Political Media Review

While most mainstream Westerners may think of the Dalai Lama, robed monks or possibly Thich Nhat Hahn when they consider Buddhists, it is Soka Gakkai that has quietly built a mass organization. The Japanese export and its Nichiren Buddhism have become one of the fastest growing disciplines in the last 20 years. Yet it eschews the aesthetic, ceremony and iconography the vast majority of people associate with Buddhism, and focuses on society over the solitary meditation people think of when they recall Buddhism.

Such a phenomenon begs the question of why does a faith that looks little like what people think of Buddhism, let alone one that is to some politically revolutionary, seeing such growth.

In Waking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion (Middleway Press: 2014), author Clark Strand weaves an especially immersive story about social change, revolution versus reform, and modern Buddhism in the form of Soka Gakkai International, the international component of Buddhism’s largest movement.

SGI, as it is popularly known, is a lay organization founded in Japan. Its lineage can be traced back to Tsunesaburō Makiguchi and Jōsei Toda, who founded its predecessor in 1930 and registered it in Japan as a religious organization in 1952. Unlike Zen Buddhism, it has no outwardly religious frame, nor does it have monks or priests. Under the leadership of Daisaku Ikeda, it advocates equality for all, world peace through its kosen-rufu initiative and what Strand calls radical self-empowerment in the form of its “Human Revolution” creed. SGI has attracted members in nearly 200 countries. In America, it’s widely regarded as the country’s most racially diverse Buddhist group.

Waking the Buddha‘s storytelling here is first rate, and the former Tricycle editor’s research on SGI offers an absorbing look at the world that shaped the organization. As Strand remarks, though it traces roots back to Nichiren Diashonin more than a millennium ago, SGI’s Buddhism has been largely forged in the last few generations. The Japanese government charged Makiguchi and Toda during World War II with denying the emperor’s divinity, and sent the pair to prison, where Makiguchi died of malnutrition. Repression and arrests of its organizers during the war would prove to define the group in myriad ways. Many adherents would later reflect on steeling their commitment to a Buddhism which refused to bow to Japan’s royalty during the war as well as amid official violence and persecution. It was in this environment where the idea of life over doctrine, rather than doctrine over life won many Japanese weary of orthodoxy catering to the powerful rather than its people.

For the unschooled, the work transverses a few decades and many personal interviews in a brisk, engrossing fashion. Practical considerations from the business of building a large devotional formation to leadership succession to SGI’s split with Nichiren Shoshu in 1991 are explored in varying levels of detail, to which the reader can explore elsewhere or seemingly be content with. Waking the Buddha is as much about aspirations as the past. In sharing conversations among Japanese members, Strand shares the circumstances of those who chose to convert mere days after exposure to Soka Gakkai’s teachings. He refutes the idea that members chant for money or cars with a subversively clear class analysis. By his pen, Strand conveys the optimism the ill, the impoverished and many more received through contact with people like Ikeda and the SGI’s message of self-determination.

Although the internal dynamics plumbed are quite compelling, Waking the Buddha is at its best in investigating the thorny issues of faith and justice. As such, modern social questions, from political freedom to the nuclear devastation that scarred Japan in the group’s earliest days to poverty to sustainability, have been ongoing concerns of SGI, which has often been challenged as political rather than religious in character. Strand spares no words in noting the ossification of many religious paths that start from a progressive impulse, but drift to the center as concern for ideology, identity and pragmatism surpasses the improvement of lives. Overarching inquiries of how a section can keep the fire of hope for the poor and those needing such faith burning amid the demands of today’s world are worthy of more interrogation.

Strand’s work leaves some of the more tantalizing queries open. SGI holds that Buddhahood is available to anyone, regardless of background, race, gender and sexual orientation. It’s a socially conscious concept in many countries, but left unanswered is how Nichiren Buddhism in the United States can avoid becoming commodified in a nation where such ideals as equality are honed for the service of dominant political agendas. One need only look at the trap Tibetan Buddhism has arguably fallen into: where its positive aspects are used in the West as a political football — in the aforementioned matter, against China and its autonomy from the United States. Although since Shakyamuni Buddha went among the poor, Buddhism has in some instances been rooted in a desire to challenge authority, such is a sensitive subject. The reader is pressed to wonder at what point does Buddhism embracing reportedly democratic ideals become inadvertently serving something else, as the ideals of freedom various nations postulate may be a means of undercutting independent lands resistant to the sphere of Western influence.

Marketing an imperial docket is, of course, not new. Theorist Jodi Dean notes in The Communist Horizon the ideals many civil society organizations hold dear, including access, inclusion, participation and discussion, have rapidly been coopted into what she calls communicative capitalism, a space where the very notions of democracy are supplanted in the service of wealth and power. It’s a hard question that Strand’s prose can’t help but lead one to. Given how young of an organization SGI is, and the ascent of neoliberalism in the last 30 years, the dangers of external pressures are obvious.

American Buddhism most assuredly attracts people who see mainstream Christian, Muslim and Jewish sects as having rhetorically lost their souls to internecine battles, scandal, sectarianism and bureaucracy. Buddhism is looked at as a transparent, even ecumenical, in terms of not being moored to the conflicts of other denominations. However, American Buddhism is not without its detractors. The most pointed of criticism comes in the form of the indictment of North American practice as little more than appropriation of Asian culture, where mostly wealthy, mostly white self-styled experts have turned an ancient spirituality into a cottage industry of self-help, pursuits of personal wealth and Tony Robbins-ish empowerment retreats. The degree to that remark’s fairness depends on who you ask. To some, the post-racial narrative popular in the United States gives one the privilege of not seeing class and race, for example. To others, America’s economic, cultural and gender disparities are a clarion call for Buddhists to apply their practice in the name of social justice. Strand comes across early on as not afraid to tackle race and class when talking about Buddhism, and notably SGI’s success in its racial makeup. How it has done it, and avoided the issues noted, absolutely invites further study.

Strand relates a story of SGI that is, in countless ways, a story of many religions that emerge in their time and must contend with challenges. With a lineage more contemporary than most faiths, SGI’s history and vision are indubitably most relatable to people now. However, Strand points out issues such as ethnic pluralism, the decline of religion and competition among them, and our evolving understanding of humanism to be among the many contestations. Further, he notes, if Soka Gakkai can be regarded as a prosperity-driven religion, one that grows among those facing adversity, what becomes of it when adversity is minimized? Though much is yet undetermined, Waking the Buddha is a valuable glimpse into a practice whose growth many can learn from.