How Tina Turner's Buddhist faith gave her the strength to leave Ike Turner

JONAH VALDEZ
Los Angeles Times
May 24, 2023

While Tina Turner is heralded as an R&B and rock icon, her Buddhist faith was the soul that drove her eventful life and career.

She often credited the religion with helping her find the strength to leave her abusive relationship with Ike Turner in 1976. In the years since, Turner was known to recite Buddhist chants daily, even chanting on national television on Larry King’s CNN show in 1997, a practice she continued until her death on Wednesday, at 83, in her home in Küsnacht, near Zurich, Switzerland, where she had kept her own Buddhist shrine.

As tributes for the “Proud Mary” performer poured in online, many recalled the influence Turner’s faith had on their lives, inspiring them to start practicing Buddhism and some to also leave harmful relationships.

“Tina Turner is the reason I found Buddhism,” tweeted Jessica N. Pabón, a professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at SUNY New Paltz in New York. .

“She was my strength when I left my abuser,” former journalist Laura Keeney wrote while tweeting a Turner obituary, “and she introduced me to Buddhism as a balm for my soul.”

Laura A. Cole tweeted that Turner’s song “What’s Love Got to Do With It” taught her “that I could change my mind and my path on a dime if the life I was living no longer served me or even actively harmed me.”

Cole continued: “SHE introduced me to Buddhism and the peace of meditation.”

Turner was introduced to Buddhism by multiple people throughout the early 1970s. But it was a woman whom Ike Turner had brought to the studio one day who convinced the singer to start practicing. The woman, Valerie Bishop, was a member of the Soka Gakkai community, a form of Nichiren Buddhism, which is active throughout West Los Angeles, near where the Turners lived and recorded music. That was according to Taro Gold, co-author of Turner’s 2020 spiritual memoir, “Happiness Becomes You,” who was interviewed in 2021 by the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford University.

The Grammy-winning singer, who grew up Baptist, eventually transitioned from reciting “The Lord’s Prayer” to chanting the basic prayer within Nichiren Buddhism, “nam-myoho-renge-kyo,” which translates to devotion to the mystic law of cause and effect. Members of Soka Gakkai customarily chant the prayer twice a day, morning and evening, in part to manifest things in their lives, such as happiness or other goals.

“The more you chant, the more you become liberated, mentally,” Turner said in the 2021 HBO documentary “Tina,” during a scene that featured a voice-over of her reciting Buddhist prayers.

“I started seeing my life — I started really seeing that I had to make a change,” Turner continued in the film, recalling the effect chanting had on her life. “I started to become much more confident. I mean, not even caring what Ike thought about me — becoming less afraid of him.”

Her introduction to Buddhism also came shortly after she attempted suicide by overdosing on Valium, Turner told USA Today in 2020. “Buddhism literally saved my life,” she said.

“When she found her spirituality, when she found Buddhism, that unlocked something inside of her,” “Tina” co-director T.J. Martin said in a 2021 interview with “PBS NewsHour.” “I think that gave her a sense of confidence that she was always searching for.”

While she struggled to regain momentum in her career after leaving Ike Turner, often working in Las Vegas showrooms and on the cabaret circuit, Turner’s constant performing and her faith had “kept her sane,” according to Martin.

And after laboring for nearly a decade, Turner rebounded to what would become a remarkable second act that began in 1984. Her solo album “Private Dancer” spawned the hits “What’s Love Got to Do With It” and “Better Be Good to Me.” She continued to perform and record until 1999, when she released “Twenty Four Seven,” her 10th and final solo album.

Throughout the last decade of her life, Turner was involved in various interfaith projects, such as the recording of a series of spiritual music albums with the Beyond Music project that combines Christian and Buddhist chants.

“When I recorded it, the sound I got back, I was very proud of it,” Turner said during an interview around the release of one of the group’s albums in 2011. “I hope the whole world will hear a prayer that brought me this far, and brought me to being a very happy person.”





https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2023-05-24/tina-turner-buddhism-ike-turner-nichiren

How the practice of Nichiren Buddhism sustained Tina Turner for 50 years

The Conversation
Published: May 26, 2023


Author
1. Ralph H. Craig III

PhD Student in Religious Studies, Stanford University


Disclosure statement

Ralph H. Craig III receives funding from Stanford University. He is affiliated with SGI-USA, but he does not represent them in any capacity.


Partners

When Tina Turner, often dubbed the "Queen of Rock 'N' Roll," died at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland, on May 24, 2023, at the age of 83, media headlines praised both her dynamism as a performer and her many career achievements. What many did not know is that for the past 50 years Turner had practiced Soka Gakkai International Nichiren Buddhism.

Soka Gakkai is a lay Nichiren Buddhist organization that was founded in Japan in 1930. Today, the international organization is known as Soka Gakkai International, or SGI. This form of Buddhism was popularized in the United States through the organization known today as SGI-USA. Turner was introduced to the organization by Valerie Bishop, a woman whom her first husband, musician Ike Turner hired to work in his recording studio.

Turner's Buddhist practice developed initially against the backdrop of her first marriage and continued throughout her solo career. It provided inspiration for some of the final projects of her career.

As a scholar of Buddhism in South Asia and in the U.S., I have closely studied the career of African American artists who practice Buddhism. Tina Turner, in particular, sought to teach Buddhism through her writings and later through her records.

Turner's early religious life

Turner was born on Nov. 26, 1939, and raised in the community of Nutbush, Tennessee. Her family was Baptist and worshipped at both Woodlawn Missionary Baptist Church and Spring Hill Baptist Church. They also sometimes attended a Black Pentecostal church near Knoxville, Tennessee.

As I found while doing research for my forthcoming book, "Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner," Turner's religious influences extended beyond the forms of Afro-Protestant institutional religion. In her memoir "Happiness Becomes You," Turner describes the deep, mystical connection that her grandmother had to nature, which suggests that her grandmother was immersed in the more mystical strands of Black Southern religious culture.

In 1957, she met Ike Turner. After she initially joined his band as vocalist, they eventually formed a musical partnership under the moniker The Ike & Tina Turner Revue.

The duo scored chart success with songs like "A Fool in Love," "River Deep – Mountain High," "Proud Mary" and "Nutbush City Limits." Though publicly successful, in private Ike frequently abused Tina Turner.

Introduction to Buddhism

Turner was introduced to the teachings of Nichiren Buddhism in 1973. Nichiren Buddhism is based on the teachings of Nichiren, a Buddhist monk who lived during the 13th century in Japan. Central to Nichiren's thought was the conviction that the Lotus Sūtra, a Mahayana Buddhist text, was the highest of all the Buddha's teachings.

Nichiren taught that chanting the title of this scripture in the form of the mantralike phrase "Nam-myoho-renge-kyo" was the way for all people to reveal their inherent potential for awakening and attain buddhahood. Further, Nichiren taught that doing this practice would have profound social impact by making the Buddha's highest teachings the basis of society.

Chanting of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

How Nichiren Buddhism was popularized

Soka Gakkai members began arriving in the U.S. in the 1950s. As these members spoke primarily Japanese and were geographically spread out, they initially had limited success in their efforts to propagate Nichiren Buddhism in the U.S. That changed in 1960 when, under the leadership of the third Soka Gakkai president, Daisaku Ikeda, an American branch of the organization was formally established.

With his guidance, they spread the basic Nichiren Buddhist practice of chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo before an inscribed scroll called the Gohonzon. They taught that doing this practice would lead to "human revolution," a gradual process of inner transformation and empowerment.

It is the SGI Nichiren Buddhist understanding of personal empowerment and human revolution that seems to have initially attracted Tina Turner. In a 2020 Tricycle Magazine interview, Turner explained: "As I began studying Buddhist teachings and chanting more, it led me to take responsibility for my life and to base my choices on wisdom, courage, and compassion. Not long after I started chanting, I began to see that the power I needed to change my life was already within me."

In the '70s, changing her life meant separating from the Ike & Tina Turner Revue in 1976 and divorcing Ike Turner in 1978.

A resurgence powered by SGI Nichiren Buddhism

After her divorce, Turner struggled as a solo artist before her well-known career resurgence with 1984's "Private Dancer" album. Platinum albums and sold-out global tours followed. Turner credited each success to her Buddhist practice.

Her practice would be chronicled in two autobiographies: the first, "I, Tina," published in 1986; and a second, "My Love Story," published in 2018. Her practice is also represented in the 1993 biographical film "What's Love Got to Do with It?" and on record on the 2009 interfaith album "Beyond: Buddhist and Christian Prayers" and on stage in the musical "Tina: The Tina Turner Musical."

Through all of these projects, Turner made clear that her practice of SGI Nichiren Buddhism sustained her for the past 50 years.



https://theconversation.com/how-the-practice-of-nichiren-buddhism-sustained-tina-turner-for-50-years-206486

Breaching the secretive sects of Shin-Buddhism

Stephen Mansfield
Special to The Japan Times
May 30, 2015

The tendency to perceive covert groups as reticent conspirators rather than curators of hidden knowledge is universal.

In Japan, secret oral transmissions, chants, rituals and services have long been identified with esoteric schools of Buddhist faith such as Shingon and Tendai. Defenders of secrecy have drawn attention to several examples of the discretionary sharing of teachings among other well-established religious groups to prove that they are hardly unique in their commitment to confidentiality.

Among others who prefer to keep their most profound learnings under wraps are the Nichiren Buddhist sect with their many secret teachings, Zen Buddhists with their practice of direct transmission.

Are the Shin-Buddhist groups that researcher Clark Chilson writes about truly “covert” — with all the dark and grainy implications that come with that word — or are they simply esoteric?

Covert groups, as the writer soon discovers, are not primarily interested in disseminating doctrine and, thereby, expanding their congregations, although they may seek to maintain a regular number of adherents. The creation of a mystique through the sharing of secret practices among a select group, is in itself empowering.

Yet secrecy has its limits. By the Edo Period (1603-1868), the much-coveted “secret teachings” associated with gardening manuals were being openly published, prompted by the growing popularity of gardening — no longer the exclusive preserve of stone-setting priests and professionals. On a recent trip to Onomichi, Hiroshima Prefecture, a monk at Jodoji Temple began speaking to me in hushed tones of ahibutsu (a hidden Buddha image or sculpture), concealed in a dank chamber — only to break the spell by finally showing me a photograph he had taken of the figure. There are cases with certain religious objects where excessive conjecture has almost refined them out of existence. There are those who believe that the tiny statue of the deity Kannon — found by two sibling fishermen in Tokyo’s Sumida River in 628 AD and now purportedly housed in the recesses of nearby Sensoji Temple — is a figment maintained by a religious establishment content to enjoy prestige by association.

Historically, covert groups and sects have gone into hiding to avoid persecution — their very secrecy defining them as heretical or injurious organizations outside the legitimizing realm of Buddhist scholasticism, threatening the existing social order. Confucianism, with its innate distrust of secrecy, helped to cast further aspersions on covert groups during the Edo Period. Heeding this climate of suspicion and fear, Chilson’s text is enlivened with anecdotes about religious espionage and undercover infiltrations, arrests and the grisly extraction of confessions.

Religion in Japan is often presented as a harmonious entity, despite historical records to the contrary. Those who know of the murderous rampages of monks on Mount Hiei, or the support lent by Zen Buddhists to the military in World War II, will not be surprised to learn of internal schisms and shifts of ideology and allegiance among the groups Chilson highlights. The author uses the existence of such groups as a vehicle for exploring ideas of concealment associated with Tantric traditions and hidden Christians in Japan, and also the practices of Crypto-Jews and those who practice Gnosticism or follow the Kabbalah.

Confraternities of covert Shin-Buddhists have been grouped into three categories by Chilson, which is a standard division: those found in the northeast of the country (referred to as kakushi nenbutsu), groups deemed heretical, and secret practitioners in parts of Kyushu. Though never privy to the ultimate teachings of these groups, Chilson, gaining the trust of various Shin-Buddhist fraternities, including one known as Urahomon, was admitted to their discussions, prayer sessions and sermons, and was even allowed to witness the rarely performed rites of one group who follow, and claim to protect, the teachings of the 12th-century holy man Shinran.
Chilson was able to explore a number of practices preserved by certain arcane congregations and affiliations, such as the liturgical texts used in services by Kirishimako members from southern Kyushu, who, at least traditionally, enforce a dietary ban on the consumption of chicken. The author was even asked if he would like to undergo the first of a number of initiation rites, an honor he declined in order to keep his integrity as a researcher intact. The acquisition of profound knowledge would have placed the writer in the predicament of having to decide whether to respect oaths of secrecy, or betray them.

Ultimately, the carefully managed balance between revealed and concealed practices helps to maintain the very special identity of these groups. “Secrecy,” as Chilson puts it, “in effect becomes an organizing principle,” for fraternities that are marginal, but essentially self-engrossed rather than socially seditious.
A work of staggering scholarship, ‘Secrecy’s Power’ — an undertaking requiring a mind-bending grasp of Japanese religious terminology and nomenclature — represents a milestone in the study of covert Buddhist groups, not so much for what it tells us, but for what it pointedly omits.
It will be interesting to see how such groups cope in Japan’s new government-driven surveillance society, whose doctrine is full disclosure in the service of the state.

Secrecy’s Power, by Clark Chilson
235 pages.
University of Hawaii Press, Nonfiction.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2015/05/30/books/book-reviews/breaching-secretive-sects-shin-buddhism/#.VWsO59JVhHx