Suck it up, Dalai Lama. You'll get neither support nor sympathy from Soka Gakkai, whose leaders are longtime admirers and friends of China.

Each year, SGI President Daisaku Ikeda writes a "Peace Proposal" prescribing actions to achieve world peace. His recipe for peace in Asia is simple: greater friendship between China and Japan. Tibet has never rated a mention.

Why won't SGI use its carefully constructed relationship with the Chinese government to lobby on behalf of the Tibetan people?
A Soka building and Soka-founded China-Japan friendship association building were recently bombed in Japan. There are many Japanese who are wary, first, of Soka's powerful role in Japan's government and, second, of Soka's push for stronger ties with China.

As Soka tells it, its efforts to curry favor with Chinese officials are inspired by a need to atone for the horrors inflicted by Japan on China during the WWII era. To be sure, Japan has much to atone for.

Critics, however, point out that Soka's approach to China ignores the human rights violations currently committed by China. Soka pursues "friendship" between Japan and China without questioning or challenging the brutality of the Chinese government.

Lotsa SGI members may be surprised that their supposedly Buddhist organization has intimate ties with a regime famous for pursuing extermination of the Buddhist culture and tradition of Tibet. Especially in the U.S., SGI members shrug and say they just want to chant, they don't care about Japanese politics. They don't want to understand that the organization they loyally defend and claim as their own has tacitly condoned China's aggression against Tibet.

For its part, China has an interest in currying favor with Buddhists other than Tibetan Buddhists as part of its campaign to smear and undermine the Dalai Lama. Soka Gakkai has played gamely along.

Why? Because SGI wants to expand into China, not as a religion but as a "peace, culture and education" organization, perhaps? Why would any "peace organization" the People's Republic of China? It's a good question.

If you scratch deeper than the surface and talk to SGI members, you'll find that a good many of them think there's some kind of global competition for Top Buddhist. They feel that Daisaku Ikeda deserves the Nobel Peace Prize; the Dalai Lama won the Nobel, but he's a pretender, a "provisional" Buddhist as opposed to a "true" Buddhist like Ikeda. The suffering of the Tibetan people was brought on because they subscribe to a heretical form of Buddhism, according to some Soka soldiers. This thread had to be cut off before SGI members started writing on a public message board what many of them say in private. This entry by a SGI member sums up the "my mentor Ikeda is better than your Dalai Lama" attitude common in the SGI:

Along the way, learning from a mentor may be essential, but a mentor is not a Pope, a Prophet or a Dalai Lama. I mean no offense to those who choose to follow those faiths, just to explain the difference and to supply a broader understanding. In my case, as an adherent of Nichiren Buddhism, I have chosen Daisaku Ikeda, leader of the Soka Gakkai International Buddhist lay organization as a mentor. I do so because I believe he has and continues to very effectively demonstrate a profound understanding of compassionate Buddhism that will make the world a better place.

For all their official statements, press releases, proposals and papers, SGI has never made a single statement about Tibet. As of my last advanced Google search of the SGI.org website, "China" returned 238 hits; "Tibet" returned exactly zero.

SGI claims to be a peace organization fighting for human rights across the globe. Their butt-kissing support of the Chinese government proves otherwise.

Report that, Tricycle.