SGI-USA San Francisco Buddhist Center

Looking north from the top floor of the SGI-USA San Francisco Buddhist Center, you can spot Coit Tower, a landmark Ikeda Sensei visited on October 5, 1960, two days after he first set foot in the continental United States.^[1] Along with a group of local members, Sensei took in the panoramic view of San Francisco Bay amid a brilliant sunset. He commemorated the moment, saying:

We are striving to create here on earth a new world where indestructible happiness and eternal peace reign supreme. With the passage of time—in twenty, fifty or a hundred years—today will without a doubt be remembered as a day of profound significance in the history of our movement.^[2]

The Buddhist Center opened in August 1912 as the Lux School for Industrial Training for Girls. Its motto, “To do common things uncommonly well,” lives on at what is now the SGI-USA San Francisco Buddhist Center.^[3]

This month, members of Northern California commemorate the 30th anniversary of the junior high and high school divisions, which Ikeda Sensei established when he visited the center on March 14, 1993.^[4] Later that year, on October 2, Sensei shared the following message to the members of San Francisco:

So long as San Francisco advances, America will advance. If San Francisco is healthy, America too will be strong. A new movement of peace and culture will spread outward from San Francisco to the rest of the world.