Waking the Buddha by Clark Strand Page B

Moto’s place, but it was at the end of a very long hill. And finally Sensei would admit, ‘I am so exhausted.’
    â€œSensei was completely frank and open at these meetings, and it was wonderful to see how relaxed everyone was with him. And even though he was exhausted at the end of the day, the members at the final meeting would always ask him for advice on a variety of personal issues, and so he would end up giving guidance well into the night. For me to have guided Sensei in this way was a very great honor. Everything I am today—every single thing I have been able to accomplish in my life—I feel it all goes back to those days.”

spiritual independence
    T HERE ARE TWO EVENTS in the broader history of the Soka Gakkai movement and the life of its third president, Daisaku Ikeda, which are sure to be paired together by future historians of the movement, even though they took place more than fifteen years apart. The first was the founding of the Soka Gakkai International on the island of Guam on January 26, 1975. The second was the excommunication by Nichiren Shoshu of the full combined membership of the Soka Gakkai and the SGI on November 28, 1991, a date subsequently referred to in Soka Gakkai lore as the “Day of Spiritual Independence.” Naturally, the first event is celebrated annually by the SGI. But why the latter? Surely excommunication is nothing to be proud of.
    When the Soka Gakkai was launched as a lay movement associated with Nichiren Shoshu, no one could have predicted that it would grow to the size it did. Prior to World War II, there was no history of any lay religious organization, in Japan or elsewhere, outgrowing its sponsor organization to the extent that it virtually dwarfed it, all but marginalizing the former religious ethos and replacing it with its own. There are doubtless many reasons why such a thing had never happened— cultural inertia, the sheer weight of priestly authority, and the difficulty (in Japan at least) of creating religious organizations independent of existing traditions. But, then, no one before Toda had ever offered an alternative to temple-based religious practice that could hold together—and even grow vigorously—in the absence of priestly direction.
    As much as anything, it was neighborhood discussion meetings, held in members’ homes, that accounted for the difference. The Soka Gakkai grew outward from hundreds, then thousands of such meeting places— and it grew very
quickly
from those nexus points, following the natural lines of human relationships. Members spoke to their neighbors about Nichiren Buddhism, or to their coworkers, or to their friends or extended families, and nothing was more natural than asking such people to attend a meeting at their home or at the home of a friend. It was utterly unlike being invited to attend a service or a lecture at a temple. True, the Soka Gakkai had a compelling message of optimism and hope— moreover, one that had “gone viral” in the early ‘50s and was therefore capable of leaping quickly across traditional boundaries. But without a post-tribal delivery system to match that viral message, the movement could not have grown as it did. Having to funnel the whole thing through a priest or a temple would have clogged the flow of the movement until it slowed to a trickle and finally came to a stop.
    But it didn’t. And once it became clear that the Soka Gakkai’s vision for Buddhism would outgrow the Japanese religious sensibility of its Nichiren Shoshu sponsors, it was just a matter of time before the Soka Gakkai International was born.
    The third and final phase in the development of the Soka Gakkai—the phase of completion—could not have taken place without the internationalization of the movement, which began formally with the creation of the SGI on Guam in 1975, and informally in 1960, with Ikeda’s first trip to America. Follow a linear history