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Getting Started With the Ikeda Center

Two participants engage in dialogue at our Dialogue Nights event

Welcome! For more than 30 years we have been committed to exploring and highlighting the ways that learning and dialogue can contribute to a more peaceful world. For us, this means encouraging and enabling as many people to discover shared peacebuilding values and imagine more harmonious modes of being together. Here is quick guide to some of the key ways you can join us as we go about this work. 

Learn About Us

A great place to begin is where it all started for us. In September 1993, Daisaku Ikeda delivered a lecture at Harvard’s Yenching Institute called Mahayana Buddhism and 21st Century Civilization. Soon after, he founded our Center as a place to engage in learning and dialogue on key themes from that talk. Since that time, and right up to the final months before his death, Mr. Ikeda regularly sent us messages of guidance that outline the main ideas and values that guide all our work. If you visit About Us, you can learn about our journey in our History section and dive deeper into our values in our Core Convictions section. 

Discover The Art and Practice of Dialogue

One way that our approach to dialogue is unique is the extent to which we encourage dialogue as a way to imagine and discover together diverse pathways to peace. To learn more what dialogue looks like for us, a great place to start is by listening to our podcast, The Dialogue Studio. Here, friends of the Ikeda Center discuss what dialogue means to them, both as a philosophy and as an everyday practice. Our events also demonstrate our dialogical ethos. Check out the in-depth write-ups on our Dialogue Nights series and annual Ikeda Forum for Intercultural Dialogue for a taste of dialogue-in-action at the Ikeda Center.

Explore Our Resources

One thing that is really special about our website is the volume and variety of resources that are freely available for your exploration. These resources reveal peacebuilding to be the rich and multidimensional endeavor that it truly is. You can explore our resource library in many ways. You can search for topics such as Education and Philosophy or Nuclear Disarmament or by types such as Interviews or Essays or Lectures. Dig in and encounter connections with your own vision for peace!

Read Our Publications

We prize our publications as an essential way of engaging in peacebuilding dialogue with readers worldwide. We are especially honored to have published ten of Mr. Ikeda’s book length dialogues through our Dialogue Path Press (DPP). Just a couple highlights include our first DPP title, Creating Waldens: An East-West Dialogue on the American Renaissance, with Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, and America Will Be! Conversations on Hope, Freedom, and Democracy, with the historian Vincent Harding, who was a friend and confidant of Martin Luther King Jr. We also publish multi-author books exploring themes central to our work. Two of our favorites are Subverting Hatred: The Challenge of Nonviolence in the World’s Religions and Hope and Joy in Education: Engaging Daisaku Ikeda Across Curriculum and Context. 

Engage With Us

Now that you know a little more about us, we’d love to stay in touch with you! To receive our most recent resources and event updates right in your inbox, subscribe to our mailing list. You’ll be the first to hear about our local and virtual events, when new podcast episodes are released, when new resources such as video recordings and write ups are posted, and more! You can also find us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X @ikedacenter.