Dharma World Buddhist magazine

Rissho Kosei-kai's Social Contribution: Bodhisattva Practice Today

by Masahiro Nemoto

The role played by lay religious movements is valuable, in that they offer people a way to avoid being caught up in the current prejudices about religion.

Rissho Kosei-kai was founded in 1938 as a lay Buddhist movement; now approaching its seventieth anniversary, it is still in its youth as a religious movement or group. In the history of religious movements, I expect that there are very few examples that match the scale of the growth and development of every aspect of its work, including its organization and activity programs, over as short a period as only seventy years.

What made this growth and development possible? The unique social environment of Japan during and after World War II when Rissho Kosei-kai was starting out no doubt had an influence, as did the superior leadership of both Rev. Nikkyo Niwano, founder, and Mrs. Myoko Naganuma, cofounder. The faith inspired by the founder and cofounder also led lay leaders to zealously pursue dissemination work.

At the same time, I also feel that people were drawn by Rissho Kosei-kai's emphasis on striving together for individual perfection, that is, the revelation of each person's buddha-nature and the attainment of buddhahood, by thoroughly carrying out bodhisattva practice in all aspects of daily life, as stated in the Members' Vow. I am confident that the dynamic message of everyday bodhisattva practice was the fundamental energy source that fueled Rissho Kosei-kai's astonishing growth and development, and that this will continue to be so in the future.

The Role of Lay Buddhist Activities

I, personally, belong to a second generation of believers; through my family's membership in Rissho Kosei-kai, I was exposed from my earliest youth to the teachings of the Buddha, and I grew up in an environment in which I was able to take part in a variety of faith-related activities. I think that many members, including myself, would have ended up living our whole lives without having much to do with religion had we not encountered lay religious activities such as are practiced at home in Rissho Kosei-kai.

This is because Japan, unlike many other countries, is an environment where fixed concepts and prejudices about religion are deeply rooted, meaning that people do not develop a meaningful interest in religion unless they have some special motivation to do so. The most probable outcome for most people is to live their entire lives without a correct understanding of the profound aspects of religion, and in ways far removed from the path of trying to practically apply "bodhisattva practice" or the concepts of love and compassion in their lives.

The vivid, living religions and religious feeling that in former ages formed the foundation of Japan's culture and moral system were gradually lost due to factors such as the introduction of the danka system of registering every family with a specific Buddhist temple, introduced in the Edo period as a way of suppressing clandestine Christianity, and government repression of Buddhism during the early part of the Meiji era in order to promote Shinto as the state religion. Most unfortunately, one result was that people came to regard religion as something weak and depressing. It seems to me that these factors helped create the diluted religiosity that prevails in Japanese society today.

In this context as well, I think that the role played by lay religious movements such as Rissho Kosei-kai is valuable, in that these movements offer many people a way to avoid being caught up in the current prejudices about religion, and instead encourage efforts toward a way of life that takes a square look at religion and is founded in religious feeling. Lay religious movements also have an extremely important mission from the altruistic point of view of promoting religious feeling that aims to restore morality and an ethical outlook to society at large.

I feel fortunate that, in my own life, I have been able to avoid being influenced by prejudice and fixed concepts about religion, and was instead given the opportunity to directly receive the message of Buddhism. As a branch head, I am presently working to put my Buddhist faith into practice together with everyone in my district, focusing on dissemination work and bodhisattva practice as each one of us strives to reveal our buddha-nature. Since I started out as a staff member at twenty-two, until I was made a branch head in my late forties, I have been working at Rissho Kosei-kai headquarters. During that time I have been given many opportunities to participate in interreligious dialogue/cooperation and social welfare/peace movements, both inside Japan and abroad. Based on these experiences, I would like to take a look at bodhisattva practice today, the social responsibility of Buddhism, and how this relates specifically to our organization.

What Buddhism and Bodhisattva Practice Mean to Me

First, I would like to describe several phenomena that today's world and Japanese society seem to me to have in common. The first is the belittlement of the dignity of life. In every region of the world, many disputes, civil wars, and acts of terrorism are going on, with innocent people being slaughtered nearly every day. In Japan, murders and assaults are happening nearly every day, with no letup in sight.

The second is egoism. People are behaving selfishly on every level--as individuals, families, ethnic groups, religions, and nations. The attitude that "All is well as long as life is good for me and mine" gives rise to confrontation.

The third is a tendency to focus on the past and/or the future while forgetting to give proper attention to living the present moment.

When I see these tendencies being played out in the world and in Japan, I feel very strongly that religion, and especially the message of Buddhism, has an increasingly important role and mission to fulfill in guiding our age away from confrontation and toward peace.

First, Buddhism above all teaches us the value and preciousness of life. It teaches that our lives are part of the great life force of the universe that causes us all to live. It also teaches us how to use this precious gift of life. That is, to use it not only for ourselves, but also for the benefit of other people and the society at large. All of us can live because we are supported by the whole, and thus we should live to benefit the whole. It also teaches us to put our hearts into what we are doing in the present moment.

A worldview that perceives our individual lives as part of the great life force can function as a core belief appropriate to our present age and conducive to creating peace and security in our future. It is our mission and obligation to communicate to the world the truth of the message that to harm or take the lives of others also harms and gnaws away at our own lives. By the same token, when other lives are alight with vitality, this lights up our lives as well.

To put it in Buddhist terms, to devote our lives to others-- that is, to engage in bodhisattva practice--is the best way to use our lives. Another important Buddhist message advises us not to get wrapped up in the past or be overly anxious about the future, but rather to concentrate on carrying out bodhisattva practice every day and every moment, living wholeheartedly in the present time. When we speak of dissemination activities, what we mean is the work of communicating these messages to others inside Japan and abroad.

At present, I am using my own life as a branch head to try to communicate this Buddhist way of life and to invite as many people as possible in my local community to walk together with us on the Buddhist path. This might seem like rather a long way around, but in fact I think that this is the surest and shortest way of achieving the goal of a peaceful society in a peaceful world. This is because all human groups--families, societies, ethnic groups, and nations--are made up of individuals, and when individuals awaken to the preciousness of life and devote themselves to others, this brings peace both to the individuals and to the large entities of which they are part.

Learning from Hands-on Experience

As a staff member of Rissho Kosei-kai, I have worked mainly on providing support to international refugees, a direction that originally grew out of a visit I made to the scene of a major famine in Africa in the 1980s. Since then, I have been involved in helping victims of drought in Ethiopia, Somali refugees, refugees and displaced persons in the former Yugoslavia, Afghan refugees, and Kurdish refugees. For three years in the latter half of the 1980s, I was stationed at the headquarters of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva.

My most formative experience was in Ethiopia late in 1984. When I saw so many children with their stomachs distended from malnutrition and no hope for tomorrow, I felt enraged that such a thing had been allowed to happen, but at the same time utterly powerless.

After that, I felt that I wanted to do something for these people, and in that spirit I started trying to help them. However, as I continued this work, the feeling that I was "doing something for them" underwent a change. Many employees of the UNHCR call the refugees "friends." With friends or family, we naturally try to find out what is happening to them, how they feel, and what they need. To put yourself in another's place and look at things from his or her point of view is expressed in English by the word "understand," a combination of the two words, "under" and "stand." I learned that when you place yourself below the other person in a position of humility, this opens the door through which heart-to-heart communication can then take place.

The Japanese language has adopted the word "volunteer" from English, but the most fundamental point of the Buddhist doctrine of "taking refuge in the Three Treasures of the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha" is that one takes refuge voluntarily. I think that the attitude that leads one to voluntarily work for the benefit of others and our world is common to all the people who work in the United Nations and in nongovernmental organizations, as well as to people who engage in religious activities. I learned that this spontaneous desire to act is the key factor in these fields.

As a member of the Buddhist faith starting out with refugee support work and also participating in various social and peace movements, the most important thing I learned was a feeling for life, which showed me that all lives do in fact arise from the same great life force, are connected with one another, are all equally precious and originally a unified phenomenon in which self and other are not separate.

For example, in the course of pursuing Rissho Kosei-kai's work in the former Yugoslavia, it was because we were standing on the Buddhist worldview that considers all lives as equally precious and part of a greater life force, that we were able from the very start to provide uniform and completely unprejudiced support to the three mutually antagonistic groups of Croats, Serbs, and Muslims. This was an extremely valuable experience for me, as it allowed me to directly see that although building bridges between antagonistic social groups is an almost insuperably difficult task, it is not totally impossible.

Buddhism's Contribution to Society

In August 2006, a total of over 2,000 religious leaders from all over the world gathered in Kyoto for the Eighth World Assembly of the World Conference of Religions for Peace; it was a historic conference in the overall context of the thirty-six-year history of Religions for Peace. Here, the world's religious leaders expressed their profound and heartfelt determination not to be daunted by any kind of violence, but rather to muster their courage and wisdom, join hands with one another, and face up to it, for the sake of bringing peace to everyone on Earth. Many of the leaders had come from areas of conflict at great personal risk. Each religion may express it differently, but all teach love of one's fellow man, brotherly love, and compassion.

At the conference, one Jewish leader called on everyone to remain mindful of the angel that lives within every person. A Christian leader made a tearful appeal, saying that Israeli children, Palestinian children, and Iraqi children are all the irreplaceable children of God. As a Buddhist, I am also in the process of learning the importance of being alive and remaining mindful of and worshiping the Buddha within me and every other person. All people are in the process of learning this lesson as they do their best to live.

The social responsibility of religions, including Buddhism and Rissho Kosei-kai, is to communicate the truth about life, and to help as many people as possible to learn how best to use the irreplaceably precious gift of life and realize that others' happiness is one's own happiness, and other's suffering and sorrow is one's own suffering and sorrow. I think that religions exist to help people make the effort to live their lives so as to bring happiness to the whole world. It is my deep conviction that this is Buddhism's social responsibility and the meaning of bodhisattva practice today.

Masahiro Nemoto, formerly a deputy director of the External Affairs Department of Rissho Kosei-kai, now serves as head of the organization's Tsuchiura Branch in Ibaraki Prefecture.

This article was originally published in the January-March 2007 issue of Dharma World.

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