THE FAMILY is the basic social unit in all human societies. It has therefore long been the glue that holds spiritual traditions together. No spiritual tradition has ever survived in the absence of family. Even those that did not directly support or condone family life— celibate orders like Theravada Buddhism in South Asia or Shakerism in America—were still dependent for their continued survival on families who sponsored their practice financially or provided an influx of new members with each passing generation. The life of the family is intimately connected with religion—or should be. A religion that ignores the role of the family, or that offers nothing of value for families, is not long for this world.
Several years ago I wrote an article that gained wide attention in America, eventually making its way into the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The article was called “Dharma Family Values (Or, Why American Buddhism Must Change or Die),” and its premise was simple: In America, Buddhism tended to be a solitary pursuit rather than a family affair; therefore, its days were probably numbered. The current generation of “Boomer Buddhists” would die, leaving no lasting American Buddhist movement behind.
The problem was that fathers or mothers would go off on meditation retreats once or twice a year, or attend regular meetings at their local Zen center or Tibetan Buddhist temple, but they seldom took their children along. Few Buddhist centers in America had regularly scheduled activities for families. They didn’t even have Buddhist holidays to build a family culture around, like Jews did with Passover and Christians with Easter and Christmas. Perhaps most significant of all, they tended not to offer christenings, weddings, or funerals. You could meditate as a Buddhist in America, and you could chant, drum, and in some places even beg for alms, but you couldn’t get born or married. In many cases, you couldn’t even die as a Buddhist. When it came to the kinds of observances that are sacred to families, Buddhism had little to offer.
The article generated a remarkable range of responses. Some American Buddhists were angry at me for what they regarded as an unjust attack. Others, mostly young Buddhists with families, wrote to thank me for pointing out the obvious flaw in the American Buddhist fabric. Years later, the article continues to get cited in newspapers and magazine articles about Buddhism, and the debate it started continues in American Buddhist centers and temples around the country.
In the year it appeared, there was only one American Buddhist group that responded enthusiastically to what I wrote in “Dharma Family Values,” and that was the SGI-USA. Admittedly, I had praised the SGI for its efforts to include young people. The SGI met mostly in members’ homes, had meetings for teens, and even very young children were often included in its activities. It hadn’t evolved any yearly Buddhist holidays that I knew of (though the SGI had plenty of celebrations of its own), and I didn’t think it had a formal ceremony in place for christenings, but on the whole they were doing better than most. Not only that, when the article came out, the SGI was the only organization to seek advice on how they might do more for families than they were already doing. They cared about families and about young people and wanted to be sure they felt included in the movement’s activities.
This was the most hopeful sign for the future I had seen from any group, and it was about that time I began advising other American Buddhist organizations to study the SGI and imitate as many of its practices and policies as possible. As I wrote to a Buddhist teacher friend, “You don’t have to agree with their teachings or adopt their style of practice, but you’d be a fool not to notice where they’re succeeding and learn from it.”
In Japan, where the Soka Gakkai originated, there is a long tradition of what might be called “Family Buddhism”—so long, in fact, that many now consider it an intractable problem. The term “Funeral Buddhism” has been used in recent years to describe institutions which, having outlived their use and therefore no longer relevant to life in a modern, secular state, are now only a shell of their former selves. Such institutions offer funerals and memorial services but little else, and these at exorbitant prices. Recently, some Japanese families have felt so financially abused by the Buddhist temples that their families have maintained an affiliation with, sometimes for many centuries, that they have gone so far as to hire freelance priests to say the services instead. These families believe that their temple priest has nothing real or legitimate to offer them, and so they simply pay for the service itself. Any priest will do. In such cases, the relationship that once existed between family and temple is itself in need of a funeral. It is now officially dead.
The vitality of the Soka Gakkai stands in stark contrast to the “Funeral Buddhism” so prevalent in Japan. Generations of Soka Gakkai members have now attended schools founded upon Makiguchi’s theory of value-creating education, and Soka University now has graduates of its various institutions teaching in its halls, both in the United States and in Japan. As time goes on, perhaps these institutions will no longer be so closely identified with the Soka Gakkai as a religious institution, just as today, in America, a student can attend a four-year university without every learning that it was originally a religiously sponsored institution or that it maintains a religious affiliation today. For now, however, there remains a lively and inspired sense among the students at these institutions that their experience at home, at school, and in some cases even at work, are all coherently focused.
I would maintain that this cohesive kind of experience is possible because the Soka Gakkai has introduced a new paradigm—both in religion and in religiously inspired education—that embraces the full range of life enthusiasms. Within Soka Gakkai families, there are surely children who grow up and move on to other things, just as there are in all families. But this tends to happen more in families that have lost their spark, families that are so bound by tradition that the only way to experience freedom is to break with that tradition, renouncing some aspect of it, if for no other reason than to make room for something new. For now the Soka Gakkai is that new thing. In fact, the Soka Gakkai may well be the newest thing in the world.
In the end, it was that new thing that led me to study the Soka Gakkai International in depth and conduct dialogues with so many of its members. At the beginning of that study I posed myself a question: What does a religious movement like the SGI mean for the larger economy of religious cultures? What does the appearance of the SGI mean spiritually for the world at large?