Encountering the Dharma — Daisaku Ikeda, Soka Gakkai, And the Globalization of Buddhist Humanism

"Seager does a superb job of giving outsiders an inside look at Soka Gakkai Buddhism as it is understood and experienced by practitioners themselves. This is an important contribution to the field, and stands out for its intriguing thoughts about the way the movement straddles boundaries of East-West, sameness-difference, and past-future."--David Machacek, author of Soka Gakkai in America: Accommodation and Conversion

"This book paints vivid portraits of the major players of Soka Gakkai. Seager is forthright about the checkered political path Soka Gakkai has taken in Japan, while providing insight into why the rough spots occur. The story is clear and interesting, full of intimate details, and the writing flows wonderfully well."--Phillip Hammond, D. Mackenzie Brown Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

"Encountering the Dharma is a marvelous book that bristles with fresh observations about Japanness and Americanness, the local and the global, spirituality and secularity. Exhaustively researched and elegantly written, this is the definitive work on the globalization of Soka Gakkai, but it is also a powerful new model for truly humane scholarship--a model in which both scholar and subjects are fully present, and the author's interpretations, rather than springing fully formed from some supposedly universal mind, emerge out of particular, even peculiar, circumstances and evolve in real time."--Stephen Prothero, author of American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon

Richard Hughes Seager, Associate Professor of Religion at Hamilton College, is author of Buddhism in America, The World's Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893, and The Dawn of Religious Pluralism: Voices from the World's Parliament of Religions, 1893.