JAPANESE NEO-BUDDHISM: IDEALISM OF EAST AND PRAGMATISM OF WEST

Abstract

The author studies the phenomenon of the growing popularity of new religious Buddhist trend movements in the world, in particular the Japanese organization Soka Gakkai. He analyzes its syncretic ideological preferences, structure, political activity, social construction technologies, PR-methods, concludes that the massiveness of such social-religious movements is explained by their attention to an individual’s everyday needs, pragmatism, but at the same time the concern with global problems agitating all the humanity, and shows that the proposed project of the future, based on humanity’s spiritual unity, reflects the process of spiritual life internationalization and, to the same extent, meets the need of the globalizing world in the dialogue of cultures.