Waking the Buddha (3 page)

From the beginning, Soka Gakkai members were given the same teaching. The surest way to elevate their life condition was to share the movement's message with others, offering them the tools, the teachings, and the supportive spiritual community they needed to take charge of their destinies and improve the overall condition of their lives, their communities, and even society itself. This was what Makiguchi himself taught, and it was the teaching that Toda spread to nearly a million Japanese people in the years immediately following World War II. But it was still very much focused on Japan and the struggles of its people. And, after all, it wasn't that different from what other evangelical religions taught. Ikeda took Nichiren Buddhism one step further, restating the Soka Gakkai's mission in terms of human values that transcended narrow differences of race, religion, and nationality. By celebrating those values that unite us all, he empowered the Soka Gakkai with a message that was, for the first time, truly global. It was Buddhism on a scale no one had ever seen before. It could go anywhere and help anyone.

It could also address a whole host of emerging global issues—problems like climate change, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, poverty and hunger, and economic expansionism. These were challenges for which the religious models that had existed up until then did not adequately prepare us. Only through a process of radical self-empowerment—which Ikeda, expanding upon a term used by Toda, called Human Revolution—could human beings address issues that big. They couldn't be dealt with effectively by any one people, nation, or religion, but only by humanity as a whole. It was Ikeda's willingness to address such concerns and make them the main focus of his outreach that transformed the Soka Gakkai into what may well be the world's first true global religion.

Ikeda's second undertaking was riskier, as the process of firing always is. For it is always possible that, no matter how functionally perfect the form of a pot is, or how beautifully glazed its surface, it will nevertheless crack during the long process of firing. During that process, the heat must be kept at a constant temperature. Likewise, once that process is over, the cooling must occur naturally. Otherwise, the pot will shatter. During this process it is hidden within the depths of the kiln where the potter cannot see it; he can only proceed with faith that his efforts will be a success. More than anything, he has to
believe
in the whole process. And this is difficult, given the kinds of pressures that the pot is exposed to within the kiln.

Ikeda conducted that “firing” process largely through
dialogue
—with other Soka Gakkai members, with world leaders and scientists, and with an ever-widening circle of artists, writers, and intellectuals from around the world who shared a common concern with peace. Throughout this process, his aim was to refine the teachings of the Soka Gakkai so that it is clear what they stand for and (the importance of this cannot possibly be overstated) what they actually
are.
For the danger of any universal spiritual teaching is that its appeal may be so broad that in the end it cannot hold together and simply falls apart.

In this process, Daisaku Ikeda was aided by the history of the Soka Gakkai itself, which emerged phoenix-like from the ashes of World War II, having endured its dehumanizing deprivations and witnessed its horrors— including the atom bomb. From the beginning, the Soka Gakkai's approach to Buddhism was focused on the fundamental dignity of human life—affirming it, protecting it, and convincing others to do the same. Ikeda's whole philosophy clusters around the word
life
—LIFE with capital letters is how I once heard it described. As a unifying idea at the heart of Ikeda's teachings, it has proved both durable and versatile.

Today, in his eighties, Ikeda continues to extend and develop that idea in dialogue with others, focusing increasingly on the interdependence of life in all of its many aspects, both human and nonhuman species, and the need to protect them all. It's an approach to Buddhism that is almost, but not quite, bigger than Buddhism. You might say that the Soka Gakkai is Buddhism taken as far as Buddhism—or, for that matter, any religion—can go.

I
MAGINE A
FLAME
being passed from candle to candle until fifty candles are lit. It begins with one candle … then spreads to fifty. But the flame passed from candle to candle is the same. According to the Lotus Sutra, the spread of Buddhism is accomplished in just this way. It begins when one person hears “just one verse of the Lotus Sutra” and, responding with joy, passes it on to another. From there it is handed along continuously, even to the fiftieth person, without losing any of its force or effect.

In the mid-1990s, while serving as senior editor for
Tricycle: The Buddhist Review,
I proposed a thought experiment to test whether Buddhism could spread around the globe. That test consisted of a single question: Did Buddhism have a teaching that was so universal it could pass quickly from person to person without getting stopped in its tracks, leaping across national, ethnic, economic, and even religious boundaries?

Since then I have had the opportunity to ask probably a hundred different Buddhists, in America and elsewhere, if Buddhism had such a teaching and, if so, what it was.

There was no universal answer. Some held that it was
anatman,
or “not-self,” others that is was the doctrine of dependent origination, the basis for the Buddhist belief in karma. Still others claimed that the Buddhist message was impermanence, or interdependence, or consciousness itself. There were those who offered the four noble truths as an answer, and those who recited the name of Amida Buddha, the Buddhist “savior” who welcomed true believers to his heaven-like Pure Land when they died. Devotees of the Dalai Lama told me it was kindness, followers of Thich Nhat Hanh that it could only be “peace with every step.” More than one meditator observed that Buddhism was watching the breath, and virtually every Nichiren Buddhist I spoke with told me it was contained in the
daimoku,
or “title,” of the Lotus Sutra—Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

Finally, in 2007 on my second visit to Japan, I found the answer I was looking for. It came from an eighty-seven-year-old war veteran to whom I had not even addressed the question. Instead I'd asked him, “How were you converted?”

In 1953 a family friend had visited Tadashi Murata and told him about a new religious group. “During the war its founders were declared traitors of the nation and sent to prison for opposing the military regime,” his friend told him. “That's all I know.”

“That's all you know about it?” asked Murata.

“That's all I know,” confirmed his friend. “But, good God, man! Isn't that enough? What could be more
certain
than that?”

“And that was when I converted,” Murata told me.

I met Murata, along with three women in their eighties, all part of a delegation of Soka Gakkai members who'd been part of the original “Kansai Campaign,” a period in the early 1950s when the Soka Gakkai had grown very rapidly, expanding by 11,111 families in the city of Osaka during one month alone. When I asked how they'd joined, I discovered that they'd each been converted by members who had themselves joined the movement only a week or so before.

“But you must have grown up in other religious traditions,” I observed. “What made these people approach you like that when they'd only just joined themselves?”

One after another, they explained the “one verse” of the Law that was enough to convert so many people right on the spot, passing from hand to hand like the lit flame of the candle I spoke of earlier. All they'd needed to hear was that the Soka Gakkai put life first. Simple as it was, that was enough to make people want to pass the message along. They'd seen for themselves what happened when religion got the upper hand. Religion served itself. Or it served industry, the military, or the state. In either event, human values—and human
life
—were all but annihilated in the process. The result was a senseless war that had destroyed their own country and much of Asia besides. I observed that this had been the case many times throughout history. The state-sponsored Shintoism that had co-opted virtually every sect of Japanese Buddhism during the war was only one regrettable example. Evangelical Christianity had done the same thing in my country only a few years earlier by supporting the war in Iraq. Religions were always selling out.

That was when I heard Murata's story.

Half a century later, his body still shook with the force of it. “To be called a traitor to the nation during those years, and to hold fast to the truth in spite of everything, what an honor!” he continued, almost shouting now. “There could have been no more honorable title than Enemy of the State!”

I left the interview impressed with what I had heard. Nevertheless, I couldn't help asking myself exactly what truth Murata was referring to. Many people held fast to truth in the face of imprisonment. Persecution was an ordeal and the truth
—some
truth—was essential if one wanted to endure it. But that truth could be anything from Nichiren Buddhism to Aryan Nationalism. Gandhi had held fast to the truth, but then so had the infamous Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. There was no guarantee that one's truth would be true for everyone, or that it would even be a truth worth having.

In the case of the leaders Murata's friend was referring to, the issue seemed to hinge upon Makiguchi and Toda's refusal to accept a Shinto amulet from the Japanese government, which would have symbolized their patriotism and their willingness to collapse (the government word was “consolidate”) their Buddhism under the banner of Japanese militarism. Under the ironically named Peace Preservation Law, prisoners could be detained and interrogated indefinitely for such a refusal.

At one point early on in the transcript of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi's interrogation, he was asked how many amulets to the Sun Goddess Amaterasu and other Shinto deities he had destroyed or caused to be destroyed. Makiguchi's answer was considered so breathtakingly seditious that it bore special mention in the August 1943 edition of
Tokko geppo
(The Special Higher Police Monthly). “We must have burned
at least
five hundred of those things,” he'd said. The thought police had little use for him after that, continuing to conduct routine interrogations but without any real conviction that they would change his mind, and Makiguchi died in prison a year later of exhaustion and malnutrition.

Some scholars have insisted that, in refusing to accept a Shinto amulet, Makiguchi and his disciple Josei Toda were merely adhering to the letter of Nichiren Buddhist orthodoxy, which forbid them from mixing non-Nichiren elements with their religion. According to them, the truth Makiguchi died for was, at best, some version of the right to religious freedom. One Buddhist historian told me it was like the Jehovah's Witnesses refusing to vote or be drawn into politics “because they were citizens of another, higher kingdom.” I surprised him by revealing that, in fact, Japanese members of the Jehovah's Witnesses had been imprisoned along with Toda and Makiguchi for their refusal to support the war. There might be something to their higher kingdom after all if it inspired such resistance. Who could say?

But if some scholars questioned the truth of Makiguchi's anti-militarism, his disciples never had. It was a given. Had he been a nationalist, or even religiously indifferent on the matter of the war, he could have secured his release from prison right away. Instead he had died. No. They understood Makiguchi's refusal to accept an amulet in far deeper, far more radical terms.

The truth that had been passed along to Murata from his friend in 1953 was much bigger than the right to religious freedom or some exclusivist approach to Buddhism. It was “certain” in Murata's mind, true, but it wasn't the kind of religious certainty that becomes a weapon in the hands of the ignorant. What was certain for Murata—post-Iwo Jima, post-Nagasaki—was the idea that there had to be a better way for humanity, and that better way could not be delivered by nations, states, or tribes. The truth he spoke of belonged to humanity as a whole, and for that reason it was, indeed, the enemy of the state. It couldn't be used to champion the rights of one group of human beings over another and would even work to subvert such narrow, self-serving impulses. It was truth beyond ethnicity; it was religion reinterpreted for a global age.

F
OR
MANY
YEARS
NOW,
I have collected amulets such as the ones Makiguchi and his disciples burned, religious trinkets, and talismans from various cultures around the world. These come from every imaginable tradition and are therefore remarkably varied in form. Collectors are drawn to the
particularity
of the things they collect; they think of them as unique or special, and it is that thought that drives the impulse to collect them. For that very reason, however, they tend to overlook the obvious—the ways in which the things they collect are all exactly the same.

Beads, for instance.

Beginning with the rosewood prayer beads I was given the day I became a Zen Buddhist monk, I have collected Catholic rosaries, Orthodox
chotkis,
Buddhist
malas,
and Muslim
tesbih
for half a lifetime now. That is why recently, on meeting a paleoanthropologist who had spent a lot of time excavating in southern France, it occurred to me to ask when beads became prominent in the archaeological record. I was trying to work out a theory about the origins of meditation and prayer.

Beads were among the first human artifacts having a purely decorative function, she explained. “But no, I don't think they originally had anything to do with prayer. They've always existed but became common during the last Ice Age when advancing glaciers pressed early human beings close together in the same habitable region. Beads may have served as a useful visual marker to distinguish one tribe from another. And so you get black bead Homo sapiens and white bead Homo sapiens. Originally, it may simply have been a good way to tell one another apart.”