Waking the Buddha (6 page)

As I see it, the primary difference between the SGI and most other contemporary forms of religious worship lies here, in its tradition of openly addressing the challenges to happiness faced by the ordinary individual in the “immediate life context” (or land) they actually inhabit. That difference is so fundamental that I sometimes feel that SGI members don't fully appreciate its implications for the world at large. For what that tradition really offers isn't just a new paradigm of worship for Buddhism but for religion in general. That is because it makes religion answerable to life.

A
JOURNALIST
CONTACTED
me a few years ago to ask if I could provide her with a list of individuals who had been inspired by their Buddhist practice to change their lives in some positive way. She wanted to interview “practitioners who were motivated to make a significant change in one specific area of their life as a result of their practice.” She gave as possible examples a person who had made a courageous or momentous decision, someone who had triumphed over an addiction, or perhaps one who had moved into social work or some other profession based on the desire to contribute directly to the community they lived in. For the purpose of her article, she defined Buddhist practice as meditation and was therefore primarily interested in talking with practitioners of Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, or
Vipassana
(mindfulness meditation).

I was enthusiastic about the idea of the article, but I warned her that she wasn't likely to get the kinds of responses she was looking for from American meditators. There was a simple reason for this: their approach to Buddhism was based on age-old models of monastic-style practice that privileged religion over life. Those traditions rarely offered their adherents practical ways of confronting the obstacles and challenges that tended to come up in the course of ordinary life, nor were their communities organized to offer the moral support and inspiration necessary to sustain the kinds of prolonged efforts that are required for real and lasting change at the personal level. The focus of their effort was not on being proactive about life issues and problems but on being religions, albeit in a meditative way. If she asked meditators to provide stories about how they came to this or that spiritual insight, how they passed a certain Zen
koan
or mastered a complex visualization, they were sure to oblige. Ask them how their meditation got them out of a bad job and into a good one, or how it helped them find the right life partner, and they'd probably come up blank.

In fact, that had been the case. She confessed that, so far, she had received not one story of the kind she'd been looking for. Although they might have lowered their blood pressure or their stress level, or enhanced their immune system or their powers of concentration, the meditators she interviewed could draw no direct line of influence between their practice and overcoming the challenges and obstacles to growth that people ordinarily struggled with in life. There was little sense that devoting themselves wholeheartedly to their Buddhist practice had led directly to any
specific
positive outcome in their lives. That was why she had contacted me for advice.

In the end, I told her she was right to challenge American Buddhists to show actual proof of the benefits of meditation practice. While she was waiting for them to do that, however, there was no reason she shouldn't visit an SGI discussion meeting in her neighborhood. There she would discover that chanting practice, coupled with monthly study and discussion meetings, provided inspiration and support for just the kinds of positive life changes she was talking about. “Go to virtually any discussion meeting in the Boston area,” I told her, “and you'll hear at least one or two inspiring stories of personal transformation.”

A week later, she wrote to me again. On the advice of the SGI-USA representative I'd put her in touch with, she'd contacted a woman, a well-known musician, who had a deeply inspiring story to tell. It turned out that she'd interviewed the same woman once before, though for an entirely different article, and had liked her immediately. She was surprised to find that she was also a longtime SGI member. That, it turned out, was the back story to her successful musical career. I wasn't surprised by this at all. Based on years of watching the Soka Gakkai in action and listening to its members tell their stories, that's what happened when you held Buddhism accountable for changing your life. Although, by modern standards, it seems an extremely simple and obvious notion that religion should serve life, it is nevertheless an utterly revolutionary idea. The monthly discussion meeting is “where the rubber meets the road,” Buddhism is put to the test, and the truth of its teachings are manifested by members through personal stories of overcoming obstacles to happiness. Sharing such experiences builds faith, faith builds lives, and collectively those lives can change society. As Daisaku Ikeda has written, “A great human revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a nation and further, will enable a change in the destiny of all humankind.”

It is often said that the Soka Gakkai's teachings on Human Revolution begin with its second president, Josei Toda, and it is true that Toda gave those teachings their definitive form, but in Tsunesaburo Makiguchi's life, and in his development of a post-tribal model for religious transformation through group discussion, we can see those teachings already dynamically at work in the world.

“M
AKIGUCHI IS
DEAD.”
These were the words, spoken by a prison official on January 8, 1945, with which Josei Toda learned of the death of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi two months earlier. Until that moment, the future second president of the Soka Gakkai hadn't realized that his mentor had died.

According to Toda, when he heard those words, he “just stood there stunned, unable even to weep…. I had never experienced such grief as I felt at that moment. Then and there, I resolved: I will show the world…. I will achieve something great to repay him.”

Moved as he was, however, Toda would never have made good on his vow if not for two other events that had occurred in his life the year before.

The first, in early March 1944, was his sudden discovery in prison that “the Buddha was life itself,” the experience of enlightenment that later formed the basis for his radically modern reinterpretation of the Lotus Sutra.

If a truth is profound and deeply felt, it can be stated very simply. And if it can be stated simply, it is useful. This fact has been understood by reformers throughout the ages—from Shakyamuni Buddha to Jesus of Nazareth to Martin Luther King Jr. Using this criteria, it is hard to imagine a simpler, more profound, or more useful truth than the one arrived at in March 1944 by Toda as he struggled with a passage from the Immeasurable Meanings portion of the threefold Lotus Sutra.

According to the Immeasurable Meanings Sutra, the body of the Buddha was

neither existing nor not existing,

neither caused nor conditioned, neither self nor other,

neither square nor round, neither short nor long, neither appearing nor disappearing, neither born nor extinguished
…

The passage went on to include eight more lines, offering a total of thirty-four negations in all. The Buddha's body was neither this nor that, the sutra explained. But it didn't say what it
was.

As many times as Toda had read this passage, he still could not understand it. And yet the Immeasurable Meanings Sutra served as a kind of “introduction” to the Lotus Sutra. If Toda wanted to understand the Lotus Sutra, as he had vowed to do, it only stood to reason that he had to understand this part first. But no matter how he struggled, the body of the Buddha would not reveal itself to his mind.

In truth, he was stuck. There seemed to be no way forward unless he could understand this one fundamental point. “In a sense, he burned the bridges behind him in the battle to understand the Lotus Sutra,” said Daisaku Ikeda of the first great spiritual struggle of Toda's life. In other words, like his mentor before him, Toda had reached the point of non-regression, the point of resolve beyond which it was no longer possible to turn back.

Where Buddhism is concerned, it is probably fortunate that Josei Toda was incarcerated by the Japanese government during World War II. Had he been allowed his freedom, there is no guarantee that he would have studied the sutra so fiercely. Even had he felt inspired to do so, with access to the countless commentaries and scholarly resources on the Lotus Sutra that would have been available to him as a free man, it is unlikely he would have felt so driven to forge his own understanding of what he read.

When I visited the original site of Josei Toda's tutorial school in Shinagawa Ward, Tokyo, which is said to be the birthplace of the Soka Gakkai, I asked the curator there about Toda's activities before the war. I was told that he handled the money end of President Makiguchi's various projects, contributing his writing and editorial skills to the fledgling Soka Kyoiku Gakkai (Value-Creating Education Society). When I asked how involved Toda had been in the more spiritually oriented discussions and meetings, however, my guide humorously recalled a scene from the film
The Human Revolution
in which Toda, who was mostly concerned with the business side of things, is shown drinking sake out on the porch during Makiguchi's discussion meetings.

This portrait of Toda before World War II agrees completely with my estimation of him as a man—practical, with a no-nonsense approach to life and commerce and little interest in spiritual matters that could not be proven to have a direct impact on life. Such people often feel like outsiders in religious circles. But the persecutions of the Soka Gakkai during World War II changed Toda permanently, driving him deep within himself.

Still, there must have been something of the porch-sitting, sake-drinking Toda even in prison, because he tried several times to send his copy of the Lotus Sutra home to his family. But each time, mysteriously, without any explanation, it was returned to his cell. It was as if the Lotus Sutra belonged there. As if it were waiting for him to finally open it and see what he could discover there. Finally, Toda understood that it was his destiny to study it—even though, being of such a practical mindset, at first he could not see how it was relevant to his condition. And so, beginning on January 1, 1944, in the first of countless determinations that Toda would make as part of his commitment to the process of Human Revolution, he resolutely plunged ahead.

It was sometime in March of that same year, after having read the complete sutra through three times, that Toda began to ask himself what constituted the body of the Buddha. He reasoned that it was neither the physical body of Shakyamuni nor merely an abstract idea with no substance. In the first case, such a body—the product of countless lifetimes of ascetic practice—was unattainable by the average human being. In the second, it was mere idealism, a religious fantasy with no practical value for ordinary life.

According to
The Human Revolution,
Daisaku Ikeda's novelistic history of the Soka Gakkai, finally one day as Toda was chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo in his cell, he entered a state of deep meditation, “recalling each of the thirty-four negations one after the other—trying to imagine what it might be that could absolutely exist despite so many negational words.” Eventually, he lost track of how long he had been chanting and finally even forgot where he was. It was then that a single word flashed suddenly through his mind: Life. There was nothing mystical or mysterious about it at all, he finally realized. The Buddha was life itself.

What did the identity of the Buddha as life itself mean for Toda, and for modern people in general?

In a word, it meant “freedom.” It meant that the authoritarian interpretations of Buddhist texts that for hundreds of years had ruled people's understanding of their religion could at last be shaken off. Because if the primary reference point for understanding Buddhism lay in the life force of each individual rather than in the opinions of learned priests and monks, that meant that Buddhism was truly accountable to the individual. Prior to Toda there always existed a gap between the concerns of Buddhism and those of daily life. One might have recourse to a wise priest or teacher who demonstrated that the two could sometimes be brought into harmony, but for the most part religion was a kind of “professional sport.” Only if you separated yourself from ordinary day-to-day struggles of working and raising a family—by living in a monastery or a temple, for instance—could you hope to make the lofty spiritual ideals of Buddhism a reality in your life. Buddhism was for the priest or monk. Ordinary people simply got by as best they could.

Josei Toda's great insight was to put life first, not religion, in effect inverting the traditional hierarchical structure of Buddhism, which placed spiritual authority in the hands of a religious or intellectual elite. That is why it was inevitable from the beginning—and even necessary—that the Soka Gakkai would eventually experience a break with its priestly parent organization, Nichiren Shoshu. To put life first, as Josei Toda did, meant that each member of the future Soka Gakkai would be connected directly to the Buddha without the mediation of any “professional” religious class committed to its own prosperity and security rather than to the happiness of those it served.

It was this realization that must have lead to the second spiritual breakthrough of Toda's prison years, which occurred a few months later—coincidentally, on almost the exact same day as Makiguchi's death, although Toda did not realize this at the time. That breakthrough took the form of a mystical vision in which Toda found himself among the “Bodhisattvas of the Earth” from the Lotus Sutra and realized that he must be one of them.