Ikeda Sensei gave the following guidance at the Soka Gakkai headquarters leaders meeting in Tokyo, Japan, Jan. 6, 2006. It can be found in The Wisdom for Creating Happiness and Peace, part 3, revised edition, chapter 23, installment 1, pp. 67–69.
“Valuing each person”—kosen-rufu begins and ends with this.
Convinced that a single life is more precious than all the treasures of the universe, Ikeda Sensei devoted his life to the realization of a world that upheld as its guiding principle the refusal to leave anyone behind.
Valuing each person is the starting point of the Soka Gakkai. This is also the fundamental spirit of Nichiren Buddhism, which teaches that all people are irreplaceably precious and that everyone in the world innately possesses the noble Buddha nature.
Authoritarian leaders, on the other hand, ignore or denigrate the supreme value of the individual, seeing people only as faceless masses. This is because as far as such individuals are concerned, people are just a means to an end; they are objects, like weapons to be launched or resources to be spent. Power-hungry individuals cleverly manipulate people to feed their own greed and ambition, seeking to gain total control over the whole.
The Soka Gakkai’s approach is the exact opposite. This is because the purpose of kosen-rufu is the happiness of each individual. We believe in the infinite potential of every human being, strive to help each person awaken to and reveal that potential, and work to expand the circle of those who share this commitment. This has been the history of our people’s movement to this day.
The individual comes first and then the whole. Everything starts with the individual, and with individuals strongly uniting. Losing sight of this essential point will bring terrible consequences. Anyone who sees the Soka Gakkai and its members as nothing but a tool for advancing some personal or organizational agenda, just like the authoritarian leaders I have described, is wicked to the core.
Everything comes down to the individual. I’d like to reconfirm with you today our basic principle of valuing each person. Let us focus even more attention on each person, doing our utmost to encourage them and foster their precious potential. When each person develops inner strength and wisdom, they can bring forth double, triple, 10 times their present capabilities.
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