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The Rissho Koseikei was founded by Nikkyo Niwano (1906-1999) with the inspiration of his "sensei" Sugenobo Arai and a remarkable woman Myoko Nakanuma (1891-1957). It is an offshoot of the Reiyukai organization and one founded based on inspiration from Nichiren's teachings. Its teachings differ in some respects from the teachings of Reiyukai mainly due to different understandings of the meaning of the Lotus Sutra. For the Reiyukai the Lotus Sutra, as seen by its leaders Kimi Kotani and its founder Kakutaro Kubo, was a "means to make contact with the spiritual world", but to Niwano and his teacher (sensei) Sugenobo Arai, the Lotus Sutra was the "container of all wisdom and spiritual power."1 For that reason the teachings of the Reiyukai, since the Reiyukai tends to focus on "ancestor veneration" which is puzzling to most Americans or Westerners. Even so if you are looking for specified or consistant doctrines, it is difficult to find them in either of these organizations or their offshoots. Like other New Religions, the doctrine and affiliations seem to have changed with the changing currents of the wind and feelings of the founders, finally settling where those founders found themselves at the end of their lives -- often far from where they began.
Nikkyo Niwano and his Rissho Koseikei may have wandered far in their affiliations and teachings. But one thing remained consistent. Daniel Montgomery quotes Dharma World,(December 1980,4):
"It was because of the guidance of my teacher Sukenobu Arai, that I became fond of the Sutra, threw myself into it, and made it part of me. Until then I had gone from one religion to another; each had its power to save, but they were like coarse nets through which many fish could slip. The ecstacy of discovering this made me want to shout and sing and dance for joy"Daniel Montgomery, when writing on Nikkyo Niwano, tells us that "no Buddhist leader in the World has become more widely known or showered with honours than him." He seems to have been in competition with other Japanese Buddhist leaders, like Daisaku Ikeda, who like him had entire staffs devoted to seeking out people to "dialogue" with or university decrees to prove their international standing and world honored wisdom. Nikkyo Niwano had dialogues and conversations with people from the Duke of Edinburg to the Ayatolla Komeini, and travelled the world in the name of seeking world peace and multiple honorary degrees. Daniel Montgomery tells us he was a great listener. He would sit "smiling, friendly, and intently interested in every word" spoken by the person he was visiting.2
He was born "the second son" of a large family in a mountain village of Niigata. His bio page says "As a child he was deeply impressed by his grandfather's and parents' kindness to others. Their good examples instilled in him a love of peace and harmony and service to others." Daniel tells us he was a natural leader, his family belonged to the Soto Zen sect, and he knew nothing about religion except that he should bow to shrines and "be helpful to neighbors." In 1923 he set out to make his way in the world arriving in Tokyo just in time for the terrible Kanto Earthquake. He fled home, but then came back. In 1926 he was drafted, and he served his country with some distinction in the Navy. He became an accomplished Gunner, and also served on his ships entertainment committee.3
After his discharge in 1929 he went to work in business for himself. First he worked as a pickles vender and later as a milkman. He married a girl from his hometown and seemed to settle down. That changed when his daughter got sick. His desperation for a cure for his daughter drove him to seek out an esoteric form of Buddhism known as Tengu-Fudo which promised to have a cure for his daughters illness. When his daughter recovered mysteriously Daniel Montgomery tells us "he wanted to know why?" He threw himself into the rigorous study and discipline of his new religion and did so with such zeal that he soon became the assistant master claiming he could cure people of their diseases and problems. He writes:
I did not know the reason why. I had no confidence at all that I had such an ability. I had no abnormal experiencs like the others who in trances saw divine figures or heard divine voices. When I considered myself from every angle, I was quite an ordinary man. I was nothing but an ordinary pickles dealer. Nevertheless, I could cause mysterious things to happen, one after another.4
The humble Pickle vender seems to have started entertaining the idea that he had spiritual powers that could be more useful to him than vending pickles. But "mysterious apparitions and heavenly voices were too unreliable for his taste." He wanted something more exact, something that would be reliable. So he next turned from Tengu-Fudo to onomancy, a type of fortune telling based on peoples names. This too turned out to work in many cases but not all. He needed more certainty.
When his second daughter became seriously ill and was diagnosed as having Japanese Sleeping Sickness, he turned to Reiyukai. As soon as he enshrined his ancestors and began to chant the Sutra as instructed in Reiyukai, his daughter quickly recovered. He began to study that Lotus Sutra he was reciting from. He had found, in his own words, from "Lifetime Beginner"...
...the former systems to be "eighty-five percent" effective... "Some people were not cured by it" [Shugen-do]. "Some were cured physically while their deep suffering and spiritual wounds went unattended. Furthermore I was not convinced by Spiritual Powers that could not be understood by the person exercising them. In my own vague way, I was constantly looking for a rule that would save everyone, a rule that was not mysterious, but was clearly based on reason and was convincingly based on reason and was clearly regulated and systematic."
He found his answers in the Lotus Sutra as lectured on by the teacher Sukenobo Arai. Sukenobo Arai was one of the few real scholars in the Reiyukai, and fortunately for him, he was his "branch chief." He writes next, In Lifetime Beginner:
"Listening to the lectures on the Lotus Sutra I realized that I had found what I was looking for. The Lotus Sutra was the perfect net in which to save everyone in the world. Physically and spiritually it could help both the individual and all of society. I was profoundly shaken by what I had learned. The impression it made on me was of astonishing, vibrant freshness. It has remained fresh for over forty years. And the text has lost none of its subtlety, none of its ability to reverbrate in my heart and sink deeply into my spirit. On the contrary the more I read the sutra the more impressive and profound it seems. Is there another teaching with its power? Is there another book that can be read with amazement and growing impact every day for forty years?" 5
He gave up his Pickles business and opened up a milk shop in order to have more time to evangelize for the Reiyukai. He became a missionary. Like many who encounter the Lotus Sutra it had impacted him deeply. And he felt that part of the way to recompense the gratitude he felt would be to propagate what he had learned. If it later led to wealth, power and prestige, all the better.
One of Niwano's first converts was Miyoko Naganuma (1891-1957). According to Daniel Montgomery she was a sickly housewife seventeen years older than he was. She recovered from her illness and they soon became an effective team. He was the "enthusiastic organizer and theoretician" and she was the charismatic mystic who could relate to others personal needs, expecially those of women. When they weren't proselytizing and visiting prospective converts, they spent time at the feet of Sugenobo Arai learning about the Lotus Sutra. Niwano would often remain after the others left, discussing the sutra late into the night.
Naturally this caused his business to suffer and his family life as well. His wife didn't like his fanatic activities, and he wasn't about to let her stop them. For ten years they were seperated, even so their marriage survived, and eventually she accepted his activities. No doubt material success played some role in this. Similarly Miyoko found herself in trouble with her spouse. Eventually they did indeed divorce. Strangely her ex-husband remarried and both remained with the by then Rissho Koseikei.6
Sugenobo Arai, Nikkyo Niwano (1906-1999) and Myoko were now leaders of the Reiyukai. The Reiyukai was prone to schisms. Daniel Montgomery advances the theory that the reason for this was that a "member is more obliged to the 'parent' who converts him than to the central organization." Another reason, is that Reiyukai didn't have much of a foundation in the Lotus Sutra or any established tradition. Without an established tradition to give members some sort of discipline one interpretation of religion is likely as good as another. Add to that tyrannical leaders like Kimi Kotani, the tendancy of Japanese society to place loyalty on personal loyalty and fidelity, it shouldn't be surprising that doctrinal or personality differences would result in schisms. The twin tendancies to rank and queue up within organizations, and to chose sides based on which side of a line one finds oneself on, makes it only natural that those involved would create factions, and launch turf wars. The idea of "loyal opposition" is not operative in these groups.
Not to mention, the new organization would not have to share its revenues with the old one....
At any rate, as described in the page on the Reiyukai, Nikkyo Niwano parted company with the Reiyukai ostensibly over their different interpretation of the Lotus Sutra. For the Reiyukai the Lotus Sutra had been a simple method to reach spiritual powers and repay ones debts of gratitude to ancestors. For Nikkyo Niwano the Lotus Sutra was "the container of all wisdom and spiritual power." Could these views be really so different? Or did he see simply that he would never be more than a branch chief in the reiyukai and saw this as an excuse to start something new. In any case the new organization would soon reflect his views.7 And over time more and more so.
Sugenobo Arai refused to leave the Reiyukai. Ostensibly the break was in his name, yet he refused to Break with Kakutaro Kubo. They were personal friends. It seems that Nikkyo Niwano had dreams that involved more than simply reforming the Reiyukai. Miyoko and Niwano began organizing just before the war started. They endured World War II and for many years it was hard to tell the difference between them and the Reiyukai.
The Rissho Koseikei claimed great spiritual powers from its practice. For instance, all the members who were drafted to the Military during World War II, returned safely at the end of the war and their main building wasn't bombed. They considered those major benefits, expecially considering that Ikegami Honmon-ji the main temple of the Nichiren Shu was bombed during the war and had to be rebuilt. Nichiren Shoshu's head temple endured a disasterous fire, and that their parent religion, the Reiyukai suffered terribly during the same times. After the war, it was one of a number of "new religions" competing to gain the affections of the hapless and disaffected Japanese whose faith was left akimbo by the betrayals of the Shinto/Emperor system. It grew to a level and stablized. And later it began to spread around the world.
The Rissho Koseikei, Reiyukai and the Gakkai, were a lot alike. Each of them chanted the Daimoku (Sacred title/Namu Myoho Renge Kyo), were led by charismatic leaders, proselytized vigorously, promised material benefits, and staged mass meetings and parades.8 The Reiyukai had the "home-field" advantage in that its teachings, centered around ancestor veneration appealed to ordinary Japanese, but was almost incomprehensible in the rest of the world. The Gakkai had an initial advantage abroad because its message was relatively coherent, and focused, it new its object of worship and was tied to a 750 year old sect (Nichiren Shoshu) of Buddhism which gave it some claim to not be just a "new" religion but a revival of a more tried and true teaching.
But the Reiyukai, with its emphasis on Shoju, and on the "Hoza" practice offered its own benefits to membrs. The Hoza was an explicit effort to apply Buddhism. Members would sit in a circle of ten to twenty people and apply the deep principles of Buddhism and amateur philosophy to their lives. They insisted on "confessing errors and repenting shortcomings" (Zange), a practice also sometimes employed by the Gakkai. And they would then use principles of Buddhism to discern what "errors of thought, word and deed" were causing the persons problems. This is fundamental Buddhism. Every phenomena has a cause, and so these discussions must have been fruitful to members. The organization grew and spread world wide.
- The principles applied were those in the first half of the Lotus Sutra:
- Four Noble Truths
- Eightfold Path
- Six Perfections (Paramitas)/dd>
- The twelve-fold chain of dependent causation
- The ten factors of existence
The idea was that "suffering can be made a cause for awakening" which they referred to as "O-Satori." The idea was to walk the "Bodhisattva Path" applying Buddhism to his daily life and taking life from the "mundane to the sublime." The Rissho Koseikei provided a "narrative" that was both modern, psychological, and appealing to intelligence. Like the Reiyukai, they would have a "Sokaimyo" for the ancestors, and members kept a "death register or kakocho. The roots in Reiyukai continued, no matter the different interpretation of the practice.
They also practice chanting, though not anywhere near the volume that Gakkai members chant. For a Gakkai leader, the advice would often be to "chant about it" with the idea that the "Kanjin" or mind contemplation and prayers in front of the Gohonzon would allow the person to chant and awaken from within as a result of that chanting. But for the Rissho Koseikei the daimoku was almost entirely a meditation vehicle and they felt that that approach to chanting would make the daimoku a mere formalism. They would say:
"When we recite the Title of the Lotus Sutra, it seems well enough to recite it only once if we do so with complete sincerity. But in reality, if we do not repeat the Title from three to ten times, the idea of taking refuge in the Buddha does not penetrate completely. Nevertheless, although repetition is very important, if we recite it a thousand or ten thousand times, unless we are superhuman we will become bored or our minds will wander, and we will find ourselves merely mouthing the title without understanding it. This results in the defect of formalism, the lazy belief that merely by reciting the title we can besaved. We must realize that real Buddhist practice has three requisites:
- a good practice
- wholehearted conduct
- constant repetition
(Buddhism for Today, page 91)9They maintained, like their rival the Sokagakkai, that the practice of chanting the daimoku (Nam Myoho Renge Kyo), is every bit as effective (more?) than the silent meditation of Zen. Niwano felt he was following the dictates of the Sutra.
Even before the schism, Nikkyo Niwano had been impressed by the teachings of Nichiren, but he claimed a special revelation had told him that he should read only the Lotus Sutra10, and so he didn't start studying the teachings of Nichiren in depth. He continued to have an ambivalent attitude towards that teacher for the rest of his life. For a time his society was even affiliated with Nichiren Shu, but later it became closer to the teachings of Tendai. Nevertheless the name of his new society was drawn from an important work of Nichiren's. The Rissho Ankoku Ron, which means "Treatise on Establishing the Right Dharma." One of Nichiren's titles is "Rissho Daishi" which means "Great Teacher establishing the right Dharma." "Ko, according to an explanation for English Speaking members means 'the pious intercourse of many people.'" "Sei carries the idea of completion of personality and attainment of Buddhahood" and Kai means Society. He had ambitious ideas for his new society.11
Initially the organization appealed to the seriously ill and downtrodden. Still it grew and prospered. Myoko dominated the organization at this stage. Her spiritual revelations sent Niwano's wife and children to the countryside for ten years. As this was during World War II, that only made sense anyway, but it left Niwano Free to pursue his organizational activities unhindered. She sent the members on pilgrimages to Mt. Minobu, and she had Niwano dressing and following the discipline of a Buddhist Monk. Even after the ten years were up, she made them live on seperate floors for another three years until she felt they were spiritually mature enough to get back together.12
From 1949-1950, the Rissho Koseikei was a Nichiren Shu auxilliary. Daniel Montgomery writes however, that "Nikkyo Niwano didn't approach the Nichiren Shu with the humility of Josei Toda at Nichiren Shoshu, but with the zeal of a new convert." Niwano tried to be "more Catholic than the Pope." A mistake with most conservative religious groups. [Ultimately the mistake the Gakkai probably made with Nichiren Shoshu -- as the parallels between Niwano and Ikeda are striking here]. A religious group led by layfolks with its own "take" on religion is not going to get along with others with their own firmly established traditions. In this case Niwano arrogantly presented a demand that the Nichiren Shu unify completely its 5000 temples in one year. When they didn't he broke off relationships with the "sleeping religious organization" and went their seperate ways.13
This from a fellow who hadn't yet even made up his mind about his own groups "object of worship" and when he did finally make up his mind decided to use a statue of Shakyamuni containing a copy of the Lotus Sutra, stating that the "Odaimoku Gohonzon" "does not adequately represent the union of the Person(the eternal Buddha Shakyamuni) and the Law."14 Niwano doubtless felt that the Nichiren Shu should unify around his own ideas, and didn't respect the variety of expressions that a teaching can have in the hands of many people who each feel a full right to see things their own way. For him it was "my way" or the highway.
From that time onward, the Rissho Koseikei moved steadilly from being in the "lineage" of Nichiren's teachings, though of course, Niwano probably didn't see it that way. In his essay Honzon Niwano explained his frequent changes in object of worship as fulfilling the "true intentions of Nichiren." Like many religious leaders he had come to feel that his own feelings and experience made him an expert on religion and that he could make such claims and make them binding on his disciples. Initially its books named Nichiren as its "Koso" or 'Patriarch', but by 1987 that title had vanished and Nichiren's name was all but excised from the official prayer book. Meantime it moved closer to Tendai teachings.
As Daniel Montgomery notes, Nichiren had said that the Tendai emphasizes the "Imprinted Gate" or practices, while his efforts placed emphasis on the Original gate of faith. Rissho Koseikei emphasizes "practices" and reads the Lotus Sutra as a book of "rules of life" rather than as Nichiren read it as "rules of grace."15
Even so, the crest is still that of Nichiren, the members still climb Mt. Shichimen and the O-eshiki festival commemorating the Death of Nichiren is still celebrated in October. As Daniel Montgomery notes, "the Roots in Nichiren Buddhism are too deep to be eradicated easily."
It was Myoko who dominated the organization until her death in 1957. Her power came from her visions. He says:
"Spiritual powers were recognized only when they assisted in understanding of the Sutra or served to enhance its importance...Myoko Sensei would experience visitations. If I was convinced that they were in keeping with the Sutra, I explained them to others. But if they were unreasonable and unconvincing, I refused to comment. The deities were often enraged and scolded me. 'Niwano, if you do not do as I say, I will bring physical harm to you.' Still I would not give in, but replied, 'Do as you lik. Take my life. I have devoted it to my task already.'"16
Apparantly Miyoku tried to use her visions to rule the organization. A year before her death, she demoted Niwano to a secondary position. She even prepared a document for Niwano's signature stipulating that he'd do nothing without her agreement. She then proposed that she be officially recognized as the founder of the society, and Niwano refused to go along with this. His opponants started to create a new organization under her direction. But then she got sick, and it was Niwano who waited on her like a son. All their differences were set aside and when they died they were once again very close. After her death he launched a new course, away from the "Spiritual Voices" and towards reliance "on Dharma alone." Books were written, translated, members were sought in foreign countries, and Niwano began to travel the world. For Niwano the principle of "Zuiho Bini" or differentiating dharma from society meant that Buddhism and other religions could be harmonized. He said 17 Anyone who studies Buddhism in depth, and expecially the Lotus Sutra will see this truth plainly. Though it is also a charitable view of the religious practice of some people since many who pursue their own religion do indeed become locked in self-righteousness and even a world view that can see the world as being fought over by demonic forces versus good ones. But the purpose for teaching Buddhism is to defeat fundamental darkness, and therefore the various religions of the world all have teachings to offer people. One need not give up ones traditions and become Japanese to become a Buddhist. There is no reason, in theory, why there couldn't be Jewish Buddhists, Christian Buddhists, or even Moslem Buddhists. He says a "right teaching is right regardless of who preaches it." The definition of "true Buddhism" weighs on the word true, not the word Buddhism. Niwano passed his religion to his son, Nichiko Niwano. His son was already deeply involved in studying Buddhism. Daniel Montgomery reports that he tried to disapear when he heard the news that he'd been appointed successor, but he took on his fathers legacy. Like the Reiyukai, the founder made his group a family enterprise. Unlike the Reiyukai, so far, Nichiko Niwano is still in charge. The Rissho Koseikei is still around and appears to be none the worse off for his being in charge. "If one pursues one's own religion to its depths, one is led, not to self-righteousness, but to an understanding that leads one to understand the fundamental truths of other religions."(DW October 1979,4)
Nichiko Niwano
Footnotes
Sources and further readings: