A lay movement without a 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.

The absence of an ordained priesthood shapes Soka Gakkai's ordinary religious life directly: where a Nichiren Shoshu member historically depended on a temple priest for rituals, funerals and the conferral of religious objects, a Soka Gakkai member's regular practice centers instead on small, member led discussion meetings, typically held in private homes, where chanting, study of Nichiren's writings and Ikeda's own guidance, and mutual encouragement among lay members substitute for functions a priesthood would otherwise perform. Seager's study of the movement's international growth identifies this home meeting structure, already established well before the 1991 split, as part of why Soka Gakkai adapted to operating without priestly mediation more readily than a movement built entirely around temple centered ritual might have; the organizational habits the split required were already largely in place. McLaughlin's account adds that Soka Gakkai's lay leadership structure, with members progressing through recognized roles of increasing responsibility within the organization itself rather than through any ordination, gives the movement an internal hierarchy of its own even though that hierarchy confers no priestly or sacramental authority in the sense Nichiren Shoshu's ordained clergy claim; a senior Soka Gakkai leader teaches, organizes and represents the movement, but performs no rite a Nichiren Shoshu priest would describe as requiring ordination to perform.