A Living Tradition of East Asia
In 1931, a Japanese Buddhist monk named Fujii Nichidatsu traveled to India and met Mahatma Gandhi. It was an encounter between two forms of conviction: Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to British imperialism and Fujii's Nichiren Buddhist faith that the chanting of the Lotus Sutra could transform the world. They recognized each other. Gandhi gave Fujii a drum — a small hand drum of the kind used in devotional chanting — and Fujii gave Gandhi the practice of beating the drum and chanting Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō. When Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, Fujii was shattered. He spent the remaining thirty-seven years of his life building peace pagodas: white stupas, modeled on ancient Buddhist reliquary monuments, erected in cities and on hilltops across the world as silent declarations that another way of being was possible. There are now more than eighty of them — in Hiroshima, in Milton Keynes, in New Delhi, in Battersea Park in London, in Leverett in the hills of western Massachusetts — each one a stone and concrete prayer for the abolition of nuclear weapons and the end of war.
Nipponzan-Myōhōji — "Japan Mountain Temple of the Wonderful Dharma" — is the monastic order Fujii founded. It is small (perhaps a few hundred monks and nuns worldwide), confrontational (its members have been arrested at nuclear test sites, military bases, and construction projects on sacred Indigenous land), and utterly committed to a single proposition: that the practice of chanting the title of the Lotus Sutra, accompanied by the beating of a drum, is not merely a devotional act but a political one — that it changes the world by changing the consciousness of those who hear it. This profile is an introduction to the order, its founder, its practice, and its remarkable global presence.
I. Fujii Nichidatsu — The Drummer for Peace
Fujii Nichidatsu (1885–1985) lived for exactly one hundred years, and he spent most of them walking. Born Fujii Mikizō in Kumamoto Prefecture on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands, he entered the Nichiren priesthood as a young man and was ordained in 1917. He founded Nipponzan-Myōhōji that same year — not as an institution but as a vow: to spread the chanting of the Lotus Sutra to all nations, by all means, through the medium of his own body and voice.
Nichiren Buddhism, the tradition from which Fujii drew, holds that the Lotus Sutra is the supreme teaching of the Buddha and that the chanting of its title — Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō, "Devotion to the Wonderful Dharma of the Lotus Flower Sutra" — is a practice of sufficient power to transform not only the individual but the entire world. Nichiren himself (1222–1282) had been a prophet of confrontation, a monk who told the Japanese government that its policies were bringing ruin on the nation and that only devotion to the Lotus Sutra could save it. Fujii inherited both the universalism and the confrontational spirit of the Nichiren tradition, but he redirected them: where Nichiren had addressed the Japanese state, Fujii addressed humanity.
The Indian journey of 1931 was the turning point. Fujii traveled to India intending to establish Nichiren practice there — a remarkably audacious goal for a Japanese monk in British India. He met Gandhi, and the meeting produced a synthesis that would define the rest of his life: Gandhian nonviolence wedded to Nichiren devotional practice. Gandhi taught Fujii that spiritual practice and political action were inseparable — that the transformation of consciousness was not a private affair but a public one, with consequences for the structure of power. Fujii taught Gandhi the chanting of Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō, which Gandhi adopted as one of his daily devotional practices. (Gandhi's evening prayer meetings in his later years regularly included the chanting of the Lotus Sutra title alongside Hindu and Christian devotions.)
The encounter with Gandhi gave Fujii his life's program. He would not build institutions. He would not develop a systematic theology. He would walk, chant, beat the drum, and build stupas — stone monuments to peace that would stand in the world's cities as reminders that the violence of the twentieth century was not the last word.
II. The Peace Pagoda — Stupa as Protest
The peace pagoda (平和仏舎利塔, heiwa butsushari-tō — "peace Buddha-relic pagoda") is Nipponzan-Myōhōji's most visible contribution to the world. It is a white stupa, typically between fifteen and forty meters tall, modeled on the ancient Indian reliquary monuments that housed the physical remains or relics of the Buddha. Most of Nipponzan-Myōhōji's pagodas contain relics — fragments of bone or ash identified as relics of Shakyamuni Buddha, obtained from Buddhist communities in Sri Lanka and other Theravada countries.
The pagodas are not temples. They are not places where services are regularly held or congregations gather. They are acts of witness: vertical prayers, permanently visible, standing in public space as assertions that peace is possible and that the human capacity for violence is not the deepest truth about human nature.
The first peace pagodas were built in Japan — in Kumamoto, in Hiroshima (where the pagoda stands near the Peace Memorial Park), in Nagasaki, and at other sites associated with the war. After 1947, Fujii began building pagodas internationally: in India (including at Rajgir, where the Buddha preached, and at Wardha, near Gandhi's ashram), in Sri Lanka (at several sites associated with the ancient Buddhist tradition), and eventually in Europe and America.
The most significant pagodas outside Asia include:
The Battersea Park Peace Pagoda (1985) in London — a gift from Nipponzan-Myōhōji to the city, built by monks and nuns who lived on site during the construction. It was the first peace pagoda in Europe and remains one of the most visited Buddhist monuments in Britain.
The Milton Keynes Peace Pagoda (1980) — the oldest in the Western world, built by monks and volunteers in the Ouzel Valley Park of the planned city of Milton Keynes.
The Leverett Peace Pagoda (1985) in western Massachusetts — built on a hilltop by Nipponzan-Myōhōji monks led by Jun Yasuda, a Japanese nun who became one of the most prominent peace activists in the American Northeast. The Leverett community has been continuously active in anti-nuclear and anti-war protests since its founding.
The Grafton Peace Pagoda (1993) in upstate New York — another community led by Jun Yasuda, built with the labor of volunteers over several years.
The Vienna Peace Pagoda (1983) — built in the Donaupark, presented as a symbol of international peace during the Cold War.
In total, more than eighty peace pagodas now stand across the world. Each was built by Nipponzan-Myōhōji monks and nuns, usually with the help of local volunteers, usually over a period of years, and usually in the face of at least some local opposition. The order regards the construction process itself as a spiritual practice — a form of walking meditation enacted through stone and concrete.
III. Practice — The Drum, the Chant, and the Walk
The core practice of Nipponzan-Myōhōji is stark in its simplicity. Beat the drum. Chant Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō. Walk.
The drum is the uchiwa daiko — a small, flat hand drum, round, held in one hand and struck with a stick held in the other. It produces a rapid, driving rhythm: don-don-don-don, continuous, hypnotic, unrelenting. The chanting of the Lotus Sutra title is fitted to this rhythm. The combination of drum and voice is the order's signature — audible from a great distance, impossible to ignore, deliberately public.
Nipponzan-Myōhōji monks and nuns chant as they walk. They walk as a form of practice, as a form of protest, and as a form of witness. The order has organized some of the longest peace walks in modern history:
The Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage (1998) — a walk from Leverett, Massachusetts, to New Orleans, Louisiana, retracing the routes of the Atlantic slave trade and stopping at sites of racial violence and resistance. Led by Jun Yasuda and organized in collaboration with African-American, Native American, and other religious communities.
The Longest Walk (1978 and subsequent years) — walks organized in solidarity with Native American communities defending their treaty rights and sacred sites. Nipponzan-Myōhōji monks have participated in multiple cross-country walks organized by Dennis Banks and other American Indian Movement leaders.
Annual walks to Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the anniversaries of the atomic bombings — monks walk between the two cities, drumming and chanting, arriving for the memorial ceremonies on August 6 and August 9.
Walks to nuclear test sites, military bases, and weapons facilities — including demonstrations at the Nevada Test Site, at the Trident nuclear submarine base at Bangor, Washington, and at various US military installations in Japan.
The walking practice connects Nipponzan-Myōhōji to the long Buddhist tradition of pilgrimage — but it also connects it, deliberately, to the Gandhian tradition of the protest march. Fujii understood, as Gandhi had, that the body in motion is a political fact. A monk walking through a city beating a drum and chanting is a disruption of the ordinary order of things — a visible, audible, unavoidable assertion that the current state of the world is not acceptable.
IV. Nonviolence and Confrontation
Nipponzan-Myōhōji is nonviolent without being passive. The order's monks and nuns have been arrested repeatedly — at nuclear test sites, at construction projects on sacred Indigenous land, at military installations. They have chained themselves to fences, sat in the paths of bulldozers, and refused to move when ordered by police. They have done all of this while chanting Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō and beating the drum.
The order's most sustained confrontation in the United States has been in solidarity with Native American communities. Jun Yasuda, the Japanese nun who founded the Grafton Peace Pagoda community, became deeply involved in the struggle over sacred sites in the American Northeast. She was arrested at the construction site of a highway that would have destroyed a Mohawk burial ground. She was present at Standing Rock. She has marched with the Haudenosaunee, the Lakota, and other nations in defense of treaty rights and sacred land.
This solidarity between a Japanese Buddhist order and Indigenous American communities is not accidental. Fujii's vision was explicitly anti-colonial: he saw the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the supreme expression of colonial violence, the logical endpoint of a Western civilization built on the domination of non-Western peoples and the exploitation of the natural world. His monks' presence alongside Native American protestors represents a convergence of two anti-colonial traditions — one Buddhist, one Indigenous — each insisting that the sacred is embedded in the land and that the destruction of the land is a spiritual crime.
The order's anti-nuclear position is absolute. Fujii lived through the bombings (he was in Japan in August 1945, though not in either target city) and spent the rest of his life declaring that nuclear weapons were not merely a political problem but a spiritual one — that their existence represented a fundamental betrayal of the human capacity for compassion and that their abolition was the most urgent spiritual task of the age. Every peace pagoda is, in part, an anti-nuclear monument.
V. Organization and Current State
Nipponzan-Myōhōji is one of the smallest religious orders to achieve global visibility. The monastic community numbers perhaps two to three hundred monks and nuns worldwide — a tiny fraction of even the smaller Japanese new religions. It has no lay membership system, no tithing structure, no organizational bureaucracy. The monks live in small communities attached to the peace pagodas or in urban centers where they maintain a presence. They own nothing individually. They beg for food in the traditional Buddhist manner. They build pagodas with their own hands.
Fujii Nichidatsu died in 1985, just short of his hundredth birthday. He had lived to see more than sixty peace pagodas built, had walked tens of thousands of miles, and had witnessed both the use of nuclear weapons and the growing global movement against them. His death did not precipitate the kind of succession crisis that has afflicted many founder-dependent movements, because Nipponzan-Myōhōji had never been organized around a single charismatic leader. Fujii was revered, but the order's structure — small monastic communities, each relatively autonomous, united by practice rather than by institutional hierarchy — proved resilient.
The order continues to build pagodas. Recent projects have been proposed or completed in Africa, Southeast Asia, and additional European sites. The walking practice continues. The anti-nuclear activism continues. The solidarity with Indigenous communities continues.
What Nipponzan-Myōhōji has not done — and what distinguishes it from the larger Japanese new religions — is grow. It has not developed a mass membership, a lay organization, a publishing operation, or an educational system. Its influence is disproportionate to its size because its monuments are permanent, its activism is visible, and its practice is unmistakable: the sound of the drum and the chanting of the Lotus Sutra title, heard from a great distance, in public spaces around the world, is Nipponzan-Myōhōji's form of evangelism.
VI. Nipponzan-Myōhōji and the Aquarian Phenomenon
Nipponzan-Myōhōji occupies a distinctive position in the Aquarian landscape. It is not a new religion in the conventional sense — it does not offer a new theology, a new cosmology, or a new spiritual practice. It is a Nichiren Buddhist order that practices the same chanting that Nichiren taught in the thirteenth century. What makes it Aquarian is not its doctrine but its application.
The Aquarian insight — that the sacred is directly accessible, that institutional mediation is unnecessary, that spiritual practice has immediate implications for the political and social order — is present in Fujii's work not as a theory but as a method. You do not need a temple. You do not need a congregation. You do not need an education in Buddhist philosophy. You need a drum, a voice, and the willingness to walk into the middle of whatever injustice you encounter and stand there chanting until something changes.
The encounter with Gandhi is the key. Nichiren Buddhism before Fujii was a tradition of national salvation — Nichiren himself had petitioned the Japanese government, not humanity. Gandhi taught Fujii that the scope of the practice was universal and that nonviolent witness was its natural political expression. The synthesis — Buddhist devotion as nonviolent direct action, the stupa as anti-nuclear protest, the walking pilgrimage as solidarity with the colonized — is Fujii's original contribution, and it is an Aquarian contribution: the ancient practice freed from its institutional and national context and directed at the global crisis of the age.
The peace pagoda itself is perhaps the purest Aquarian monument. It is not a church — no one worships there. It is not a temple — no services are held. It is a visible prayer, a stone declaration, a permanent disruption of the skyline that says: here, in this city, someone has declared that peace is possible. That is enough. That is the whole teaching, rendered in concrete and white paint, standing silently while the monks walk away drumming.
Colophon
This ethnographic profile was researched and composed for the Good Work Library's Living Traditions series in March 2026. Sources consulted include Kisala's Prophets of Peace: Pacifism and Cultural Identity in Japan's New Religions, Bocking's academic surveys of Japanese Buddhism, the Nipponzan-Myōhōji community websites and publications (including the Leverett and Grafton Peace Pagoda communities), Victoria's Zen at War (for context on Buddhist pacifism as a minority position in wartime Japan), and encyclopedia entries. This is an outsider's scholarly portrait of a living community.
Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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