Hamilton College Associate Professor of Religious Studies Richard Hughes Seager is the author of a new book, Encountering the Dharma (University of California Press), which examines Japan's Soka Gakkai Buddhism movement. Seager's research for a previous book, Buddhism in America, piqued his interest in Daisaku Ikeda, the organization's longtime president, and the history of modern Japan.
From the publisher's Web site: In Encountering the Dharma, Richard Seager, an American professor of religion trying to come to terms with the death of his wife, travels to Japan in search of the spirit of the Soka Gakkai. This book tells of his journey toward understanding in a compelling narrative woven out of his observations, reflections, and interviews, including several rare one-on-one meetings with Soka Gakkai president Daisaku Ikeda. Along the way, Seager also explores broad-ranging controversies arising from the Soka Gakkai's efforts to rebuild post-war Japan, its struggles with an ancient priesthood, and its motives for propagating Buddhism around the world. One turning point in his understanding comes as Ikeda and the Soka Gakkai strike an authentically Buddhist response to the events of September 11, 2001.
Stephen Prothero, author of American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, said in a review of Seager's book, "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."
Seager is also the author of 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.
