I practiced with the SGI-USA for over 20 years - I got my gohonzon in August, 1987. You can do the math ;) If I hadn't been moving around so much, I probably wouldn't have lasted so long - most of the time, I was practicing on my own.
I have a personal experience of the fascistic and authoritarian atmosphere of the SGI-USA organization. Being a white American, I naturally want to be Japanese (it's a joke - that's a white person stereotype). I was enthralled when I read James Clavill's Shogun back in the early 1980s. Well, we bought a house (and I held SGI meetings here) and it has a vaulted ceiling. There is a tall wall over the landing to the stairs, and I found these beautiful gohonzons to put there. For a while, there was a Japanese seller feeding old Nichiren Shu gohonzons onto the market. These are enormous - 5' to 6' tall. As you can see, they are a simplified gohonzon form - no one would mistake these for one of the little, busy SGI-USA gohonzons. I'm going to try to paste pictures here, but I'm not sure if this medium allows it:
Gohonzon 1 - over 100 years oldGohonzon 2 - over 130 years oldThey now hang side by side, and they look beautiful! Well, when I was considering purchasing one (before I decided to purchase TWO!), I asked a Japanese leader to "read" the inscription for me, since I don't read Japanese. That really started the drama. I was told not to buy it. I got a home visit from a leader who said, "Your home has such a lovely, warm feel to it. I would hate to see that change to something dark and sinister." She was, of course, implying that, if I bought "heretical objects", they would magically cause a dark miasma to descend over my home. For all her "wisdom", she couldn't tell that I'd already bought both of them, and they were sitting right upstairs, waiting to be hung!
The local big-cheese women's division Joint-Territory leader, a Japanese war-bride, came by. She inspected these two gohonzons, which were now hanging on my wall, and told me she thought the members might get confused. I, and another (American) leader, disagreed, saying that we didn't think that any of the American members would see them as anything other than beautiful original calligraphy. Besides, where they were hanging, they weren't visible from the room where I held meetings. When the American leader stepped out, the Japanese leader told me I should chant until I agreed with her. That was her "guidance" to me.
It was interesting when, two weeks later, she dropped dead. She was only in her 50s! This was, of course, a sad thing, and that should be the end of it. But I know for a fact, having spent much time in the higher echelons of SGI-USA leadership, that if it had been ME who dropped dead, the leaders would have wasted no time in wagging their heads and tongues about how this was my "karmic retribution" for disobeying my leaders' orders! It is commonplace in the SGI-USA leadership to exploit members' misfortunes this way, as a cautionary tale to inspire more submission and obedience from the membership. But to suggest that SHE was struck dead for presenting her own opinion as official Buddhist doctrine - that would be in terribly poor taste, wouldn't it? So why are the members not accorded the same respect the leaders are?
I heard that, at one meeting, one member had said, "Well, what if she had a museum of Japanese art and artefacts, and wanted to display these examples of original calligraphy as works of art? That would be okay, wouldn't it?" The leader replied archly, "She doesn't HAVE a museum, does she?"
I have always read a lot, and when I started reading about Buddhism outside the SGI-USA's approved publications, I discovered some rather alarming things. Remember how we always hear that "Buddhism is win or lose"? Look what I found from the Buddha in the Dhammapada:
Winning gives birth to hostility. Losing, one lies down in pain. The calmed lie down with ease, having set winning and losing aside.Now THAT ^ is consistent with the Buddhist principle that attachment causes suffering! "Chant for whatever you want" and "Chant to win" serve only to strengthen attachments! Finally, from the Kalama Sutra:
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”Here's another version:
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."Why should we accept that we have to "discard, close, ignore, and abandon" such wisdom? Perhaps because Nichiren and Daisaku Ikeda both saw their opportunity to be worshiped as gods! The way the SGI-USA pays to have Daisaku Ikeda's name put on public monuments is deeply disturbing. The Gandhi-King-Ikeda Exhibit is a joke - more like "One of these things is not like the others!" And the way Daisaku Ikeda's effectively anonymous son Hiromasa is being shoved into the spotlight leads me to suspect that this nobody, who hasn't actually accomplished *anything* on his own, whose only claim to fame is that his daddy is famous, is being positioned to take over the International Presidentship once Daisaku kicks the bucket. To take over what will become a hereditary dynasty rather than a leadership position earned by merit. It's just gross. All hail the Dear Leader!