Passing on the Law. The Growth of Soka Gakkai International in Argentina

Abstract

Soka Gakkai is a Japanese Nichiren Buddhism lay organization that has greatly grown in the last decades. Through a strong organizational structure and a membership that undertakes the job of spreading the practice and recruiting new members, they became Argentina’s biggest Buddhist organization with approximately 30,000 members. Through this article, I would like to highlight some factors that I believe contributed to its growth by focusing on two main aspects: Their practice—shown as simple, easy to learn and that will bring concrete benefits in short term—and their network organization based on residence groups, which allows them to cover more territory by decentralizing the space in order to make a closer follow-up of the newcomers and to generate lasting relationships among the members. This point also helps to create the image of a horizontal organization (consistent with the idea of equality among all people held by Nichiren Buddhism), where all members are disciples of one mentor: Daisaku Ikeda, Soka Gakkai’s president. This mentor/disciple relationship is the visible face of a rather invisible organizational structure that has proven to be very successful, given the current worldwide scale of Soka Gakkai.