Water Matters
July 2008
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India and the Heart of Nonviolence
Daisaku Ikeda (right) and Dr. Radhakrishnan follow Gandhi's final footsteps, New Delhi, 1992
[Photos ©Seikyo Shimbun]
In 1961, shortly after becoming president of the Soka Gakkai, at the age of 33, Daisaku Ikeda made his first visit to India. This trip was the first step in a journey to fulfill an aspiration of his mentor, Josei Toda (1900-58), the second president of the Soka Gakkai. Toda had frequently expressed his desire to contribute to the peace and happiness of the people of the Asian continent and to repay a debt of gratitude to India, the land which had given birth to Shakyamuni and Buddhism.
This journey inspired the founding of the Institute of Oriental Philosophy (IOP), realized the following year. Impressed by the vast array of cultures and philosophies that intermingled in India, Mr. Ikeda conceived of an institute that would promote scholarly inquiry into the great religious traditions of Asia and the world, with the aim of promoting dialogue and peace. The IOP would become an important conduit of exchange with Indian scholars, and in 1992 it opened a center in India.
In 1979, Mr. Ikeda visited India again, at the invitation of the Indian government. During this trip he devoted much of his time to developing relations in the field of education on behalf of Soka University, which he had founded in Japan in 1971. One of the individuals with whom he began a friendship at that time was Kocheril Raman Narayanan, vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University at the time and later the 10th president of India. Mr. Ikeda has since held dialogues with a number of India's political and civic leaders from across the political spectrum.
A Cosmic Humanism
His next visit to India took place 13 years later, in 1992. One focus of the trip was an address he gave at the Gandhi Memorial Hall. The director, Dr. N. Radhakrishnan, later wrote that the speech "revealed a profound understanding of Gandhi." He writes that afterward "several distinguished Gandhian scholars and academics rushed toward [Mr. Ikeda], congratulating him on his splendid analysis of Gandhian philosophy which had given them new insight and scope for further study and research." The lecture received wide coverage in the press and Mr. Ikeda's travel plans had to be altered because of the number of people wishing to meet him.
With school children in Kolkata in 1979
Since then he has held dialogues and developed friendships with many prominent Gandhians in India, such as Dr. B. N. Pande, Dr. J. P. Narayan and Dr. G. Ramachandran, who like many Indian intellectuals and activists have found a natural resonance between his ideals and their own.
Mr. Ikeda's insights into Gandhi's philosophy grow from a broad interest in and respect for the spiritual and cultural heritage of India--what he has referred to as a "cosmic humanism based on creative coexistence"--and his belief in the positive contribution this can make to the construction of peace in Asia and the world. More than anything, it is this respect that has built such enduring bridges with scholars, thinkers and activists in India, as well as with ordinary Indians who feel pride at having the grandest aspects of their cultural and spiritual legacy reflected back to them.
This sense of pride and vision has been one factor in the tremendous growth, more recently, of SGI in India (Bharat Soka Gakkai) and its appeal to youth. It is reflected too in BSG's high degree of social engagement, particularly in the fields of education, nonviolence and environmental sustainability.
The second Soka Gakkai youth exchange delegation visits India in 1991
During his 1992 trip to India, Mr. Ikeda visited Sonia Gandhi, whose husband Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had been assassinated the previous year. The two men had met in Tokyo in 1985, at which time Mr. Ikeda had presented the young statesman with a lengthy poem as an expression of friendship and respect.
Another outcome of the 1992 trip was a large-scale exhibition, "King Ashoka, Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru--Healing Touch" proposed by Mr. Ikeda, celebrating a lineage of spirituality connecting the ancient Indian sovereign who was inspired by Buddhism to renounce war and violence, the leader of India's nonviolent independence struggle and Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister. The exhibition was held in Tokyo in 1994 through cooperation between the SGI-affiliated Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) and the Indian and Japanese governments.
The ICCR, and Mr. Ikeda's friendship with its successive directors, has played a significant part in his efforts to develop exchanges between India and Japan, including youth exchanges, the holding of the SGI's "Nuclear Arms: Threat to Our World" exhibition in Delhi in 1986, and performance art exchanges facilitated through the Min-On Concert Association founded by Mr. Ikeda.
The "King Ashoka, Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru-Healing Touch" exhibition
His contributions have been widely recognized. In May 2006, officials of the Visva-Bharati University in West Bengal State, originally founded by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), traveled to Tokyo to award him an Honorary Doctorate of Literature. This was the 11th honorary academic title awarded to Mr. Ikeda by an institute of higher education in India, the first being an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Delhi in 1998.
The SGI leader's relationships with Buddhist scholars represent a further facet of his engagement with India. Among such scholars is Dr. Lokesh Chandra, director of the International Academy of Indian Culture. Their friendship has opened up cultural and scholarly exchange between Japan and India, including collaboration with the IOP to preserve and make available to academia ancient rare Buddhist texts, and public exhibitions of such texts and artifacts in Japan and India.
"The people of India ponder life's depths without resisting reality. They maintain that there is more to life than trivial matters. It is this spiritual climate that gave rise to Shakyamuni and later became the stage for the activities of Mahatma Gandhi, and that has long captivated the minds of intellectuals around the world."
--Daisaku Ikeda
In 1981, Mr. Ikeda, a prolific poet and writer since his youth, was awarded the title of Poet Laureate by the World Academy of Arts and Culture. In 1995, the World Poetry Society Intercontinental, headquartered in India with members in 50 countries, awarded him the title of World Poet Laureate and, in 2007, that of World People's Poet. In fact, it is through the medium of his poetry that Mr. Ikeda first became widely known in India.
India has strong poetic traditions. In 1979, the late Dr. Krishna Srinivas, the founder of the World Congress of Poets, an international network of poets writing in various languages, was given a small volume of poems by Mr. Ikeda that had been translated into English. He began publishing these in his monthly poetry journal, and as a result, many high-level officials in India with whom Mr. Ikeda is now well acquainted came to know him first as a poet.
Poetry has also played an important part in his efforts to deepen his friendships with the people of India and he has written several long poems dedicated to his friends there.
Such heart-to-heart exchange is the core of Mr. Ikeda's vision of peacebuilding and is the essence of all his various efforts to promote cultural exchange.
Leela Samson's classical Indian dance troupe (Tokyo, 2002), one of 17 Indian performing arts groups invited to Japan to date by the Min-On Concert Association
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