SINCE WORLD WAR II, cultures across the planet have been in transition as humanity has tried to grapple for the first time in its history with truly global issues— species-wide challenges like overpopulation, diminishing water supplies, nuclear proliferation, and global climate change. Prior to the explosion in information technology, the contours of these problems were visible to few and clear to none. Now almost everybody sees them.
As a result, humanity finds itself faced with the necessity to move forward as a species and—with greater ease of building community through communication across the globe—it finally has the means to do so. Naturally, this means that we human beings will have to radically rethink the way we organize our activities as a species— the way we address our problems, and even the way we think about them. Instead of competing against one another as separate races, nationalities, or religions, effectively creating a world in which for some to prevail others must necessarily lose or be cast away, we will have to think of ourselves as a whole. We will have to find a new philosophy and a new language for expressing that wholeness, and new ways of grappling with the meaning and value of life itself.
If we accept this need, it becomes clear at once that a post-tribal, life-centered religious movement like the SGI—with its global mission to promote universal human values like peace, education, and culture—is right on time. In fact, the case could be made that it actually arrived a little early. Tsunesaburo Makiguchi had already felt its stirrings in 1903 and by 1944 was ready to die for it, even though what “it” was, apart from an educational organization with an egalitarian format for its meetings, wasn’t yet fully clear. When Josei Toda left Toyotama Prison in 1945, he carried within him a thoroughly modern reinterpretation of the Lotus Sutra, and by the time of his death in 1958, his understanding of just how big that new interpretation was had developed to the point that he could imagine it spreading across the globe. More than that, he could foresee that Buddhism itself would have to evolve in order to embrace that wider mission and left a clear, compelling legacy of post-tribal declarations and recommendations on how to inspire that revolution during the last year of his life, both to the Soka Gakkai youth and to his disciple Daisaku Ikeda.
With the benefit of the head start provided by Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, the life-centered religious philosophy of Josei Toda, and the humanistic vision and international networking of Daisaku Ikeda, the Soka Gakkai has now spread to 192 countries across the globe with its message of Human Revolution. That fact more than any other suggests that it has taken the lead in spreading the new paradigm for religious practice, for there was no analogous twentieth-century religious movement in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, or Islam. In fact, as a spiritual movement, the Soka Gakkai offers a much broader and more versatile model than we normally see in a religious paradigm. Its egalitarian, international ethos, mixed with a home-based discussion group model and a focus on the human potential for altruism and peaceful cooperation are the basis for a “sustainable” model of progress. It’s the next model because its focus remains on progress in culture, in human rights, and the human spirit, rather than on the ever-multiplying array of products that masquerades as progress, distracting us from our humanity and poisoning the Earth on which we live.
To the degree that we can at last come together as a species to realize the core values we share in common as human beings, we will learn to preserve and celebrate those values in the only way possible going forward—by finding sustainable ways of life and commerce that allow us to live in harmony, not just with one another, but with the planetary ecosystem itself. Does the SGI stand the best chance of “passing the flame” of those core human values across the planet? Honestly, I don’t know. But I am increasingly certain that the SGI is the only type of religion that might be up to the job. And yet its job description is a sobering one. Because the SGI created not just a new version of the Lotus Sutra but a new version of religion itself, it is sure to face unique challenges over the next century. Going first entails certain responsibilities. Being in the lead means you are likely to confront certain obstacles before others even know they are there.
Predictably, the biggest challenge concerns religion itself, so much in need of an overhaul as we move into the next millennium that it is questionable whether it is any specific religion that needs to be reformed or reimagined so much as the whole notion of religion itself. Has humanity simply outgrown it? With racial and ethnic pluralism on the rise in nations around the world, is it not more reasonable to replace religious laws and values with their secular equivalents in order to preserve harmony and peace? These questions are now being asked in newspapers, magazines, and policy journals all across the globe.
In Western Europe we already have an answer. In nearly all of its countries—including Italy, the home of the Vatican—religion is in steep decline. The same could be said of religion in South Korea and Japan. In fact, in its most recent study of forty-four countries across the full international spectrum, the Pew Global Attitudes Project demonstrated that the higher the standard of living in a country, the less likely its citizens were to hold religious views or engage in religious activity. There were no exceptions—although the United States, at that time the most prosperous nation studied, scored highest in religiosity among developed nations. Even so, its people ranked only about half as religious as those living in poorer countries such as Indonesia or Senegal. All of which led religious scholar Alan Wolfe to conclude his Atlantic Monthly article on the Pew Study with words that have almost the ring of prophecy:
The future may come sooner than we think. We have seen how rapidly religion has spread in the past, claiming adherents from competing faiths before the competition knew what hit them. Both secularism and secularly inspired ways of being religious are spreading just as rapidly—maybe even more so. Historians may one day look back on the next few decades, not as yet another era when religious conflicts enveloped countries and blew apart established societies, but as the era when secularization took over the world.
What would such a trend mean for a religious organization such as the SGI, which is poised already on the tipping point of history? The answer isn’t simple.
No one can deny that until now the SGI has been a prosperity-driven movement—one that has tended to grow best and fastest among those struggling with adversity of some kind—often, although not always, economic adversity. With its teachings on self-empowerment and harnessing the power of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo to elevate one’s life condition, Nichiren Buddhist teaching offers hope to people struggling in hard times. Likewise, the style of leadership and community offered by the SGI provides just the right kind of ongoing support and guidance needed to help them overcome obstacles to happiness and security. That was the pattern for the Soka Gakkai’s growth in Japan and the pattern that has continued to serve the SGI as it has spread to other countries.
There is something inspiring about such a frankly populist approach. The fact that the SGI has managed to preserve that spirit of service and support to ordinary people—even years later, when so many of its members have become influential or prosperous—offers an elegant defense against those critics who saw the Soka Gakkai’s early recruitment efforts as a crass attempt to exploit the nation’s sick and poor. Josei Toda vowed to raise such people up—one at a time, if necessary—in order to make a stronger, healthier society. He never gave up on that mission, and the SGI continues that tradition today.
But what drives a prosperity-driven movement once prosperity has been obtained? This is a question that faces all religions moving ahead into an age of secularization—not just the SGI.
A liberal protestant minister recently told me that he had two wishes for the next decade: that church attendance would increase in the United States and that our country would succeed in legislating universal health care. I was sympathetic, but I suggested that he wasn’t likely to see both wishes come true. Once a country got universal health care, attendance at religious functions invariably went down. Barack Obama had hinted as much during the 2008 election when he observed that, without adequate health insurance, all that most families had to protect them from catastrophic illness was prayer. Eliminate the threat of an uninsured medical disaster and the need for prayer was, if not exactly eliminated, then at least made far less urgent. When a state takes care of its people—all of its people—those people are less likely to feel that they have no choice but to take the matter before God, or perhaps chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.
Naturally, the SGI is not driven solely by prosperity. In recent years, under the guidance of Ikeda, the movement has become far more centered on “worldwide kosen-rufu,” a term from the Lotus Sutra that means “widespread declaration of the teaching.” As defined by Ikeda today, its meaning is closer to “promoting world peace through individual happiness.” Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the Soka Gakkai came of age during a period of rapid postwar economic growth—a historic context that matched the optimism of the Soka Gakkai’s message. If, as many economists fear, we are entering an era when economies around the world will run up against the natural limits of economic growth, that message will need to go even further in the direction of Buddhist humanism and championing the common good in order to accord with the time and the experiences of the people. Already the SGI has begun to refine its understanding of “prosperity” for an era when that experience is likely to be more modestly underwritten by prevailing economic conditions. For that transition, the Soka Gakkai’s core values of peace, education, and culture—values that accord so closely with those of a modern secular state—make it a natural fit for the age ahead.