The Soka Gakkai Practice of Buppō and the Discourse on Religion in Japan

Anne Mette Fisker-Nielsen

doi:10.3390/rel13020167

Abstract

This paper investigates the Japanese Nichiren Buddhist organization, Soka Gakkai (SG), whose members have supported the political party known as Kōmeitō, or Clean Government Party, in Japan for over half a century. SG members have often been criticized as ‘impure’ political actors, undergoing frequent public questioning of their motivations for engaging in electoral politics in light of their ‘religious’ status. The paper shows how the SG members’ support for Kōmeitō at a qualitative level indeed transcends the typical demarcations of the ‘secular-religious’ binary system. However, they also simultaneously challenge the term ‘religion’ that has functioned as an ideology in the creation of statecraft and in their competition for legitimacy. The current paper is based on long-term fieldwork, extensive interviews, and doctrinal analyses that highlight how socially productive this discourse on religion has been. It also shows how a counter-episteme, rooted in Nichiren’s theory of the Risshō Ankoku Ron and the idea of kōsen-rufu, sought to bring a ‘Buddha’ consciousness to bear on individual and collective action as a model for alternative ‘politics’. Contrary to many claims, this did not entail contesting the modern institutional separation of ‘church’ and ‘state’, but is rather an attempt to find legitimacy for participating in ‘Japan-making’ in ways that cannot easily be understood or confined to explanations framed within the ‘religious-secular’ binary system.

Highlights

This paper investigates the Japanese Nichiren Buddhist organization of Soka Gakkai (SG), whose members have supported a political party called the Kōmeitō, or the Clean Government Party, in Japan since 1964
This paper explores how SG has become the biggest Buddhist organization in postwar Japan, with around ten million members, and the way it has refused to have its collective actions dismissed by labeling them ‘religious’, along with the problematic term ‘public good’, within the realm of competitive electoral politics
Nichirenfamously argues in the Risshō Ankoku Ron (RAR) against other ‘teachings’ of his time with their ‘wrong’. Soteriological devices, such as believing that rebirth in the ‘pure land’ of Amida would lead to salvation; he saw such ‘wrong’ beliefs as the cause of profound human suffering, war, and pestilence; this was unlike the Lotus Sutra teaching, he argued, which pointed to existential solutions as manifesting in a ‘belief’ in universal Buddhahood, no way to overcome the human tendency to be ‘ruled’ by the emotions of arrogance, greed, and ignorance, the ‘three poisons’17 that were seen as the cause of self-destructive tendencies

Summary

Using the Term ‘Religion’ to Demarcate ‘Difference’ and ‘Impurity’

SG’s support for Kōmeitō was and continues to be typically categorized as ‘religious’. Rituals and edicts containing devotions to the emperor as a divine figure, it was possible to maintain the position that ‘belief’ was a private matter and something amorphous to do with ‘religion’ This ‘non-religious secular’ (Josephson 2012) realm of public morality signified ‘Japan’ as a modern ‘civilized’ nation that presented a separation of ‘church and state’, the pivotal criterion for ‘civilization’ by the end of the nineteenth century (Isomae 2003, 2014). The praxis of ‘human revolution’ was SG’s modern take on Nichiren’s reading of the doctrine of ichinen sanzen This presented the individual not as ‘religious’ but as an embodied being existing in a system of meaning and human relations; to understand its SG identity, I look at how the organization sought participation in ‘the world’, both as a model for deeper human connectivity and for practical engagement in ‘society’. The success of this movement inevitably posed challenges to the modern nation-state’s disciplinary powers, whereby ‘power is exercised within discourses in the ways in which they constitute and govern individual subjects’ (Weedon 1987, p. 113; see Foucault [1971] 1991), contained in this case within the religious-secular binary conceptualization

The Multifaceted and Socially Productive Term ‘Religion’

The ‘Buddhist Law’ Is Found in ‘Human Behavior’

The Dharma as Defying Karma and the ‘Spirit’ of the Risshō Ankoku Ron

Findings

Conclusions