Daisaku Ikeda - Buddhism: The First Millennium

Published by Middleway Press

A division of the SGI-USA

606 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90401

1977, 1982 by Daisaku Ikeda

2009 Soka Gakkai

ISBN 978-0-9779245-3-0

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Cover and interior design by Gopa & Ted2, Inc.

This book originally appeared in Japanese under the title

Watakushi no Bukkyokan (My View of Buddhism),

published by Kodansha International Ltd., Tokyo, 1977.

Ikeda, Daisaku.

[Watakushi no Bukkyo-kan. English]

Buddhism, the first millennium / by Daisaku Ikeda ; translated by Burton Watson. 1st ed.

p. cm. (The Soka Gakkai history of Buddhism series ; 2)

Sequel to: The living Buddha. 2008.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Buddhism. I. Watson, Burton, 1925- II. Ikeda, Daisaku. Watakushi no Shakuson kan. English. III. Title.

BQ4055.I3913 2009b

294.3dc22

2009017374

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The following abbreviations appear in some citations:

• LS (chapter number), page number(s)refers to The Lotus Sutra, translated by Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)
• WND-1 refers to The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, volume 1 (Tokyo: Soka Gakkai, 1999)

In February 1961, I stood on the banks of the Ganges, the mighty river that begins as a tiny trickle of clear water among the Himalayas, the roof of the world, and races down from their towering peaks, traversing the foothills, to water the vast plain of the Hindustan. Near the city of Patna, where I was standing, it gathers into itself a number of large and small tributary streams. Close to this spot in ancient times stood Pataliputra, the City of Flowers, capital of the Maurya dynasty, the first kingdom to extend its rule over almost the entire Indian subcontinent.

The sacred Ganges flows on today, just as it did so long ago when Shakyamuni, having preached the most important series of sermons on the dharma, or Buddhist Law, to his disciples at Eagle Peak, crossed over it from the village of Patali, heading northward on foot in the direction of his old home of Kapilavastu. He was nearing the time of his death, a fact that he no doubt recognized. I wonder what he thought as he stood alone by the Ganges. Looking out over the vast surging waters, I tried to imagine what might have been in the heart of the Buddha.

For how many countless centuries has the river continued day after day to flow in this fashion? As long as the waters of life well up upon the earth, it will go on flowing. Like the Ganges, the profound and timeless wisdom of Shakyamuni, born in Lumbini Gardens in the foothills of the Himalayas, continued for more than a thousand years to flow through the land of the Indian people. From there, it spread south to Sri Lanka, southeast to the regions of Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia, northward through Central Asia and along the Silk Road into China, and by way of the Korean peninsula into Japan. In the time of King Ashoka in the third century BCE, Buddhist monks journeyed as envoys to the Greek states of the Macedonian empire, so that from early times it was already known to the West as well.

Shakyamuni, that extraordinary man of ancient times, died long ago, but he left behind a body of teachings the world had never known. These teachings were born of the passionate desire to save humanity. Handed down from one disciple to another, from one follower to ten thousand, they eventually became a vast current of faith transcending national boundaries.

Since that visit to India, the land where Buddhism was born, I have thought increasingly of the early history of Buddhism and have felt a desire to try to put down in writing some of my ideas concerning its founder. I realized a part of my desire by writing a book titled Watakushi no Shakusonkan (My View of the Buddha), which has been translated into English under the title The Living Buddha.

Needless to say, Buddhism is not the possession of Shakyamuni alone. Just as that vibrant life force, which Shakyamuni embodied and which inspired all of his teachings, has always existed and always will exist, so the Buddhist religion is a faith that continues flowing forward into the world, working ceaselessly for the salvation of all sentient beings everywhere.

After Shakyamunis death, his disciples gathered to put into formal shape the teachings he had left behind, eventually forming that huge mass of scriptures and commentaries that make up the Buddhist canon. Among these are the scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism, in particular the Lotus Sutra, which were formed at the hands of lay believers who strove to realize the bodhisattva ideal by working to spread Buddhism more widely throughout society. Each of these later disciples drew upon the life force of the eternal Buddha within them and pressed forward to the best of their ability toward the realm of enlightenment, the realm of the Buddha.

In my earlier book, The Living Buddha, I surveyed the life of Shakyamuni. In the present volume I would like to continue to trace the history of Buddhism, examining its early development in India and endeavoring to define the basic principles and ideals of the religion. As in the case of the earlier volume, I have drawn upon numerous excellent studies published by Buddhologists and Indologists, and I wish here to express my gratitude to them for their endeavors in the past and, as a Buddhist, to pray for the continued success of their research in the future.

In closing, I express my thanks to Burton Watson, formerly of Stanford and Columbia University and now one of the worlds most accomplished interpreters of Asian literary and religious texts, for the pains he has taken in preparing the translation.

The present volume is a translation of a work in Japanese titled Watakushi no Bukkyokan (My View of Buddhism). The original work was cast in the form of a discussion among Mr. Ikeda and two of his associates, but with his permission I have, for purposes of smoother reading, recast it in straight narrative form, taking care to preserve all the factual and speculative material of the original.

Sanskrit and Pali personal names, place names, and technical terms have been introduced in the text in the romanized form that seems most suitable for ordinary English readers, without the elaborate diacritical marks demanded by strict Indology.

As indicated by Mr. Ikeda in his preface to the English edition, the present work is a sequel to his earlier volume, The Living Buddha: An Interpretive Biography (reissued by Middleway Press, Santa Monica, California, in 2008), which deals with Shakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism. Treating as it does the life of a single individual, The Living Buddha is unified in subject and has a clear beginning, middle, and end. Moreover, Shakyamunis life, though marked at times by hardship and sadness, was on the whole a relatively untroubled one that ended on a triumphant note of accomplishment and optimism, and this sunniness is reflected in Mr. Ikedas treatment.

The present volume concerns itself with the story of Buddhism in the dark days after the death of Shakyamuni. It is perforce more diverse in content, covers a vastly greater span of time, and is in some ways more somber in tone, for, as so often happens in the history of religion, once the founder of the new faith had passed from the scene, doubt and dissension arose among his followers. Controversy developed concerning the correct interpretation of the doctrine, the correct practices and goals for the monks and laity, and the Buddhist Order in time was torn by schism. Mr. Ikeda, himself the leader of the Soka Gakkai International, a Nichiren Buddhist lay movement that has in recent years become the largest and most widespread in the world, describes these problems that beset early Buddhism, piecing out the scant historical facts with insight and conjecture. He succeeds in casting new light upon a period in the history of Buddhism that, because of the paucity of reliable data, is shrouded in uncertainty, bringing the account of its development down to the point where it began to spread beyond the borders of India and to grow into a major world religion.