On Communication
April 2011
Banner photo: Lyon, France [© Alexis Grattier/Getty Images]
Evolving Consensus Through Dialogue
In 1993, the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by SGI President Daisaku Ikeda, to collaborate with diverse scholars, activists and social innovators. The center, which was renamed the Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning, and Dialogue in 2009, now has its own publishing arm, Dialogue Path Press; books developed by the center have been used in 750 college and university courses to date. Virginia Benson served as executive director for the center's first 16 years and is now senior fellow. Here, she discusses how the center evolved.
SGI Quarterly: What was your experience of setting up the Boston Research Center's programs?
Virginia Benson: The first book I read based on Nichiren Buddhism was Choose Life--SGI President Ikeda's dialogue with British historian Arnold Toynbee. This was around 1983, and I was working in public policy at the time. But their dialogue went way beyond my experience of public policy issues, expanding from a national to a global view. I began to understand things differently from then on. Years later, when I first met President Ikeda in August 1992, I told him I had been encouraged by his dialogues with scholars and leaders around the world and asked if there was any way I could help. Shockingly, he said he didn't need my help! He said words to the effect of "Don't just try to help me. You yourself have a unique mission in the world, and I want you, like all the members of the SGI, to become a brilliant shining sun in your own field."
I had held a lot of important positions in the fairly male-dominated field of public policy and politics--but there was a certain holding back for me as a woman. So it was very significant for a man whose work I admired to turn around to me and say, "I want you to become a brilliant shining sun in your own field." This really took the limits off me, and I was able to realize breakthroughs at the think tank where I was working. When I was invited to join the interview process for the directorship of a new peace institute to be founded by President Ikeda, I was asked to create a vision of what I thought would make a good institute. That was really surprising to me, that I was expected to have a vision.
SGIQ: When did you start working as director?
VB: I was hired in September 1993, soon after President Ikeda's lecture at Harvard University, "Mahayana Buddhism and Twenty-First-Century Civilization," delivered on September 24, 1993. Looking back, I can see the vision for the center was actually at the heart of the Harvard lecture, which focuses on Shakyamuni Buddha's trust in language and lifelong commitment to dialogue as a means of bringing about peace. I turned to the lecture as the background for the mission statement for the center on communication and dialogue, which, in Ikeda's terms, meant openhearted and open-minded dialogue.
Small group discussions at the Ikeda Center [Marilyn Humphries]
At the same time, I needed to connect the lecture with what was going on with peace movements in the world at the time. The Parliament of the World's Religions had met in 1993, and there was interest in developing a global ethic. So, our initial focus was on global ethics across cultures and religions, the need to evolve a consensus through dialogue among cultures and religions.
In the summer of 1993, a Harvard academic, Samuel Huntington, had written an article that he eventually turned into a book, positing a clash of civilizations. I believe that President Ikeda was aware of that theory. His own lifework had been premised on evolving a philosophy of the harmony of civilizations through dialogue, so it seemed very significant that he should come and give a lecture at Harvard about what kind of contribution Buddhism can make to a global civilization of peace. He then created the Boston Research Center to continue in that spirit.
SGIQ: How have you developed dialogue at the center?
VB: I had previously worked in a think tank, where we always focused on making specific recommendations, so initially I found the broadness of the vision a challenge. I thought, "Let's work here at the center to bring together people from different fields and disciplines, who are scholar activists, around a set of core values." We took the values that have been clarified through UN processes--human rights, environment, peace and nonviolence, and economic justice--and spent two years on each. The first eight years gave us a foundation of goodwill and a statement of who we were.
SGIQ: The publications program at the center has been very important.
VB: At first, we did a lot of events to bring people in, establish our presence and make friends. We held many dialogues and published the transcripts of these. But then a friend of the center, the sociologist of religion Bryan Wilson, suggested we solicit essays and develop a book that hangs together. These too are a kind of dialogue--between the editor and us, the editor and various scholars. Subverting Hatred: The Challenge of Nonviolence in Religious Traditions was our first book to be picked up by an outside publisher. Other books started getting used as texts in university courses. In a similar way, the Ikeda Forum for Intercultural Dialogue, which started in 2004, came about as the result of advice from a friend, the distinguished literary scholar Ronald A. Bosco, who proposed that we do a forum that would articulate the values of President Ikeda and be more clearly identified with his writings.
SGIQ: How has your own practice of dialogue and communication evolved?
VB: I once mentioned to President Ikeda that I sometimes felt intimidated around scholars. He responded by helping me see the enormous value of engaging people of great learning in the cause of peace. Feeling more proud of my mission and less concerned about academic credentials, I realized that what mattered most was heart and resonance, the quality of my interaction with each person.
Q & A session, Ikeda Forum 2010 [Marilyn Humphries]
We take networking at the center very seriously, as an end in itself, and we are working to create a great network of globally minded people who want to be in a mutual learning environment and to evolve a set of more universal, intercultural understandings.
SGIQ: How did you develop your own skills in facilitating dialogue?
VB: It's a habit I got from my mother. She was a scholar herself, a geologist, and at the same time a housewife, and we always had lots of people coming to our family home and sharing the dinner table. Because my father was reserved, my mother became the person who had this desire for everyone to feel included and part of things and for no one to feel left out. I work from the assumption that people want to be drawn out, and I often have an intuition that a particular person may have something to say about a certain subject. I do a lot of guessing to try to make things as equal as possible, so everyone can feel they have contributed something to the wisdom in the room. I combined my mother's training with what I learned through SGI discussion meetings. I was very grateful to find a group that had just the same ethic my mother had; that everyone has something to say. I felt that President Ikeda would want the ethic of conversation that exists in the SGI and in his dialogues to be there in the center.
