hmmm funny. i've been a member of sgi for years and i've never contributed more than 10 bucks at a time (possibly no more than twice a year) and i'm still welcome at the center to use its facilities and chant there. and yes i'm sure there are some rich people with very high networths in the organization but if you actually bothered to take a look at the nyc members, most of them are minorities and struggling artists. oh and come to think of it, there's a guy who sleeps in the park but goes there to chant all the time. so yeah, make your assumptions (without actually being a selective and critical reader) because that seems to be the privilege afforded us by this media age. oh and mozucat, your link to the sgi wikipedia page is quite weak, i can easily go in there and just write positive fantastic things about the organization but i shall refrain from that since i believe in our free speech (and the fact that no religious organization is perfect) but beware, because you certainly are abusing yours by lying and slandering. the time article obviously had a slant on focusing on the most sensational aspect (ie. obscenely rich members) of the organization so draw your own conclusions. how interesting would the article be to you if it focused on the struggles of a single mother trying to raise her child? on courtney love, i really dont care who she is and all i hope is that she can, like many of the other members, somehow find a way to overcome her demons. if the organization was trying to get its publicity, it really would have been publicized (hello its ny!) to the point of saturation. but as sgi goes, their guests all get the same treatment -- a platform to share and inspire. oh and doctor memory, scumbag? you sound more like you have an axe to grind more than anything else. your comment screams immature, juvenile, my-parents-didn't-love-me-enough.

It works! She chanted my lunch back up.

As Doctor Memory pointed out, SGI (Soka Gakkai International) seems to be a politically powerful cult rather like Scientology, favored by celebrities. Buddhists with assets "as high as $100 billion"...

"she "gave a very inspiring & spiritual talk;"

You can fool some of the people all of the time. I'm sure that her shooting heroin every day of her pregnancy made her a freakin' bodhisattva, right?

To even Talk about Courtney Love and Bo@issa%^va in the same day will bring on bad Karma....:(

What exactly does she inspire people with?

Oy. For those of you not familiar with these bozos, "Nichiren Buddhism" are the "If you chant namyo-ho-renge-kyo three thousand times a day and tithe all of your income to us, you'll eventually become fabulously wealthy / walk again / recover from cancer" people. Scumbags, in other words.

A perfect fit for Courtney.

I'll add here that Nichiren Buddhists are in fact Buddhists (you know, it's one of those religions that pre-date Christianity), which means that our religious practice consists of developing compassion for others. Nichiren was a priest who lived a few hundred years ago who developed a branch of Buddhism. It is not at all like Scientology. Nor is it a cult, unless you're going to argue that all organized religions are cults, a point I would happily concede. We meditate. We learn philosophy. The normal stuff Buddhists do. You don't even have to belong to a temple or SGI in order to practice it. We chant three thousand times a day, as you say (figuratively), as our practice of meditation in order to develop ourselves and become better people. In the science world, chanting is referred to as Transcendental Meditation (TM) and is both a common and validated practice of cognitive self development. And for anyone who doesn't know, this practice has been repeatedly validated time and time again in numerous psychological and neuroscientific experiments and is widely recognized by doctors and scientists as a beneficial practice.

There is no tithing in any of the Nichiren temples/organizations. The other things you say are true, except that the becoming wealthy and famous, etc is just an SGI teaching -- none of the other Nichiren Buddhist churches teach that, and we rather think SGI members are idiots on that count. And also the part of about them being scumbags. They aren't that either, not even the SGI people. They are sincere people that devote a lot of time and energy to helping other people. I mean, we're talking about millions of people around the world, so that's obviously not true of everyone. But many of the leaders are genuinely caring.

sigh, stupid gawker comments system: that wasn't supposed to be a reply to andoman.

I believe the word you are searching for is "revulsion."