obligation to protect what, after all, is only the product of our own effort. When Daisaku Ikeda says that the oneness of mentor and disciple is the lifeblood of the Soka Gakkai, it is surely this living flame he is thinking of. Without it, the Soka Gakkai could not have become what it is today, nor would it hold much promise for the future. TIME magazine once described the Soka Gakkai as “an international people-to-people crusade against war.” They were right about that much. People to people was exactly how Human Revolution spread.
In 2007, while working on an earlier Japanese version of Waking the Buddha, I was granted unprecedented access to virtually every top leader in the SGI. My conversations with these leaders were among the most interesting of my career as a religion writer. I should confess, however, that in each of those conversations, my primary objective wasn’t to gather facts, anecdotes, and other kinds of information such as writers usually look for in crafting an article or a book. Nor was I hoping to form some general overall impression, arriving at a sense of the individual character of each man. My primary objective was, through dialogue, to compare the living flame of my own conversion (post-tribal, but not necessarily Nichiren Buddhist) with the flame that each of these men carried within him—flames which had been lit, as I later came to realize, through close personal contact with Daisaku Ikeda.
I wanted to determine whether that flame could act as I knew it must if it was to effect a worldwide spiritual revolution. Could it fulfill its promise to break free of the old paradigm? Or in the next generation would it fall back, by sheer force of gravity, into the older, drowsier model of Buddhism that stressed preserving privilege, ideological purity, and group identity above all else? And if it really was a new paradigm, what was the driving force behind it? What aspects of SGI culture would other religious groups around the world have to imitate or develop on their own if they wanted to move forward as the SGI had done? These were the questions at the forefront of my mind in virtually every conversation I had.
Every Soka Gakkai leader I interviewed spoke to me at one time or another about the central role of the mentor-disciple relationship in the life of the SGI, and several shared meaningful encounters of their own with Ikeda. One of the most memorable was a story told by Minoru Harada, president of the Soka Gakkai in Japan, about Ikeda’s first trip to China in 1974 at the very height of the Cold War. I had heard much about the trip itself and its ultimate importance in normalizing Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations and slowing the nuclear build-up between China and the Soviet Union. But Harada’s story did much to explain why the trip had been so successful.
As preparations were under way for the journey, Harada, who was chief secretary of the delegation, and his staff were busy with preparations, consulting books, guides, policy papers, newspaper clippings, and reports compiled by experts on Chinese history and culture— anything that they thought might increase their chances of a successful visit with Premier Zhou Enlai. At one point, when the conference table where they were meeting was completely covered with such materials and they were in the process of reading through the entire pile from top to bottom, Ikeda arrived for a visit. According to Harada, he took one look at the room and remarked, “This is exactly what I was afraid of—this sort of thing will do you absolutely no good at all.” Then, stepping forward to the table, he swept all the materials onto the floor. “What matters now is to go to China and observe things as they actually are and to report what you have seen.”
Indeed, on that journey Ikeda made a simple but profound observation one day when he visited a Beijing elementary school and noticed the entrance to some kind of underground facility in the garden just behind the school. When he asked what was the purpose of this structure, he was told that it was a shelter for the children in case of nuclear attack. Later, he was shown the entrance to another shelter in the basement of a large department store in downtown Beijing, this one capable of housing the population of a small city. Were the people of Beijing afraid that a nuclear attack was imminent? he asked. He was told that, while they did not believe the leaders of their own country would begin a nuclear war (a fact later confirmed in Ikeda’s conversations with China’s leadership), they were terrified that Soviet leaders would.
There had been so much posturing between the leaders of the three major nuclear powers during the arms race, so much sword rattling and false bravado, that leaders on all sides had lost touch with the basic human feelings of their people. It is therefore all the more remarkable that, when Ikeda subsequently visited Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin three months later, he went armed only with this single direct observation: The Chinese people were profoundly afraid of the Soviet Union. He told Kosygin exactly what he had observed on that very immediate, very human level—that the Chinese were afraid, even their children—and were ready to defend themselves, but that they had no intention of attacking the Soviet Union first. He asked Kosygin what the Soviet Union’s intentions were and was told that, like China, Russia would defend itself, but that its people would not begin a war.
Ikeda then confessed that the Japanese people were also deeply afraid of the Soviet Union and suggested that so much fear was bad for the people of Japan, China, and the Soviet Union. What good could the future hold for the Soviet Union if it inspired such profound fear in its neighbors? He asked Kosygin for permission to tell the Chinese leadership what had transpired at their meeting in order to decrease the level of fear all around, and Kosygin gave his consent. And, in what has to be one of the most daring acts of Cold War diplomacy ever conducted by a private individual, Ikeda did just that, relaying the message to Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping.
According to Harada, it was only years later that the full impact of Ikeda’s encounter with Kosygin came to light, as the historical record began to reflect that his meetings with Chinese and Soviet leaders had played an important role in stabilizing relations between the two countries. But all of this seems to have flowed directly from the power of face-to-face human contact. It was the theory of Human Revolution, practically applied in human relationships, that allowed Ikeda to accomplish what he did.
Years later, on one of his many trips to the Soviet Union, Ikeda met with Kosygin’s oldest daughter. She told him that the late Soviet premier had returned home in a very uplifted mood the day he had met with the Soka Gakkai president. “I’ve just met a Japanese man who looked utterly ordinary,” he told her. “But he turned out to be an extraordinary person after all. He was able to speak about extremely difficult issues in a way that made them plain and easy to understand.”
Afterward, I reflected that, in my three-hour dialogue with Harada, not one Buddhist term or phrase was used. In fact, not once did I detect in his manner, his style of communication, or in what he said the kind of spiritual posturing I have come to expect in talking with religious leaders. Harada, and the message of peace and international goodwill that he obviously hoped to convey in our meeting, would have been at home anywhere in the world. In that, he proved a worthy disciple of the man Kosygin had described as being able to take extremely difficult issues and make them “plain and easy to understand.”