BOOK TALK

Encountering Richard Seager

Encountering the Dharma: Daisaku Ikeda, Soka Gakkai, and Buddhist Humanism is an exploration of the Soka Gakkai and its history through the eyes and mind of Richard Seager, an historian of American religion and Associate Professor of Religion at Hamilton College. With support from the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century, Seager embarked on a journey in 2001 that began with a cool spring in Tokyo. From a quiet garden decorated with snowflakes and cherry blossoms, Seager begins his skeptical quest for what has variously been called a “cult,” a “philosophy,” and “an empire.” What is Soka Gakkai, this dynamic lay Buddhist organization that has grown to over 12 million since it was founded in 1930? What is its relationship with Nichiren, a 13th century monk? What are we to make of Daisaku Ikeda, the man responsible for shaping and globalizing Soka Gakkai over the past 45 years? And what do children learn in the numerous “Soka schools” that makes them so happy? BRC publications manager Patti Marxsen sat down with Richard to discuss these questions and explore his journey of writing this book.

PM: You approached this assignment with what we might think of as a “typically cynical” stance of a post-modern intellectual. What is the source of that cynical outlook that seems so commonplace in our world today? Is it an intellectual stance, or is it something else?

RS: I think it is something broader than a postmodern intellectual stance and I think there are lots of reasons for it. Personally, I engage with things like how we seem to live in a sound-bite culture where things are discussed in little snippets and our public discourse seems not to be able to hold two hard thoughts in its mind at the same time. This culture forces people to hold simplistic positions on things. In the book, there is a section where the narrator is reminded that there are good reasons to be cynical and there, I think, he has on his mind how people were just so overenthusiastic about the market boom in the Nineties when everything was rolling and then immediately became very remorseful and engaged in lamentations when the market collapsed . This shifting back and forth on a superficial level is, I think, one very good reason to be generally cynical in our world today.

PM: Perhaps part of the explanation for superficial discourse is that the issues before us are so complicated.

RS: Yes, there are a lot of really intractable issues out there. My late wife Ann and I used to have this discussion—and I mention this since she comes into the book—and she always took the position that skepticism was allowable, but not cynicism. I always took the position that cynicism is actually a lot more fun than skepticism, but I drew the line with bitterness because bitterness is the death of the soul; that is where you can’t go. But cynicism has a sarcastic middle ground and keeping a sense of humor about the world is pretty important, I think.

PM: A coping mechanism maybe?

RS: A coping mechanism; a survival tactic. Whatever the reason, it makes for good conversation. I will say, all of that aside, that one of the things I really enjoyed about being immersed in Soka Gakkai is that the organization and everyone in it keeps a very strong posture of hope, which is something I appreciated and valued.

PM: And that’s how you came to present it. Initially, the enthusiasm of the people you met came with a gloss of superficiality, an aura of being out of touch. But in the end you interpreted that as very sincere and very hopeful. Are you, perhaps, an optimist at heart?

RS: I don’t think of myself as an optimist, but I do think it is important to maintain hope and have a certain joy in your soul without necessarily feeling you have to be optimistic about progress. With SGI and Daisaku Ikeda, there is an optimism grounded in faith. This is really a faith proposition. Ikeda goes back daily in practice to confirm that faith and strengthen that faith.

PM: You describe Soka Gakkai early on as a hybrid movement that strives to combine modern life and the ancient wisdom of Nichiren’s understanding of the Lotus Sutra. And later, toward the end, you say, “…few groups equal the Gakkai in either its programmatic effort to adapt to new situations or its genius for organization.” Is there a lesson here in the importance of adaptability that other religions or other church organizations might learn from SGI?

RS: The moment a Buddhist steps off the plane from Asia onto American soil, adaptation is going to happen whether one wants it to or not. Still, being conscious about the process is a good idea. And I think Soka Gakkai, through its leaders, has been very self-conscious and quite brilliant about the need to adapt the Nichiren corpus to modern circumstance.

The three presidents—Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, Josei Toda, and Daisaku Ikeda—have been very good at adjusting to changing circumstances. Modernist movements, and I would class Soka Gakka as a Buddhist modernist movement, have a self-conscious approach to modernization; they look at it, think about it, and make adaptations in keeping with what they see in order to make it meaningful for the modern period.  I think that is one big lesson to be taken from my study of SGI. This is a good idea.

There is also a potential downside that I think is worth noting: You can adapt so much that you don’t have any leverage on the situation any more. You are probably aware of the crisis, ongoing crisis, bordering on a demise of liberal Protestantism. Their agenda for over a century was to adapt and adapt and adapt until finally there wasn’t really much there. So one has to be careful about over adaptation as well.

PM: You said adaptability is going to happen whether you want it or not. What comes to mind is the other side of the planet. I am thinking of the Middle East where there is tremendous resistance to a modern world, or modern movement. How do you see Islam in the context of this question of adaptation?

RS: Even as these anti-modernist forces in the Middle East refuse to adapt at some level, they are using satellite communications and modern weapons. So, in their own way, they are adapting to the modern world. Part of what is so interesting, and even admirable, about SGI is that you have a Japanese Buddhist movement adapting to what has always been considered the classical heart of Western liberalism. SGI has focused on a particular set of values, and has come up with Buddhist humanism.

PM: Is this why it appeals to young people and people of diverse cultural and religious traditions.

RS: There was an emphasis on youth from the beginning, with Makiguchi as an educator. It was there with Toda too, and it’s there with Ikeda. What I think is important about it is that this is not sentimentality about children, not about “helicopter parents,” hovering over their kids and all that. You know, the “do it for our children” rhetoric that we hear constantly. SGI is really quite contrary to that in that it gives youth lots of responsibility and lots of initiative. Right from the beginning of the movement, youth had this key role. Young people are not just active as members, but organizers and instruments and agents and decision makers. I am sure there were times when “youthful excesses” must have caused a few headaches. But the tradeoff is that you are also doing this leadership training.

PM: Culturally, we might stop and wonder why it takes so long in our society for anyone to be given any responsibility and a sense of real value. We don’t really allow young people to have a clear purpose until they are about 25 years old.

RS: I think throwing this responsibility upon kids is one of the key features of SGI, and I saw this happening wherever I went. In the end, I think young people respond very well. They seem to thrive on taking responsibility for their own actions.

PM: From the beginning, SGI has been endowed with gifted, charismatic, courageous leaders: Makiguchi, Toda, and Ikeda. One thing I really enjoyed about the book is the way you portray each of them in all of their complexity and then you suggest that each was ideally suited to his task and in tune with his era. It comes across as almost mystical, as if the right person just happened to be in the right place at the right time. With this idea in mind, what do you view as Daisaku Ikeda’s greatest contribution over the past 40 years?

RS: I have to say it is his capacity to liberalize, even secularize, the movement and to pull out of the very complex Nichiren corpus and the complex and sometimes opaque philosophy of Makiguchi and the tricky social reality Toda dealt with, something we call Buddhist humanism. But to appreciate the genius of it, you really have to understand the Japanese background. Unless you see what was going on in Japan and what Toda’s movement was all about and understand the constituencies he was working with in the post-WWII years, Ikeda’s liberalization can look a little vague.

PM: That again was one of the pleasures of reading your book. It provides the historical context we need for understanding SGI and Ikeda.

RS: His liberalism came out of a very different context than liberalism in the West, and it required the kind of doctrinal innovation that he fostered, his viewing things like cultural festivals as almost a part of practice. All the dialogues in which Ikeda is engaged, as well, are all part of creating this new vision. For members, he is the model to emulate; he is the mentor and his living out his life in the world is an important part of his message to them.

PM: You credit Daisaku Ikeda with the articulation of “peace, culture, and education as the pillars of Buddhist Humanism.” You also point out that the understanding of them among Soka Gakkai members is “unsystematic and fluid.” Is the blurriness of this over-arching mission a strength or a weakness?

RS: It might look a bit vague at first glance, but I think the fact that it is “unsystematic and fluid” is good. I think I used the metaphor of a lingua franca—peace, culture, and education—as a common language members around the world share; it is a way to communicate among different groups. And it is a way to communicate among different groups without over-defining an agenda. Culture can mean anything from painting at home to being part of a symphony to working for some sort of large cultural and/or international movement. I think that this is part of its great strength. You can either do micro or macro stuff, or you can do it in Brazil or the United States and it might have a family resemblance but it doesn’t have to. These “pillars” give SGI members a broad set of themes for what is a kind of dialogue within a global movement.

PM: Is there a downside?

RS: Well, movements usually dissipate over time. The energy fueling them can be diffused and things can get too vague. You don’t need a catechism to define these things, but in the case of SGI, whether the openness and the fluidity is a strength or a weakness is going to be up to the movement and will only be known when we move past the era of Ikeda’s presence.

PM: Let’s talk about the experience of writing the book. There are several moments in the book when the reader is startled by the shift in perspective from that of a third-party observer to the more personal role of participant. One of the first of those moments comes at a meeting in Makiguchi Hall when President Ikeda leads over 1,500 SGI leaders in chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo 100 times in memory of your late wife, Ann Seager Castle. Was that a turning point for you in your understanding of SGI and, if so, why?

RS: I think of it as a step – a key step. At the beginning the narrator is skeptical, more than skeptical. And at that point, it is still early on and he is still wondering about what to make of SGI, the controversy about it in Japan, and all sorts of things. So, of course, at an event like that he had to wonder, “Hmm, why is this happening to me?” At the same time, however, and this is much more important in the long term, there was the sense of power and authenticity and sincerity… and there was this grand gesture on the part of an individual. You see, Ikeda didn’t have to do that. They could have gotten me where they wanted me without a grand gesture. And so that sort of reading was inherent in this situation with all these people engaged in this special moment. I was aware that this is their sacred practice. I had to say, okay, I am a religionist and I know religion is used for all sorts of ends but here you have a group of people joining together in what they consider most sacred to honor the death of my wife. Do I really want to read this as a manipulative gesture?

PM: It forces you to confront yourself, doesn’t it?

RS: Particularly in the first half of the book, I was sort of rocking back and forth between a critical, analytical, skeptical approach to SGI and an intuitive sense of, “Gee, these people seem really nice.” What convinces me as the narrator is that these people are so consistently together and interesting and good-hearted and this seems to be a reflection of the practice, the whole gestalt of the movement.

PM: Another such moment comes when you meet a little boy from one of the Kansai schools who unexpectedly asks, “What is your dream, professor Seager?” I liked your response. You said, to begin with, that you could not lie to him. “I know I must try to tell him the truth,” you write. And so you spoke about your dreams for retirement. But what struck me was his happy, forward-looking spirit and how he related to you, even you: a grown-up, a stranger, an American, with an open heart. What do you think is going on in that little boy’s school and home that makes him so happy?

RS: I have to say at the outset that part of it is just that he was a goofy, good-natured little boy. It is a good school, a good environment, what SGI people would call an “encouraging” environment. You could see a child like that is a product of this very supportive environment.

PM: Yes, but this is not casual, is it? What we are talking about goes to the heart of the meaning and mission of Soka Gakkai. In this child, we seem to see the outcome of value-creation education, this responsible sense of happiness for self and others. And yet Japan is a tough society from all appearances so how does that transition occur?

RS: A lot of the SGI people I met in Japan, I admired their hardnosed realism. These were activists, really hard-working activists, who were not mystically inclined. And I do recall hearing a phrase more than once that suggested that some people may be“overprotected by the generous spirit of Ikeda Sensei.” I left that Kansai school wondering, “Wow, what’s going to happen to these kids when they are in the real world? How does this work? How does this apply?”

PM: And did you have a chance to talk to any SGI people about this? The children do seem so innocent and cheerful and happy. And yet Japan is a competitive, modern society from all appearances. How does that transition occur for children educated in Soka schools?

RS: This is where the “overprotected by the generous spirit of Ikeda sensei” entered the conversation. I asked people about that and part of the answer was that it’s a cohesive movement and many members tend to stay part of it, so even as you grow up and enter into adult life, you have a frame of reference, be it a Gakkai family or a Gakkai organization. It functions like any religious group does, to keep you on point in terms of your value systems.

PM: We are talking a lot about Japan, but your book traces the impact of SGI in other places as well.

RS: As you may have picked up in the book, Brazil becomes very important to me. There, things get refracted in different ways so I began to see things that I hadn’t been able to see in Japan – things that I liked.

PM: How did that whole South American angle deepen or alter your view of SGI?

RS: For me, what it really meant was that I was going into a Catholic culture. I was raised Catholic and I spent time in Mexico. In other words, I knew how to read Catholic culture; I knew how to read Latin culture, to a degree. So, I could see what a Gakkai-Latin blend was all about and just where Japan entered the picture with a cultural value that infused this religious movement. I could see it, and I could talk to people too about Brazil and its mañana attitude, for instance. It was interesting to learn about Soka Gakkai’s reputation for follow-through in a society where very often people don’t follow through because there is always tomorrow.

PM: You saw a lot of poverty there too. There seemed to be a lot more poverty and suffering and social injustice than you had encountered in Japan.

RS: Certainly Brazil is at a different level of economic development, no question about that. I was more struck by, and I write about it a little bit, how there is a certain kind of diligent attention to detail and self-discipline that seems very Japanese at work in the Brazilian movement. Commentators have noted that Brazilians who enter the movement without a great deal of normative middle-class diligent discipline learn how to attend to the details and inculcate discipline and the patience to do things. Part of that is practice and part of that is the responsibilities given to youthful members. Part of it is the atmosphere of the Brazilian movement. This kind of spirit is a very valuable one, I think.

PM: It was really interesting to go into this other part of the world with you.

RS: It was a real key: that was a turning point too, I think, an important step.

PM: Apart from its fascinating substance, your book is more than an academic book… it is a fine example of narrative nonfiction that tells a story of your personal and intellectual journey. It also encompasses a geographical journey to Japan, Singapore, South America, and California. When and how did you decide to unpack all of this material as a narrative and what challenges did you confront in finding the right voice?

RS: Actually, the concept was there from the beginning.

PM: So you never thought you would do a straight-up academic book?

RS: No, I knew I couldn’t. I don’t have the training to do Japan in a straight-up academic fashion. So the notion was always there from the beginning to introduce a narrator who can second-guess himself, who can wonder out loud, change his mind, not quite understand things and have to figure them out, then I could do it. Straight-up academics would have required a certain kind of linguistic skill that I don’t have. I had to step off a strictly academic model to begin with.

PM: But still, you have the problem of finding the voice…

RS: That was a huge struggle and it took a lot of time; it was a constant struggle. And since a lot of the writing comes out in the writing, I just rewrote and rewrote and rewrote. Finally, I came to grips with the fact that this was not my story, it was a story about Soka Gakkai. There was this marvelous epic story that I wanted to tell, and I do think of it as a kind of epic of Soka Gakkai. That story was the story. My story became in service of that story.  Once I saw that, I could determine how much personal went in and how much did not. A decision had to made and I felt that the responsible and important thing was to make the narrator’s story serve the larger story.

PM: There is, of course, this story within the story, the story of the loss of your wife Ann. There is a quality of self-witness in some of that; you are actually observing yourself as you go through grief and trying to see yourself in these new stages and phase of life as a widower. This idea of self-witness can have a cathartic purpose in autobiographical writing in general. Some would say a narrative writer or an autobiographical writer writes his way out of a traumatic experience. Are you conscious of this book as an act of catharsis? Is narrative writing inherently cathartic?

RS: Cathartic might be a little too strong a word because, at least to me, it suggests a kind of powerful encounter, a blast of some kind. And this was more of a long process of research, writing, editing texts. I think of editing as a massaging of the text, so I suppose this was also a kind of massaging of my psyche.

PM: So there wasn’t an epiphany…

RS: Exactly, and as I struggled to find my voice and to choose the language to describe both Soka Gakkai and my own experience, I was writing my way out of that period of time, post-Ann’s death, onto a new plateau of my life. So, it was transformative, yes. I would say transformative, but not cathartic.

PM: In a sense I think this type of writing makes a text of one’s life. While you are doing that you are writing your experience in a way that lets you step back and look at it.

RS: There is a certain objectification that does go on, yes, particularly when you have made choices to cut out paragraphs or pages that were more detailed or more intense because you didn’t want that in there. I chose, in the editorial process, to present my experience in a tamped down way; I didn’t want much emotional excess. I am not particularly fond of that. I love Italian opera, but I don’t do Italian opera myself.

PM: Yes, narrative writing is not a journal intime; everything is more carefully chosen. It makes it more interesting, I think, the way it is measured. The personal aspect of it is quite measured, but there is just enough of it to enrich the epic.

RS: I am glad it feels like enough because I still have people who say that they would have liked a little more of the personal. A book is never done even when it is published.

PM: I agree with you and I think there are many ways to tell a story. You just have to stop at some stage and say “I am done with it,” even if it’s not done with me.

RS: Yes, you just have to stop.

PM: You are a professor of living religion, really interested in what is going on now and the relevance of religion in our world today. Do you think you are reaching more people with a narrative style, as opposed to academic work?

RS: A broader audience is of interest to me and to tell you the truth I have found that it is interesting to write when you have a narrative presence that is both you and not you at the same time, so that you can say things that are personal but you are not bound by your own experience. Having a narrator reflect on whatever he or she might be observing or studying is a whole different way to work with material.

PM: What else will you take with you from the experience of writing this book?

RS: Part of the experience I had as I was trying to figure out Soka Gakkai was that people were so supportive of my work, so encouraging to me, so hands off in terms of what I was doing, so indulgent of me and my skepticism, so permitting of my creativity. I began to see that how they were treating me reflected the values they see in peace, culture, and education. I began to appreciate the optimism and freedom of that stance, and that is a sense of appreciation I will keep. One of my important insights into Buddhist humanism came to me as I watched how the people I encountered treated me and respected my work.