An Inverted Rebuke: How Nichiren Buddhist Remonstration Turned Inward in Soka Gakkai

Over the last decade, the lay Nichiren Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai has seen a new constituency of adherents invoke Nichiren’s tradition of admonishing authority to confront administrators within their own religion and elected officials in its affiliated political party Komeito. This paper considers ways Gakkai members critical of the religion and party are returning to Nichiren’s “admonishing of the state” (kokka kangyō) to leverage the practice into a rebuke of Nichiren Buddhists by Nichiren Buddhists. The presentation will consider the position adopted by these critical members against a religion now undergoing dramatic transformations, the tactics they are employing to admonish while mitigating public suspicion about religious expressions, how they rely on doctrine to guide fellow adherents and inspire institutional reforms, and what their inversion of Nichiren’s admonitory practices into an internally aimed critique may tell us about the nature of religious rebuke.