Asian Buddhist traditions are not just objects of political analysis but contain rich resources of political self-consciousness. This panel attempts to articulate how Buddhist texts, projects, and practices can intervene in the global dialogue of political philosophy. By examining case studies from medieval China, modern India, and postcolonial Burma, we (re)theorize the role of the individual in society, the nature of the nation state, and how spheres of sovereignty are negotiated and enforced. We argue that the contestation over this constellation of ideas creates the space for diverse actors to articulate broadly Buddhist theories of politics that bear upon questions transcending their historical contingencies. Along with contributing to a de-parochializing of political theory, the insights gleaned from our case studies not only challenge the preconception that Buddhism is apolitical; they offer alternative, compelling perspectives on perennial issues in non-Buddhist traditions of thought, thereby opening up new vistas of political philosophy.
Historians have long argued that one of Buddhism’s most disruptive effects on pre-modern China was its introduction of a novel social institution, the sangha. As a community that stood outside of family and state, the sangha posed a challenge to the traditional Chinese polity. This paper suggests that, during the medieval period, Buddhist thinkers attempted to clarify the relationship between sangha and state by exploring the nature of the monastic precepts. The paper argues that this discourse on precepts in fact amounted to an idiosyncratic form of political theory. The paper will further suggest that this precept-discourse occasionally broached the radical possibility that state and sangha were distinct polities of equal standing. Finally, the paper will explore whether this precept-discourse parallels Western political philosophy’s discourse on ‘sovereignty.’ The paper thus rests at the intersection of Buddhist intellectual history and modern political philosophy.
One of the pretexts that British colonizers denied India independence is the Orientalist claim that Indians cannot govern themselves democratically. In 1903, Rhys Davids discovered that the historical Buddha was not a prince but the son of a Saṅgha (council) elder of a republican state with some sovereignty. Inspired by this Buddhological knowledge, many twentieth-century Indian Buddhists developed traditional *saṅgha* rules into democratic theories of India’s self-governance. Unfortunately, to this day, their theories have not been studied seriously as social philosophy. This paper argues that these modern Buddhist developments are worthy of philosophers’ attention – as processual philosophy. This new perspective promises to go beyond the antimony of the individual against the collective by theorizing personhood and community as aggregated processes. As I show, these theorists conceived democratic societies as webs of mutual commitment, reproduced through motivated, nonviolent, organizational co-actions.
On January 4th, 1948, Burma gained independence. On the same day, the reform-minded scholar-monk, the Mahāgandhāyon Sayadaw (1900-1977), published his *Future of the Sāsana* (B. *Anāgat sāsanā reḥ*). This text not only puts forward the Mahāgandhayon’s vision for the future of Buddhism, but for the modernisation of the nascent nation. I demonstrate in this paper that at the heart of this program of nation building is the philosophical question of the nature of the postcolonial subject. Given the Buddhist view of the individual as fundamentally driven by desires and enslaved to the conceit of the self, I argue that rather than embracing a liberal notion of development theory, the Mahāgandhāyon Sayadaw puts forth a vision of progress where the postcolonial subject does not need to be protected from the excesses of the newly independent state, but where the state needs protection from the corruption and chaos of the new citizen.