Ningen Kakumei, Soka Gakkai's Doctrine of Human Revolution

Human revolution, ningen kakumei, is the term Soka Gakkai uses for the inner transformation the movement holds to be both the aim of individual Buddhist practice and the necessary precondition for any lasting change in the wider world, a formulation given its most influential statement in the movement's third president Daisaku Ikeda's own multi-volume account of the same title, which frames a single person's decisive change of life condition as capable of altering the destiny of a nation and, eventually, of all humanity. The doctrine draws on Nichiren Buddhism's teaching that Buddhahood is a potential already present in every person's life, accessible through chanting the daimoku, the invocation of the Lotus Sutra's title, rather than a state reached only after long accumulated merit, and Soka Gakkai's own teaching applies that potential outward: a member's chanting practice is presented not as a private spiritual exercise separate from ordinary responsibilities but as the means by which a person's actual conduct toward family, work and society changes. Levi McLaughlin's study of the movement describes human revolution as functioning simultaneously as Soka Gakkai's theological core and as its primary recruitment and identity narrative, the account members are taught to tell about their own lives and to expect of others who take up the practice.