Daisaku Ikeda’s philosophy of peace, education proposals, and Soka education: convergences and divergences in peace education

Abstract

In this article, the authors introduce and explicate Daisaku Ikeda’s contributions to peace education. Ikeda is a Buddhist leader, peacebuilder, school founder, and prolific author whose six decades of contributions to peace education have had a global impact in practice but have remained unexamined in the extant, particularly Anglophone, literature. Using excerpts and bilingual discourse analysis of the Ikeda corpus, the authors focus on five aspects to trace the past, present, and future of Ikeda’s contributions to peace education: first, they trace the biographical roots of Ikeda’s contributions to his early educational experiences and encounter with Josei Toda (1900–1958). Second, they outline the Nichiren Buddhist philosophy informing Ikeda’s approach to peace education. Third, they explicate in the context of peace and peace education Ikeda’s concept of value-creating, or Soka education (soka kyoiku) relative to value-creating pedagogy (soka kyoikugaku) theorized by Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871–1944). In light of this relation, they also trace the origin of the Soka Gakkai International, of which Ikeda is founding president. Fifth, they clarify Ikeda’s educational proposals made explicitly under the label of ‘peace education,’ namely, cultural exchange, a United Nations for Education, and education for disarmament and human rights (including anti-bullying, sustainability, and global citizenship). The authors conclude that Ikeda’s perspectives, proposals, and practices of Soka education and ‘peace education’ can be viewed as a tripartite ontological model of a process of becoming, moving from inner transformation by means of dialogue to global citizenship.