Waking the Buddha (4 page)

I'd developed a theory that human beings created beads in response to some obscure prehistoric religious impulse (after all, the word
bead
in English originally meant “prayer”). But according to this expert, it was more likely they created them to assert their differences from one another and to evoke the protections and privileges that might come from membership in certain tribes.

Early religions may have had their origins in this same impulse. Prayer and meditation probably came later, as human beings began to confront the simplest truth of all: that tribal affiliation was no protection against the realities of old age, sickness, and death.

That was what the Buddha realized at the beginning of his spiritual path. According to legend, on the eve of his renunciation, the young prince had four encounters, one at each of the four gates of his palace. At the first gate he encountered an old man, at the second a sick man, and at the third a corpse. Finally, at the fourth gate he encountered a monk, after which he cut his hair, removed his clothes, and left his various amulets and jewels behind, resolving to embrace the life of an ascetic.

The point of the story is not to justify a monastic lifestyle, however, which in itself would have been only another kind of tribe. The monk in the story is Everyman. He is simply an ordinary human being who has grasped the truth about life and suffering and has set his mind on attaining Buddhahood as the only enlightened response. Recently a Facebook friend posted a meme of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. looking somewhat monkish with his close-cropped hair. Over the photo someone had superimposed a caption: “You don't have to be a Buddhist to be a Buddha.”

The Buddha's first realization provided a basis for understanding our common humanity. That is why the community he created abolished the caste system. The Buddha began his teaching by recognizing that the life within each person is fundamentally the same. Today as we enter an age of global concerns, it only makes sense to revisit the foundational simplicity of that first great insight, exchanging our various tribal markers and Buddhist signs of belonging for a flame that can be passed to any other human being on the planet— regardless of ethnicity, race, or religion—in order to bring more light into the world.

I believe this was the kind of Buddhism that Makiguchi was asserting when he refused to “consolidate.” That was the religion he died for, and that death, which passed largely unobserved by the world in the darkness of a six-foot square cell, has become a flame that continues to be passed from person to person long after the original candle is gone.

We are now entering a phase of history when we will need all the light we can get, a period when we are once more being “pressed together”—by jet travel, by the Internet, by the global population explosion, the global economy, and eventually (should it have the effect of reducing the habitable land area) by global warming. The old response to that “pressing,” in what was probably our species' very first encounter with multiculturalism, was to retreat ever more deeply into the bead-making of tribalism in all its various forms. But that is no longer an option—or not a good option, at any rate.

Barring a global pandemic that reduces the world's population by half, we are not likely to have more space or more natural resources any time soon, as earlier human beings did at the close of the last Ice Age. That being the case, our tribal impulses (along with the competitiveness and lack of cooperation they foster) are sure to pose the gravest danger to humanity. Nuclear proliferation—as grave an issue as that is—is only a symptom of that far deeper problem that human beings must now finally address. That is why, in order to arrive at a suitable message for the coming millennium, Buddhism has reached clear back to its beginnings to reclaim a belief in the fundamental equality and dignity of all life and bring that teaching back to the fore.

As Daisaku Ikeda himself has suggested, a manifesto for the Buddhism of the coming age would therefore be devastatingly simple, for it would consist of only the single word
life,
and all that that it implies: The life and fundamental dignity of each human being and the right to express that life across the entire spectrum of cultural forms. The lives of the many millions of species of plant and animal with which we share this world. Even the life of the earth itself, its mountains and streams, hills and valleys, in all their beauty and diversity.

Like all human beings, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi's experience was rooted in the life and the land of a country he loved, and in the early days at least, in spite of the global scope of his thinking (he was a geographer by training), he felt an affectionate if realistic pride in Japan's national heritage. But then Japan began to fall out of step with human life and human values. Perhaps it was a matter of his waking up one day and realizing that the things he had once believed in were not what they seemed (or never had been), or that they carried far too great a price. That must have been the moment he was asked to accept an amulet. And he couldn't do it.

I find a sad beauty in Makiguchi's words to his interrogators: “We must have burned at least five hundred of those things.” They reflect a weariness with amulets and all they signify that has now spread far beyond the confines of Makiguchi's cell. Over and over, humanity destroys them, reasserting the claims of life and the planet, yet somehow they just keep coming back. But, then, there is also reason for hope. Because Makiguchi's words could also be interpreted as a testament of resolve: “I've burned five hundred, and I'd burn five hundred more.” That would be the spirit of a new Buddhism. What a great, bright fire so many burning amulets would make.

I
T
IS NOT
CLEAR
whether Tsunesaburo Makiguchi knew that he was laying the foundation for a new paradigm of religious worship when the first volume of his book
The System of Value-Creating Pedagogy
was published on November 18, 1930. He may have ended up as an amulet burner, but he did not begin as one.

On a research trip to Tokyo in 2007, I visited one of the elementary schools, now said to be the finest in Tokyo, where Makiguchi had served as principal. Along the wall of the current principal's office were the portraits and photographs of the school's twenty-five previous heads, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, including a now well-known portrait of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi. The photo had only recently been restored to its proper position, I was told. Makiguchi's arrest as an enemy of the state had kept it off the walls for many years. Standing in the principal's office of Shirokane Elementary School, I was struck simultaneously by two contradictory thoughts: That Makiguchi's photo didn't really belong there, and that it did.

Makiguchi alone, among all the principals of Shirokane Elementary, had achieved national fame (and at one time, infamy) as something other than a school administrator. Asked if they recognized any of the faces on that wall as belonging to a person of historical significance, the average Tokyo resident might not pick out Makiguchi's face every time, but his would doubtless be recognized far more often than the others.

It wasn't just the fact that Makiguchi had gone on to found a religious movement. There was another reason his portrait didn't belong on the principal's wall—the fact that he had been forcibly transferred, not only from the Shirokane Elementary School, but from four other schools as well. Here was a man whose educational career was devoted to the work of reforming a system that didn't want reforming—a system which, moreover, in the decades leading up to World War II, was moving in the opposite direction.

Tsunesaburo Makiguchi had opposed rote learning, and although in the beginning he hadn't resisted the emperor system, accepting it as a distinct and perhaps even a natural expression of the Japanese character, he had no interest in an educational system devoted to producing robotic, unthinking servants of the state. Makiguchi had championed the rights of children to learn
as
children, following the lines of inquiry and curiosity natural to them and learning at their own age-appropriate pace. And he had placed the
happiness
of children before all else. His entire educational philosophy was based on that fundamental principle, which informed everything he wrote.

That philosophy, which would later merge with the writings of Nichiren Daishonin to form the Soka Gakkai's teachings on Human Revolution, was already well developed before Makiguchi began writing his theories on value-creating education. Standing in the office of the Shirokane Elementary School principal, it occurred to me that Makiguchi's philosophy had been developed in the “human laboratory” of that school and others like it. Call it a growing conviction—that happiness was, or should be, the root concern of human life. That changed everything. But most of all it changed him. The face peering back at me from the wall in the principal's office told the story of a man determined to reform a system and of that system's determination to resist his ideas. His face didn't belong there.

Or perhaps it did, for exactly the same reason. It depended on how you looked at it. His face belonged on the wall precisely because he had resisted a war that had claimed the lives of so many of the young people Makiguchi had taught when he served there. Perhaps Murata was right and it was an honor in those years to be declared an enemy of the state. Society is fickle, and governments often go wrong. And so it sometimes happens that the villains of one generation become the heroes of the next.

The Soka Gakkai marks November 18, 1930, roughly two years after Tsunesaburo Makiguchi's forced retirement from the Tokyo educational system, as the date of its founding. And yet, given that the Soka Gakkai was not formally registered as a religious organization until 1952, this seems a peculiar choice. In a country where the age of a religious sect is typically measured in centuries, the addition of a few years to make it that much older hardly seems worth the effort. Nevertheless, I believe there is a compelling reason to take that earlier date as the real beginning of the Soka Gakkai. The reason is simple: The day Tsunesaburo Makiguchi published
The System of Value-Creating Pedagogy
was the day he first spoke out. That he died in prison for his beliefs exactly fourteen years later on November 18, 1944, makes this all the more poignant.

It is tempting to suggest that the two events might be mystically connected. How else can we explain how the publication of what amounted to little more than a collection of unedited notes on the theory of education set forces in motion that would lead to the death of its author and the creation of a worldwide spiritual revolution?

In a magazine interview I conducted in 2008 with Daisaku Ikeda, I asked him to comment on the “prophetic” voice in Nichiren Buddhism—its tendency to challenge prevailing authority systems, holding them responsible for discrimination, injustice, or corruption, even when doing so brought along with it certain risks. In response, Ikeda spoke of Nichiren himself:

Nichiren understood the risks [of challenging the Kamakura-era authorities] and his writings record with great frankness the doubts and questions that assailed him early in his career as he pondered whether or not he should speak out. At one point he confessed to a disciple: “I, Nichiren, am the only person in all Japan who understands this. But if I utter so much as a word concerning it, then parents, brothers, and teachers will surely censure me, and the ruler of the nation will take steps against me. On the other hand, I am fully aware that if I do not speak out I will be lacking in compassion.” After a process of intense self-questioning, Nichiren recalled the words of the Lotus Sutra urging that this teaching be spread after the Buddha's passing, and he made a great vow to transform society and enable all people to live in happiness.

In the life of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi we see this same pattern of intensive self-questioning, followed by the firm resolve to speak out. Even so, like Nichiren, the decision was probably a long time in the making.

Makiguchi's theory of value-creating education evolved during his years as an elementary school administrator, the broad outlines of it were there as early as 1903, when he published
A Geography of Human Life.
At that time already, Makiguchi was struggling with what was to become the core problem of the twentieth century—namely, the tension between cultural and global awareness. This conflict is reflected even in the title of the work, which is a kind of paradox in itself.

The title is not a metaphor, as the titles of such books often are today. Nor is it a gimmick. It doesn't indicate that Makiguchi simply intended to discuss human culture in a systematic way, using elements of geography as the organizing principle.
A Geography of Human Life
is a work of geography plain and simple, though one which seeks to situate human life and human culture in relationship to sea, sky, and land. Early on in that work, however, Makiguchi confesses that, although geography itself is quite literally a global discipline, its study must necessarily begin where we are:

I arrived at a conviction that the natural beginning point for understanding the world we live in and our relationship to it is that community of persons, land, and culture that gave us birth.

The importance of this passage can scarcely be overemphasized in light of Makiguchi's later theories and the conflicts they inspired, first with educational authorities, and later with the government itself.

The first thing to realize is that, as Makiguchi uses it, the idea of “the community of persons, land, and culture which gave us birth” (referred to as “homeland” by other writers of the same era) is so wholesome and so fundamental that it is hard to see how anyone could have felt inspired to challenge it—at least not in 1903. Indeed,
A Geography of Human Life
seems on the whole to have been received with some enthusiasm by the educational community. The idea of homeland was then popular in many countries around the world as a way of recognizing that a single ethnic group had a long history and deep cultural association with a certain geographical area. Even today, the same concept (if not the word) is used to justify the protection of indigenous peoples and their land.