Waking the Buddha (7 page)

In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a being who resolves to be reborn perpetually in order to save all sentient beings from suffering—as opposed to committing him or herself to the goal of nirvana, a “blown-out” state in which all desires are extinguished and life itself is transcended, which was the aim of early Buddhism. Since Buddhism taught that sentient beings were numberless, that basically meant that the bodhisattva, who committed to a life of eternal service, cultivating vast reserves of energy, wisdom, and compassion, was on a quest as big as the universe itself.

The Lotus Sutra is filled with all kinds of Buddhist followers who have assembled to hear its teachings— including bodhisattvas, who appear in the assembly alongside the Buddha's ordinary monks and nuns. But until halfway through the sutra none of them have ever seen or even heard of the Bodhisattvas of the Earth. The Buddha announces that he has entrusted the task of preaching the Lotus Sutra in an age to come to these very beings, and at that moment the world shakes and cracks open and millions of these Earth Bodhisattvas appear. The Buddha's other followers are astounded. How could Shakyamuni have converted so many millions of bodhisattvas in the brief span of his life?

That question foreshadows the revelation, made in the next chapter of the Lotus Sutra, that the Buddha doesn't enter extinction as people once believed, attaining nirvana and thereafter effectively disappearing from the world. Like the life force that Toda understood earlier while meditating in his cell, the Buddha is eternally present, manifesting as the limitless energy and creativity of the universe itself.

To find himself in the company of the Bodhisattvas of the Earth, transported directly into the mythic world of the Lotus Sutra, seems an uncharacteristic vision for a hard-nosed, practical-minded man like Toda who had had little interest in such mystical affairs. But in retrospect, the vision fit the man. Toda understood that the Bodhisattvas of the Earth in whose company he found himself were none other than ordinary people living and struggling in the world.
These
were the people the teachings of the Lotus Sutra were designed for. Unlike other Buddhist teachings, which emphasized a monastic-style practice that could be mastered by few, the Lotus Sutra taught that ordinary individuals could attain Buddhahood in this life…. Because Buddhahood
was
this life.

Josei Toda emerged from his vision convinced that the Bodhisattvas of the Earth spoken of in the Lotus Sutra were none other than members of the Soka Gakkai. Later, the Nichiren Shoshu priesthood that originally sponsored the movement would marvel at how fast the Soka Gakkai grew, winning more new converts in a few decades than the priesthood had in centuries. But Toda understood it perfectly well. Had not Shakyamuni explained to his ordained disciples in the Lotus Sutra that it was these ordinary Earth Bodhisattvas—laypeople to a one—who were entrusted with the sacred duty of spreading Buddhism around the world?

There is something deeply poignant, and at the same time strangely appropriate, about the fact that Toda's vision and Makiguchi's death took place within a day of one another in November 1944. The two experiences are polar opposites. Toda's vision of the Bodhisattvas of the Earth was a transcendently joyful and life-affirming occasion, whereas the death of his mentor plunged him headlong into the deepest grief he had ever known. And yet, I believe those events mark the precise moment when the two great teachings of the Soka Gakkai first came together in a single person and the resolve to build the movement into what it is today was born.

Without Toda's revelation that the Buddha is life itself, and his vision of the Bodhisattvas of the Earth that completed it, Makiguchi's death would almost certainly have crushed his hope for the future. Likewise, without the death of his mentor, those revelations (extraordinary as they were) might have lacked the urgency that drove Toda to spread the Soka Gakkai's teachings throughout Japan.

Daisaku Ikeda explains it in terms of an event from the Lotus Sutra called the “Ceremony in the Air,” during which the Buddha and his entire assembly of followers ascends into the heavens above the mountaintop where he has been delivering the sutra, transcending the world of ordinary concerns and—for the moment, at least— attaining a panoramic view of the cosmos.

From real life to the Ceremony in the Air and then back to real life—this continuous back-and-forth process is the path of human revolution, the path of transforming our state of life…. We can change nothing unless our feet are firmly planted on the ground.

The discovery of Makiguchi's death marks the first pairing of religious idealism with firm, practical resolve that distinguished Toda's career as a religious leader and that has virtually defined the Soka Gakkai movement ever since.

T
HE
MEANING
of certain events in collective human history is clear from the moment they happen. A ship is sunk, and a war begins. After years of careful planning, a human being sets foot on the moon. The significance of personal events, however, usually emerges only with the benefit of hindsight. This is especially true when we speak of the hardships or tragedies. By their very nature, such events interrupt the course of individual lives, forcing us to reevaluate ourselves—our goals, our values, even our sense of who we are.

On August 23, 1950, having already failed in business the previous year when his publishing company was forced to close, Josei Toda suspended operations of the credit association of which he'd become director the year before. In the shadow of a government investigation, and with legal action against him seemingly inevitable, Toda voluntarily stepped down from his position as general director of the Soka Gakkai, a post he had held for more than twenty years. His motive was to prevent negative associations with the still-fragile postwar organization. Added to Toda's disappointment over his failed business ventures and the constant harassment of creditors was the knowledge that a number of Soka Gakkai members had invested heavily in the association and some suffered financial hardship because of its failure. Some even left the movement as a result.

Toda remained generally optimistic in his attitude toward business matters (the economic climate in postwar Tokyo was, after all, extremely volatile and fraught with risk). But he became deeply reflective about his relationship to the teachings of Nichiren Buddhism, unwilling (or perhaps unable) to go forward in his spiritual life until he had asked himself the most penetrating questions. Naturally, the most urgent of these questions concerned the role of business in his spiritual life.

From the earliest days of the Soka Gakkai, Toda had assumed responsibility for the financial viability of the organization, often funding its operations and outreach programs out of his own pocket. “Therefore, when he dedicated himself to the reconstruction of the organization after the war,” writes Ikeda, “he first gave consideration to the establishment of its economic foundation rather than its organizational development.” This strategy made sense while Makiguchi was alive; Toda's writing and publishing efforts allowing the older man to concentrate on pursuing his educational reforms. But now he began to wonder if, all along, this strategy hadn't been a way of avoiding responsibility for the
spiritual
leadership of the organization.

If it is true that new religious movements typically follow three stages in their years of formative growth— foundation, development, and completion—and that in each stage of growth a leader emerges whose temperament and abilities match the demands of the movement at that particular stage, then it is clear that Josei Toda was continuing to build a foundation for the Soka Gakkai, when it was actually the development and rapid expansion of the organization that was being called for.

Josei Toda showed a dynamic entrepreneurial spirit as a businessman and, given the right economic climate, had the skills to succeed as a businessman. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine anyone remarking years after Toda's death that he had been unusually gifted in that field, that there had been no other businessman of his caliber during the years of economic reconstruction. And yet, today even those who are critical of Josei Toda and the Soka Gakkai are forced to concede that, when we consider those religious leaders who rose to prominence immediately following World War II, Toda has no equal. He was the most innovative, most dynamic, most successful religious leader of his day.

The second period in the formation of the Soka Gakkai—the period of development—rightly begins when Toda resolved to succeed Makiguchi, becoming the organization's second president. According to Toda, that resolve occurred when he realized that other new religious groups had experienced dramatic growth during the mid-twentieth century, while the Soka Gakkai had not. Toda blamed himself for this and made a public vow to spread the teachings of Nichiren Buddhism to 750,000 families before he died. His fulfillment of that vow had much to do with the core idea behind the Soka Gakkai—that of religion serving life. It was a message with tremendous urgency in postwar Japan, as people sought the vitality and the sense of hope necessary to rebuild their lives and their nation. Toda's decision to make the spread of that “viral message” the principal activity of the movement allowed the Soka Gakkai to spread by the force of its own intrinsic appeal.

All that remained was for Toda to set that message in motion. When he announced his determination to increase the movement's ranks to 750,000 families during his lifetime in his inaugural address of May 3, 1951, most people felt it was an impossible goal to fulfill. The Soka Gakkai membership at that time stood at just a little more than three thousand individuals. The fact that Toda was able to convince the membership even to embrace such a goal is a testament to his powers of persuasion. But there is more at work here than the charisma of a single individual. What Toda seems to have felt within himself—and was therefore able to communicate to others—was the sense that the Soka Gakkai had been entrusted with a special mission to spread the teachings of Nichiren to a struggling nation. At the back of his mind, however, he must have felt glimmers of the global movement that ultimately developed from that national mission. This is made clear by his desire, shortly before his death on April 2, 1958, to spread the teachings of Nichiren Buddhism to the rest of the world. However, nowhere is this broader concern with humanity as a whole more clear than in his declaration of September 8, 1957, proposing the worldwide ban of nuclear weapons.

I
N
1946, the year following the world's first use of nuclear weapons, Albert Einstein declared, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking.” Sadly, nearly seventy years later, this is still the case. The discovery of nuclear energy represented a radical shift in the paradigm that until then had governed scientific theory and practice, but there was no corresponding shift at a social or spiritual level to prepare humanity for the awesome responsibility that came with unprecedented destructive power. A widening chasm opened before us that, then as now, seems almost impossible to bridge.

Fortunately, what seems impossible at the level of society (namely, a global spiritual shift to keep pace with the rapid scientific one) is nevertheless possible at the level of the individual, and so there is reason for hope. 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.”

In retrospect, I believe this “human revolution in just a single individual” is precisely what we see happening on September 8, 1957, when Josei Toda gave his famous declaration calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Brief as it is, the text of that declaration sounds as shocking today as it did when it was delivered more than half a century ago. A shift in paradigm is always shocking. At first we can't be certain we have heard it correctly. Because it transcends old ways of thinking, it is difficult to assimilate. In the beginning, we lack the spiritual and intellectual resources for taking it in. Indeed, we may feel tempted to reject a new paradigm at first because it doesn't fit our way of thinking.

On that day, before a stadium of fifty thousand youth members of the Soka Gakkai, Toda stated what he hoped his listeners would regard as his “foremost instruction for the future.” Given that he was then already ill—indeed, he would die seven months later—his words must have carried the added power of a last will and testament. In the famous photograph taken of him on that occasion, sporting a giant chrysanthemum on his lapel, it is clear that his physical vitality is on the wane. But he was making a transmission of the teaching he had devoted his life to, and he did so in the strongest and most uncompromising of words:

Although a movement calling for a ban on the testing of nuclear weapons has arisen around the world, it is my wish to go further, to attack the problem at its root. I want to expose and rip out the claws that lie hidden in the very depths of such weapons. I wish to declare that anyone who ventures to use nuclear weapons, irrespective of their nationality or whether their country is victorious or defeated, should be sentenced to death without exception.

Even his successor and closest disciple, Daisaku Ikeda, had to struggle to grasp the meaning of Toda's words, and so it goes without saying that they were not immediately understandable to everyone assembled for his address. For one thing, Buddhism does not support the idea of a death penalty. For another, Toda himself had often spoken out against it, claiming the idea of capital punishment was “absolutely futile.”

Toda's declaration was one of those occasions when a spiritual leader seeks to shock us out of our ordinary way of thinking. In Toda's case, what he wanted to communicate was an entirely new way of living in human society, one that would prove necessary if we were to survive in a global age.