Kosen-rufu: peace through the wide propagation of the teaching

Kosen-rufu, a compound meaning approximately to widely declare and spread, appears in the Lotus Sutra itself, in a passage describing the wide propagation of the sutra's teaching in the age after the Buddha's death, and Nichiren's own writings identify this scriptural term as naming the mission he understood his own teaching to be carrying out. Soka Gakkai adopted kosen-rufu as the name for its own central collective goal, understood not as the growth of the organization for its own sake but as the widespread establishment of the Lotus Sutra's teaching, and through it of the human revolution doctrine built on that teaching, to the point that Ikeda's own writing describes kosen-rufu as coextensive with world peace, since a world in which enough individuals have undergone the inner transformation the movement teaches is, in this account, a world no longer structurally prone to war. The term therefore carries a double reference in Soka Gakkai usage: it is a scriptural term with a specific place in Nichiren's own reading of the Lotus Sutra's prophecy, and it is the movement's own name for its practical, generations long organizational project of spreading that teaching, a project McLaughlin's study describes as having shaped Soka Gakkai's institutional structure and self-understanding as thoroughly as any single doctrine the movement holds.

Soka Gakkai's pursuit of kosen-rufu changed its public character substantially over the movement's postwar history. Under Toda's leadership in the 1950s the movement pursued growth through shakubuku, an aggressive method of religious persuasion whose name literally means to break and subdue, targeting other religious affiliations directly and pressing converts toward rapid, decisive commitment, an approach that drew significant public criticism in Japan and that Seager's study of the movement's later globalization identifies as a major obstacle Ikeda had to address once Soka Gakkai began building an international following. From the 1970s onward the movement's own leadership shifted its public presentation of kosen-rufu decisively toward dialogue, framing the goal less as conversion achieved through confrontation and more as a shared human project pursued through education, cultural exchange and interfaith engagement, a change reflected institutionally in Ikeda's founding of secular cultural and educational organizations alongside the religious movement itself and in Soka Gakkai's formal advocacy for nuclear disarmament beginning with Toda's own 1957 declaration against nuclear weapons. The doctrinal goal named by the term kosen-rufu did not change across this period, but the movement's own account of the acceptable means of pursuing it changed considerably, from a proselytizing method its later leadership came to describe as suited to a specific and difficult postwar moment rather than as the method's own permanent form.