ON AUGUST 14, 1952, exactly five years after his first meeting with Josei Toda, Daisaku Ikeda arrived in Osaka, at the heart of the Kansai region, having been sent there as the youth leader to mount the Soka Gakkai’s first major outreach campaign outside of the greater Tokyo area. “Let’s rid Kansai of sickness and poverty,” he said at the time. “In this faith there’s no such thing as impossible. When you base your life on prayer, everything becomes possible.”
It was a message people were waiting to hear. Of the four Kansai veterans I met on my trip to the Soka Gakkai center there, three had either been ill themselves when they began their practice, or they were nursing a sick family member. Akiko Kurihara, who began practicing at twenty-one, told me that after the war her mother was like a shattered teacup that had been glued back together.
“She went to a Soka Gakkai meeting one day but wasn’t convinced to join,” Kurihara told me. “My mother had tried a number of different religions to see if they could cure her. But at the Soka Gakkai meeting they had refuted all the things she had tried, and she was in a very agitated state because of this. I asked her what they’d said, and she repeated it all to me. And I said: ‘You know, I think they’re right. It makes perfect sense to me.’ And so I made my own determination on the spot and convinced my father to join, and then the three of us joined together. Strictly speaking, no one ever recruited me. The message that the Soka Gakkai had given my mother was such that, even hearing it secondhand, I knew it was right. After just one week, we went to a discussion meeting together.”
Those were the days when the healing, life-centered message of the Soka Gakkai first went viral. Prior to Kansai, the movement had grown in a way that was impressive but nevertheless predictable, since it was due primarily to the persistence and hard work of its long-term members. Now the message traveled quickly, like fire spreading in a high wind. I was impressed when Masako Mineyama, who began practicing because she was sick and her family poor, first told me about Hisako Yayoi, a woman whose efforts to spread the Soka Gakkai message had become the stuff of local legend. But we all laughed a moment later when she explained that Yayoi had been practicing only ten days when she came over one afternoon to convert the Mineyama family because she knew they’d been struggling with illness. “I just joined myself and I’m not sure I understand it yet,” Yayoi had explained, “but it seems like a great religion, and I really think you should join too.”
Tadashi Murata recalls that when Ikeda first came to Kansai he was only twenty-four years old: “He was quite young, but he was so earnest and sincere, and so determined to make us healthy and happy, that you could feel it right away. In one of his letters Nichiren says, ‘The purpose of the appearance in this world of Shakyamuni lies in his behavior as a human being.’ President Ikeda demonstrated the truth of this through his own behavior. He told us that the Soka Gakkai was creating a religious revolution that would allow all humanity to become happy. Human Revolution he called it. He instilled in us a deep confidence that such a revolution really was possible, and it was this confidence that allowed us to change our lives. It was he who taught us the oneness of mentor and disciple.”
“The oneness of mentor and disciple”—the expression grates on some people’s ears. For some it calls to mind the cultish, uncritical veneration one sometimes sees for figures such as His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama (who, admittedly, may be worthy of veneration) and such Indian gurus as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Swami Rama, whose abuse of American followers led to numerous scandals and lawsuits.
Among the Japanese Soka Gakkai, however, the oneness of mentor and disciple is simply understood as the necessary prerequisite for living a happy and productive life. In a recent interview, Ikeda said something which, I believe, highlights the difference between the oneness of mentor and disciple as that tradition is understood and handed down within the Soka Gakkai and the way it is understood by those who see charismatic religious leadership as primarily exploitive:
In its early days, the Soka Gakkai was despised and laughed at in Japanese society as a gathering of the sick and poor. Josei Toda, my life mentor, took this as a point of pride, however, and declared with confidence: “The true mission of religion is to bring relief to the sick and the poor. That is the purpose of Buddhism. The Soka Gakkai is the ally and friend of the common people, a friend to the unhappy. However much we may be looked down on, we will continue to fight for the sake of such people.” Faced with the devastation of postwar Japan, Toda was convinced that, in the eyes of the Buddha, this was the most noble action.
I believe this explanation, although it makes no direct reference to the mentor-disciple relationship, nevertheless explains perfectly how and why it works, and why it hasn’t degenerated into mere guru-worship in the Soka Gakkai. That is because the relationship with a mentor in the Soka Gakkai tradition is fundamentally empowering and life-enhancing for the disciple.
The Kansai pioneers I met, all of whom were directly mentored by Ikeda in the early days of the movement, spoke of him in terms of the utmost admiration and respect. And yet, at no point did their praise become a thing in itself. At no point was it disassociated from their own life-transformation. Their relationship with Ikeda was the subtext of recovery from serious illness. It was the back story of their journey back to solvency from financial ruin, the explanation for how, even in the face of great hardship, they had managed to rebuild the happiness of their families and their communities after the disappointments and deprivations of the war. The relationship was, in their minds, quite literally their ticket to a happy, healthy life. A story told by Setsuko Umemoto, who began practicing in July 1953, perfectly illustrates this point.
In 1956, when Daisaku Ikeda was traveling to Osaka each week to strengthen the organization there, the Soka Gakkai did not yet have a car at the Kansai Community Center. At the time, there was no alternative but to travel by train to the station in Wakayama, and go on from there to the meetings by bike.
Umemoto, who knew the area very well, was chosen to accompany Ikeda to five different meetings in a row, beginning with one meeting at 8:00 a.m. and stretching well into the evening. Between each meeting, they would have to hurry, biking up one hill after another. It was a grueling schedule and a long ride, Umemoto explained, but Ikeda had never complained. “We’d be going up and over lots of hills, and I’d say, ‘Are you all right, Sensei?’ And he’d say, ‘Are you OK?’ People were overjoyed to see him on these occasions, but I was the timekeeper, so I’d have to rush to move him along to the next place. There was never any time to rest. Finally, in the evening, there was the last meeting at Moto’s place, but it was at the end of a very long hill. And finally Sensei would admit, ‘I am so exhausted.’
“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.”