Waking the Buddha by Clark Strand

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.”

the oneness of mentor and disciple
    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.
    â€œShe 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