Some people might criticize new religions as “cults”. If they were right, there’d be accompanying “cult literature” or “cult journalism” as well.

Religion itself is very ancient in origin. Religious heritages discovered until today have at least ten thousand years of history. Teachings conveyed in those surely contain “unperishable truths”.

I have been spreading HS teachings abroad in Hawaii, South Korea, Europe, Taiwan, Australia, Brazil, India, Nepal, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Africa. As a result, I feel that even foreign people, who speak different languages, can understand what I believe and preach as the “truth.” I clearly feel that even if they might be Buddhists, Christians, or Muslims, they can recognize the truth.

I believe this is because they have learned from religion itself as part of their cultural backgrounds. Those people, who have learned from such religious cultures, can recognize that in my teachings are the truths that ought to be preached for modern times. That’s why it resonates with them.

If some people criticize religion from the start, treating it as an evil teaching, and label religious groups as “cults”, this means that they’ve not basically made an effort to educate themselves truly.

Religion is one of the oldest fields of study for humanity. It is a shameful thing for a person not to have studied religion. […] If you have studied traditional religious cultures, you would know that, “it was not the case that only in ancient times, gods and saints sent holy persons to the earth to spread teachings. Today there are over 7 billion people. There must be teachings that are able to give direction to many people. As such, teachers must appear and preach.”

Even Jesus was treated as a cult leader and was hung on the cross. However, Christianity has spread throughout the whole world, which took a long period of time. Various religions have been persecuted, and religion has certainly contained aspects that have gone against the “common sense” of the times. However, as there are so many people on the earth today, it is impossible that “salvation” isn’t preached. (The Light Is Here)

I strongly feel that the reach of our current system of school education is limited to the development of intellect and does not extend to the deeper, more important things. It is my opinion that it is unbefitting of a human being to use a prestigious educational background only for the benefit of one’s own personal career or gain.

The better the school a person graduates from, the more help that person has received from others. People may think that they accomplished everything on their own, but that is a misperception. Their being on an elite path in life is the result of receiving aid from a great many people. While it may appear that they did it all on their own, in reality, they did not. The fact that the efforts of many other people contributed to their current situation has simply eluded them.

Nothing will change in our country if we can do nothing more than produce a generation of self-centered elitists. Those who we call “our best and brightest” must be the types of people who keenly feel a higher calling to dedicate their lives to the improvement of the lives of others, strengthening their countries, and making the world a better place.

Japan has made a degree of progress, but we still have not succeeded in providing the type of education to our children that will result in a generation that feels the responsibility that comes with greatness. Our system currently stops at levels of satisfaction, which are limited to the individual, the family, and other close acquaintances. Many people are content to leave the fate of the world up to other powerful countries or the United Nations. There is a lack of sense of individual responsibility.

I believe that we must demonstrate an immovable commitment to better our country and better the world. In order to do this, we must raise a generation of young people who have a sense of noblesse oblige (the idea that privilege entails responsibility), and the backbone of this generation should be religious in nature. […] If the religion in question is based on the teachings of God or Buddha, people will not be bad. Charlatans aside, a religion that comes from God or Buddha must be good. Therefore, it follows that it would be a wonderful thing if people who received a religious education, or a religion-backboned education, were responsible for the governing and economy of our country.

At the same time, people who have received such an education must look past our borders and have high aspirations to help the people in other countries. It is my goal to graduate such passionate people with high aspirations from the schools that Happy Science has built and will continue to build. (The Laws of Education).

We don’t ultimately need to introduce our students to the study of human happiness, or “happy science” from a religious angle. We can teach it to them as an academic subject or in the practical form of professional expertise and skills. We need to select and extract those elements of our diverse teachings and experiences that will help people live happier lives, and we need to transmit these teachings to the general public in a detached and objective way. I think that this process will involve a certain aspect of academic research.

Some universities have faculties of theology or Buddhist studies, so why shouldn’t our university be a place for the research of human happiness? We can harness the strengths of academia – for instance, by performing comparative studies with other religions, ideologies, or philosophies — to cast Happy Science’s teachings into relief, and to re-examine them academically as “The Study of Human Happiness”. […] As I’ve explained, there are certain philosophies and ways of thinking that clearly make no contribution to making people happier. Of course, they might be worthy of research in and of itself, but we should investigate how these ways of thinking have worked as obstacles, making individuals unhappy and pulling society in negative directions.

What I want us to find out is what ways of thinking do lead to greater prosperity and success on an individual level. What should success be at the corporate or societal level? I want us to focus on researching the links between human happiness and religious and philosophical thought. I think that this theme should be investigated within the scope of the humanities.

We can break this theme down into more specific sub-sections. For instance, our Faculty of Successful Management will research and teach how to make businesses succeed, while also investigating what it means to do one’s job well, and how to be successful and secure a personal and family life while working at a company. The Faculty of Successful Management will explore the more practical aspects of the science of human happiness.

I have chosen to use the word “successful” in the faculty’s title. I could theoretically make both a faculty of human unhappiness as well as a faculty of human happiness, just as I could study business failure as well as business success. However, I think there’s no need to go so far as to create a “Faculty of Failed Management”. Of course, there is no harm in studying why certain businesses fail in order to collect some cautionary case studies, but I would rather focus on figuring out what has made businesses succeed. (The Vision for a New University)