This book is a compilation of eight lectures delivered by President Ikeda between 1989 and 1997 at universities and academies in different cities of the world — Beijing, New Delhi, Kathmandu, Paris, Cambridge USA and Moscow. Though these lectures have been delivered at academic institutions the collection is meant not just for the scholarly erudite but for the average thinking individual concerned about the future of humanity.
As Ikeda Sensei mentions in his preface to New Humanism (Weatherhill edition), another book in which some of these lectures are featured.“ It is my hope that the proposals for peace, observations on history and my views of education and arts offered in these pages will have a positive effect on the thinking and life of the reader in some way or the other.”