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Humane Education, a Bridge to Peace (4) Special Series: Humane Education, A Bridge to Peace (4) Daisaku Ikeda Gu Mingyuan Peace and Happiness for All People Gu: This year, 2010, marks the eightieth anniversary of the founding of Soka Gakkai. On this occasion, I should like to express my fervent congratulations to you, President Ikeda, and to your organization and my heartfelt commendations for the contributions you make in the name of peace and spreading the spirit of love throughout society. Your first president, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, raised aloft the banner of educa- tional reform for the sake of the suffering masses and especially their children. Soka Gakkai came into being under his guidance. During World War II, your organization vigorously opposed nationalistic Shinto and Japanese militarism. As a consequence, the militarist government suppressed the organization. President Makiguchi was thrown into prison, where he died. Your sorrowful history makes it clear that, while waging a war of invasion that brought misery and suffering to China, Japanese militarists inflicted calamity and pain on good people in Japan as well. Nonetheless, you and other later Soka Gakkai leaders perse- vered in carrying out President Makiguchi’s aims and continue the mission of realizing peace and happiness for all people in highly admirable fashion today. The Path to Comparative Education—Interrelations between Culture and Education Ikeda: I am deeply grateful for your warm words. President Makiguchi once wrote, “A single courageous individual dedicated to the Great Good can accomplish far more important things....” You are precisely such a person, and I am sure that your profound understanding of us would make him very happy indeed. 4 HUMANE EDUCATION, A BRIDGE TO PEACE (4) He was truly a lion whose great work as an original and creative geography scholar is undying and who, in the face of a militaristic regime, worked unhesitatingly for social tranquility and the happiness of children and the masses in general. This great pioneer was compelled to meet the end of his noble life in the cold confinement of prison. To proclaim to the world the worth of this relentless champion of justice, in 199, the fiftieth anniversary of his death, we established the Tokyo Makiguchi Memorial Hall in Hachioji, Tokyo, near the Soka University campus. It towers as a guardian over the students of that institution, which can be called a crystallization of his most cherished wishes. The memorial hall is also a cultural and educational shrine where Soka comrades and leaders in the work of peace and humaneness from all over the world can assemble. On a magnificent scale, members of the world’s younger generations are the heirs to the spirit of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, who longed for peace and strove to blaze the way for young people. In this installment of our dialogue, pursuant to what we said in our previous discussions, I hope to examine the relations between education and culture. Culture is the soil in which abundant humaneness can flourish and bear fragrant blossom. In relation to the study of comparative education, you have cast light on culture by pointing out the difficulty of under- standing the educational concepts and actualities of a country without taking its cultural traditions into consideration. In your Cultural Foun- dations of Chinese Education, you wrote that the factors influencing education should be divided into the political, the economical, and the cultural and that cultural factors influence it most deeply and lastingly. I agree completely. Discussing education without paying attention to culture is mere abstracting and misses the forest for the trees. Further, you get to the heart of the matter when you identify education as a component of culture. You state that cultural influence on the level of philosophy, awareness, and concepts permeates the educator’s and the learner’s value criteria and views on human talents and the mentor-disciple relation, which in turn influence the establish- ment of educational values, goals, content, and systems. Some kind of cultural imprint is to be found in any and all aspects of education. Consequently, understanding culture profoundly is indispen- sable to grasping the true nature of education in all countries and among all peoples. One of the seven great parables in the Lotus Sutra—which, as you know, was translated into Chinese in China—is the Parable of the HUMANE EDUCATION, A BRIDGE TO PEACE (4) Medicinal Herbs, which describes how the compassionate rain waters the great Earth, enabling all kinds and sizes of plants to bud and grow. Referred to as the parable of the three herbs and the two trees, this splendid teaching reveals how the rain of Buddha wisdom enables all diverse human beings to attain Buddhahood. It also evokes the image of a universal symbiosis in which all beings, including the human, harmo- nize and glorify life in individual ways within the mystical beneficence of the cosmos. As we have already said, the inclusive term culture embraces science, art, religion, philosophy, morality, and law as well as manners, mores, and systems. The products of all human activities, including education, are generated on the broad, multilevel ground called culture. If culture is figuratively the soil of symbiosis, all human activities are the plants and trees arising from it. The great tree of richly human education grows and thrives by drawing ample sustenance from the fertile cultural ground. The disposition inherent in a culture exerts an especially profound influence on the nature of education and its contents. What is more, education itself plays an important role in the inheritance and development of culture. As you point out, education has a long and deep influence on culture and is indispensable to cultural transmission and succession. It accounts for the cultural genetics of posterity. I hope that, as we delve with greater depth and breadth into the great ground or foundation of culture, you and I can discover possibilities for a brilliant century of humane education. Education as a Means and Methods of Cultural Transmission Gu: As a basic component of culture, education, like literature, arts, and architecture, has its own relative independence as well as its own rules and characteristics. Furthermore, it is always nourished by the soil of ethnic culture. I am in complete agreement with you when you say that good education requires fertile cultural ground to grow in. The foundation of education, culture influences pedagogic value criteria and educational goals, content, and methods. We need education in order to pass on to posterity parental experiences in production and society as well as various forms of customs and manners. This is why we may define the true nature of education as cultural transmission. Consequently, culture is the foundation and the content of education, which itself constitutes means and methods of cultural transmission. HUMANE EDUCATION, A BRIDGE TO PEACE (4) But, instead of directly passing culture on to students in its original forms, the transmission process entails selection and modification. For example, Confucianism as we in China understand it today differs from the original philosophy of Confucius’s own time because time and again it has undergone selection and modification. Japan too belongs to the Confucian cultural sphere. During the Sui (81–18) and Tang (18–907) dynasties, Japanese scholars were frequently dispatched to China to study. Later Japanese students came into contact with the Neo-Confucianism of the Song (90–1279) and Ming (1368–144) dynasties, which had a great impact on Japanese culture. But these students did not merely take Chinese Confucianism home unaltered. They too selected and modified it to create a something distinctly Japanese. Cultures are divided into progressive and backward. It can be said that progressive cultures advocate peace whereas backward cultures advocate violent aggression. Education that teaches people the values of truth, goodness, and beauty is superior. Inferior education stirs up such evil as militarism and terrorism. Chinese Confucianism is superior education because it teaches students to treat people benevolently; that is, with ren or humaneness and li or courtesy. In other words, the benevolent person loves others. Because of this superior kind of education, the Chinese people have placed great emphasis on peace, charity, and courtesy. Education that abandons a nation’s excellent cultural traditions in order to imitate the culture of another nation cannot be called superior. Thinking of the younger generations of today makes me aware of the pressing need to reinforce the superior cultural education of the Chinese people so that young people will not forget their traditions or lose sight of their roots. Soka Gakkai and Culture and Education Ikeda: As you say in your lucid explanation of the relation between the two, generating good pedagogy requires the inheritance and cultivation of good culture. At the same time, good education is indispensable to the inheritance and development of good culture. In his The System of Value-Creating Pedagogy Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, while advocating the guidelines for the construction of a new pedagogy, stressed the impor- tance of moving forward with cultural values as our goals. This indeed is the key point for the construction of a new pedagogy. At this point, I should like to offer a partial explanation of the Soka HUMANE EDUCATION, A BRIDGE TO PEACE (4) 7 Gakkai’s involvement with education and culture. As you said at the outset of this installment of our dialogue, November, 2010, marks the eightieth anniversary of the founding of Soka Gakkai. At that time (190), the organization was known as the Soka Kyoiku Gakkai, or Value-Creation Educational Society. When, at an advanced age, President Makiguchi was imprisoned by the oppressive militarist government and later died in prison, the majority of his disciples fell away. Josei Toda alone remained staunchly loyal, even in prison.
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