Quote
Songshand
I'm a little confused though. What is the difference between Nichiren Shu and Nichiren Shoshu? Also when the split happened with SGI, why were all the members of SGI excommunicated and not just Ikeda since it seems he was the problem?
.
Songshand, the Japanese priest Nichiren, who lived in the 1200's in Japan, had five or six senior priests who followed him. After Nichiren's death, these priests founded their own temples, but sometimes interpreted the Lotus Sutra and Nichiren's writings slightly differently. I think that Nichiren Shu sees Shakyamuni Buddha, the Indian prince, as the true Buddha and Nichiren as merely a wise teacher, while the Soka Gakkai and Nichiren Shoshu see Nichiren as the true Buddha.
The buddhajones website also lists Fuju-fuse, Nipponzan Myohoji, Rissho Kosei Kai, and the Shoshinkai as schools of Nichiren Buddhism. The fraughtwithperil website has a blog by Mark Rogow, who practices Kempon Hokke, also a school of Nichiren Buddhism. (Mark has no love for SGI either and sometimes quotes this thread in his blog -- Hi, Mark!)
As for the SGI/Nichiren Shoshu split, who really knows what happened there? The only source of information I had at that time was the Soka Gakkai, as a lot of this stuff was happening in Japan, and I don't speak or read Japanese. And they're not exactly unbiased.
In the United States there are only a handful of Nichiren Shoshu temples -- Flushing, New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Hawaii, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Most SGI members live in areas where there aren't any. So for most SGI-USA members, the temple's far away, and the priest is some Japanese guy in a long gray robe who handed you the Gohonzon once and you never saw him again. Most SGI-USA members COULDN'T have practiced with the temple even if they wanted to --and I'm sure that the situation was similar in other countries. Ikeda and his buddies knew this -- that a high percentage of the SGI members would believe whatever he told them and side with SGI rather than the Nichiren Shoshu priests. The leaders and other members were our friends, people we saw all the time; the priest is just some stranger.
We were told that Nikken ordered SGI to disband -- and then excommunicated the SGI members along with Ikeda because we wouldn't stop following a heretical leader. We were told that Nikken wanted us to join the temples. Well, if he thought we could do that, he was pretty ignorant of the real situation outside of Japan -- most of us didn't live near a temple. Was he really going to build all these temples overseas and send priests to them? That would involve spending a lot of money, and training a lot more priests -- and training non-Japanese people to be priests. No, for most of us, the Soka Gakkai was the only game in town, if you wanted to practice Nichiren Buddhism.
But who knows what Nikken REALLY said? Ikeda had to be tired of priests telling him what to do. He wasn't going to share the power and the money with anyone -- and he realized that a lot of the overseas SGI members had few ties to the Nichiren Shoshu priests anyway. He KNEW he could get away with making SGI all his own show ---so why not do it? Of course, he couldn't say that; he had to create this whole story that would make the members angry at the priests. Well, why not? He had good PR people at headquarters and devout "True Believer" leaders worldwide who would spread the word and get the members outraged at the high priest. Besides, giving people a common enemy unites them.
It all worked so predictably. We responded by HATING the priests; members were even chanting for Nikken's death! Such nice Buddhists we were. It was that mob mentality -- where people in a riot will do things that they would never do if they were alone. I will confess that, while I think of myself as a critical thinker, I still got caught up in the insanity and hatred. If your friends are acting crazy...it can be hard to behave sanely.
Our leaders told us that we were excommunicated and barred from the temples. Well, I was on vacation in Washington during this time, and went to the temple there one day. Rather defiantly, I told the lay member there that I was a Soka Gakkai member. I was not "barred" from the temple at all; I was invited in. I was antagonistic; he was reasonable and respectful. By the end of our discussion, I still did not agree with him on everything, but I did apologize for my earlier rudeness. If this guy had gone to one of my group's SGI meetings, I doubt that the members would have been as respectful to him as he was to me. Sad to say, we were so brainwashed and full of rage in those days.
SGI just had a better public relations department than the priests, in my opinion. At the time, I blindly believed what SGI said about the split, as did almost all of the members that I knew. Who knows what the real truth is? Ikeda, and he certainly isn't telling. Interestingly enough, "Westword" magazine out in Colorado wrote something that the local SGI chapter didn't like, a few years back. One of their PR hacks wrote in indignantly, and said that President Ikeda was not "kicked out" by the priests -- he chose to leave because of the priests' corruption and lack of progressiveness. By this time, SGI had been telling its members for YEARS that the evil priests EXCOMMUNICATED them -- now, they're reversing the story and saying no, Ikeda just CHOSE to leave? Curiouser and curiouser.
And speaking of PR, Lisa Jones, a former SGI employee, began an anti-cult website after she left SGI. Well, she'd apparently forgotten that when she went to work for SGI, she'd signed a paper saying that she would not write about SGI after she left that job. SGI used that paper to threaten her with legal action, and force her to shut her website down. Now, I can see why Microsoft would try to prevent employees from telling company secrets to another technology company. But what does a religious organization have to worry about? What exactly do the SGI Public Relations employees know that SGI doesn't want the world to find out?
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/04/2009 11:24PM by tsukimoto.