Lighting the Flames of Boundless Hope and Courage

In this issue is Ikeda Sensei’s foreword to the newly revised edition of the Japanese version of the Nichiren Daishonin Gosho zenshu (The Complete Works of Nichiren Daishonin) which was released on November 18, 2021, celebrating the Soka Gakkai’s founding day and the 800th anniversary of Nichiren’s birth. Ikeda Sensei supervised the publication and contributed the foreword.

The new edition of the Gosho zenshu presents the original classical Japanese script but uses a larger font, includes more line breaks and punctuation, and some of the adopted Chinese characters are identified using hiragana—Japanese syllabic characters—alongside, for ease of reading. In addition, 32 writings by Nichiren that have been discovered since the publication of the original Gosho zenshu have been included.

The writings have been grouped to make them more accessible. Nichiren’s 10 most important treatises, as designated by his disciple and successor Nikko Shonin (1246–1333), appear first. After that, writings are grouped into categories of Buddhist principles, comparisons with different Buddhist schools, analysis of other writings, charts and diagrams and letters to lay followers, which are themselves grouped according to the region in which the recipients lived.

The first edition of the Gosho zenshu was published in April 1952, after having been proposed the previous year by Josei Toda, following his inauguration as second Soka Gakkai president. Ikeda Sensei, at 24, supervised the publication of this first comprehensive collection of Nichiren’s works under the mentorship of President Toda.

Nichiren’s writings have since been translated into various languages including English, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, French, German, Italian and Portuguese.