The 1991 Split From Nichiren Shoshu's Priesthood

Soka Gakkai formed originally as a lay support organization for temples belonging to Nichiren Shoshu, the priestly school descending from Nichiren's disciple Nikko, and for most of the twentieth century its members received the Gohonzon, the inscribed mandala central to Nichiren Buddhist practice, and other core religious functions through Nichiren Shoshu's ordained priesthood even as Soka Gakkai itself grew into by far the larger and more active organization. The relationship broke down through the 1980s and reached a formal rupture in 1991, when Nichiren Shoshu's priesthood excommunicated Soka Gakkai's membership amid disputes that had been building over doctrinal authority, financial arrangements and Ikeda's own standing, a split McLaughlin's study of the movement describes as having forced Soka Gakkai to redefine itself institutionally almost overnight from a lay auxiliary to priestly authority into an independent religious body with no ordained clergy of its own at all. Since the split, Soka Gakkai has conferred its own version of the Gohonzon on members without priestly mediation and has built its entire organizational structure around lay leadership at every level, an arrangement with no equivalent in Nichiren Shoshu, where priestly ordination remains the dividing line between clergy and laity that Soka Gakkai's own post-rupture identity explicitly rejects as necessary to authentic practice.