Waking the Buddha (10 page)

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.”

O
N
A
UGUST
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.'