Kosen-rufu, From Lotus Sutra Term to Organizational Mission

Kosen-rufu, a compound meaning approximately to widely declare and spread, appears in the Lotus Sutra itself, in a passage describing the wide propagation of the sutra's teaching in the age after the Buddha's death, and Nichiren's own writings identify this scriptural term as naming the mission he understood his own teaching to be carrying out. Soka Gakkai adopted kosen-rufu as the name for its own central collective goal, understood not as the growth of the organization for its own sake but as the widespread establishment of the Lotus Sutra's teaching, and through it of the human revolution doctrine built on that teaching, to the point that Ikeda's own writing describes kosen-rufu as coextensive with world peace, since a world in which enough individuals have undergone the inner transformation the movement teaches is, in this account, a world no longer structurally prone to war. The term therefore carries a double reference in Soka Gakkai usage: it is a scriptural term with a specific place in Nichiren's own reading of the Lotus Sutra's prophecy, and it is the movement's own name for its practical, generations long organizational project of spreading that teaching, a project McLaughlin's study describes as having shaped Soka Gakkai's institutional structure and self-understanding as thoroughly as any single doctrine the movement holds.