Josei Toda's Wartime Experience and the Doctrine's Origin

The doctrine's institutional history begins with Josei Toda, Soka Gakkai's second president, who rebuilt the organization after the Second World War following the death in prison of its founder Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, arrested under wartime religious suppression for refusing to accommodate state Shinto requirements. Toda's own account of an experience during his imprisonment, in which he described directly perceiving his identity with the Buddha described in the Lotus Sutra while reciting its text in his cell, became the founding narrative Soka Gakkai built its human revolution teaching around once he was released and began rebuilding the movement in the difficult years after 1945. Richard Hughes Seager's study of the movement's globalization under Ikeda traces how a teaching rooted in Toda's own wartime and postwar experience of personal transformation under extreme hardship was generalized under his successor into a doctrine addressed to any member's ordinary life circumstances, not only to crisis or persecution, and exported far beyond Japan as Soka Gakkai grew into an international lay movement; the postwar Japanese setting of scarcity and social rebuilding in which Toda first articulated the teaching remains, in Seager's account, part of why human revolution was framed from the beginning as inseparable from visible, practical change in a member's circumstances rather than as an inward state alone.