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Daisaku Ikeda
Lives of Founding Presidents
Soka Gakkai
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Lives of Founding Presidents

Daisaku Ikeda

(1928 – 2023)

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Third president of the Soka Gakkai, Daisaku Ikeda was a Buddhist philosopher, peacebuilder, educator, author and poet. He was the founding president of the Soka Gakkai International (SGI).

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Founding Presidents
Daisaku Ikeda
Josei Toda
Tsunesaburo Makiguchi
Founding Presidents
Daisaku Ikeda
Josei Toda
Tsunesaburo Makiguchi
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Contribution Books Poetry
Third president of the Soka Gakkai, Daisaku Ikeda was a Buddhist philosopher, peacebuilder, educator, author and poet. He was the founding president of the Soka Gakkai International (SGI).
[© Seikyo Shimbun]

Ikeda was born in Tokyo, Japan, on January 2, 1928, the fifth of eight children, to a family of seaweed farmers. The devastation and senseless horror he witnessed as a teenager during World War II gave birth to a lifelong passion to work for peace.

In 1947, at the age of 19, he met Josei Toda (1900–58), educator and leader of the Soka Gakkai. Ikeda found in Toda an open and unaffected person, a man of unshakable conviction with a gift for explaining profound Buddhist concepts in logical, accessible terms. He was inspired to embrace the practice of Nichiren Buddhism and took Toda as his mentor in life.

Ikeda later found employment at a company run by Toda, and completed his education under Toda’s tutelage.

Expansion
Ikeda with local members at Chicago’s Midway Airport on his first trip to the USA (October 1960) [© Seikyo Shimbun]

In May 1960, two years after Toda’s death, Ikeda, then 32, succeeded him as the third president of the Soka Gakkai. Under his leadership, the organisation began an era of innovation and expansion, becoming actively engaged in cultural and educational endeavours worldwide. Ikeda has dedicated himself to fulfilling Toda’s dreams by developing initiatives in the areas of peace, culture and education based on Buddhist ideals.

In 1975, the Soka Gakkai International (SGI) was established as a global association of independent Soka Gakkai organisations around the world, and Ikeda became it’s president.

Establishing Soka Education

Ikeda is the founder of the Soka (value-creation) school system, which puts into practice the educational approach formulated by Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, first Soka Gakkai president, and Josei Toda. It is a nondenominational school system based on an ideal of fostering each student’s unique creative potential and cultivating an ethic of peace, social contribution and global consciousness. The school system runs from kindergarten through graduate study and includes a university in Tokyo, Japan, and another in California, USA.

Dialogue: The Foundation of Peace
Encouraging Soka Gakkai youth members from around the world, Tokyo, 2002 [© Seikyo Shimbun]
With Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling in California, February 1990 [© Seikyo Shimbun]

As a staunch proponent of dialogue as the foundation of peace, Ikeda has pursued dialogue with numerous leaders, scholars and individuals around the world in fields related to peace, culture and education. In furtherance of his vision of fostering dialogue and solidarity for peace, he has founded a number of independent, non-profit research institutes that develop cross-cultural, interdisciplinary collaboration on diverse issues. The Min-On Concert Association and the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum promote mutual understanding and friendship between different cultures through the arts.

Peace Through Inner Transformation

The central tenet of Ikeda’s thought, and of Buddhism, is the fundamental dignity of life, a value which 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 idea is expressed most succinctly in a passage in his work, The Human Revolution, Ikeda’s novelized account 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.”

Source from Soka Global

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Tsunesaburo Makiguchi

Josei Toda

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