Daisaku Ikeda (1928-Present)

Daisaku Ikeda is a peacebuilder, Buddhist philosopher, educator, author, and poet. He was president of the Soka Gakkai lay Buddhist organization in Japan from 1960–79 and is the founding president of the Soka Gakkai International (SGI), one of the world’s largest and most diverse community-based Buddhist associations, promoting a philosophy of empowerment and social engagement for peace. He is also the founder of the Soka Schools system and several international institutions promoting peace, culture, and education.

Ikeda was born in Tokyo, Japan, on January 2, 1928, the fifth of eight children, to a family of seaweed farmers. Growing up during World War II, he endured firsthand the suffering and devastation of war, including the death of his eldest brother who was killed in action in Burma (present-day Myanmar). This experience as a teenager gave birth to a lifelong passion to work for peace and root out the fundamental causes of human conflict.

In 1947, at the age of 19, he encountered Buddhism through a meeting with Josei Toda (1900–58), who was an educator, pacifist, and leader of the Soka Gakkai. Toda had been imprisoned during the war with his mentor Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871–1944). Both held firm to their religious convictions in the face of oppression by the military authorities who imposed State Shinto ideology on the population as a means of sanctifying their war of aggression, and Makiguchi had died in prison. Toda’s resolve to stand up to the militarist regime impressed Ikeda, who would later write, “The words of a person who had suffered imprisonment for his convictions carried a special weight. I felt intuitively that I could trust him.” Although Ikeda’s association with Toda lasted only 10 years, he describes his mentorship by Toda as the defining experience of his life and the source of everything he has done and become.

In May 1960, two years after Toda’s death, Ikeda, then 32, succeeded him as president of the Soka Gakkai. In 1975, he became the founding president of the SGI, now a global network linking over 12 million members in some 190 countries and territories. Ikeda writes, “Everything depends on the people. That is why it is vital to forge a growing network that brings people of goodwill and conscience together.”

Ikeda has also founded a number of independent, nonprofit research institutes that promote peace through cross-cultural, interdisciplinary collaboration: the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century (renamed the Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning, and Dialogue in 2009), the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, and the Institute of Oriental Philosophy. The Min-On Concert Association and the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum promote mutual understanding and friendship between different cultures through the arts.

It was in the 1960s that Ikeda began also to work toward the founding of a school system based on first Soka Gakkai President Makiguchi’s educational theories. This was a dream that both Makiguchi and Toda had cherished. In 1968, Ikeda realized the vision with the founding of Tokyo Junior and Senior High Schools. The schools were not simply a monument to his predecessors. Their establishment was the first major step in an ongoing endeavor to develop a humanistic educational system, one that Ikeda has described as the culminating undertaking of his life. The schools’ establishment was followed in 1971 by the establishment of Soka University, and in subsequent years by a string of other educational institutions around Japan and abroad. These schools are open to all students and have no religious instruction. Ikeda writes: “My determination was to build these schools up into centers of learning consecrated to the goal of peace, working with educators throughout the world.”

Ikeda is a strong proponent of dialogue as the foundation of peace. Since the 1970s, he has pursued dialogue with individuals from diverse backgrounds—prominent figures from around the world in the humanities, politics, faith traditions, culture, education and various academic fields—in order to discover common ground and identify ways of tackling the complex problems facing humanity. Over 70 of these have been published in book form. Dialogue and the promotion of cultural exchange have also been at the basis of his efforts to build trust and foster friendship in contexts of historical division and conflict.

The central tenet of Ikeda’s thought, grounded in Buddhist humanism, is the fundamental dignity of life, a value he sees as the key to lasting peace and human happiness. In his view, global peace relies ultimately on a self-directed transformation within the life of the individual, rather than on societal or structural reforms alone.

This conviction is expressed most succinctly in the preface of The Human Revolution, Ikeda’s novelization of the Soka Gakkai’s history and ideals: “A great inner revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a nation and, further, will enable a change in the destiny of all humankind.”

Ikeda is a prolific writer who has published more than 240 works, ranging from commentaries on Buddhism to biographical essays, poetry and children’s stories. He has two sons, Hiromasa and Takahiro, and lives with his wife, Kaneko, in Tokyo.