BUDDHIST KEYNSIAN?:

Ashoka the Great: Three decades after Alexander's fateful push into the subcontinent, an Indian emperor renounced violence and tried to rule according to the teachings of the Buddha. Even his failures have lessons for us today. (Pankaj Mishra, December 5, 2004, Boston Globe)

Born only 30 years after Alexander embarked on his improbably successful invasion of Asia, Ashoka was not only the first great ruler to reject the glory of violent conquest, but also the first to apply the teachings of the Buddha to politics and governance. As H.G. Wells put it in his "Short History of the World" (1922), "Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history . . . the name of Ashoka shines, and shines almost alone."

School textbooks in India today describe how Ashoka converted to Buddhism after an especially bloody campaign and proclaimed a state policy based on compassion, nonviolence and tolerance -- Buddhist ideas that would spread across Asia, from China to Indonesia to Japan, in the next two millennia. But Ashoka seems to have been only partly successful in combining Buddhism with statecraft. Buddhists in the centuries since have not always been immune to the corruptions of political power and ideology, and it remains unclear today whether the Dalai Lama's admirable commitment to nonviolence makes him an effective political campaigner for Tibetan independence from Chinese rule.

Nevertheless, as debate over the proper relationship between church and state rages in various places around the globe, the examples of Ashoka and the Dalai Lama, among others, suggest that Buddhism, with its absence of dogma and emphasis on dialogue and nonviolence, offers an ethical basis for both governance and political protest in large pluralistic communities, and that it may be more immune to theocratic zeal than most other major religions. . . .The Buddha himself was no political theorist. Unlike Plato, he seems neither to have given much advice to the major rulers of his time nor to have criticized the political systems they presided over. But his lack of theoretical passion was due to a wider and deeper political experience. In his travels across northern India, the Buddha seems to have known more political forms -- republics, monarchies, and then, just before his death, empire -- than Plato, who was familiar only with the polis. He preferred to address the question of what constitutes the ruler's right to rule, what made the exercise of his power legitimate. Unlike the theorists of ancient India who claimed divine sanction for kingship, the Buddha, who was an agnostic, did not find the ruler's legitimacy in some transcendent realm. The king was originally a human being like any other, who had been exalted by human beings and by his own actions, and who had more duties than rights.

As the many stories about the ideal king and government in the Jataka Tales, a compendium of Buddhist stories, attest, righteousness served as the only proper basis for the ruler's authority. His realm had to be free of oppression and hospitable to all classes of society, townsmen as well as villagers, religious teachers as well as birds and beasts. Another Buddhist text, the Kutudanta Sutra, even outlined a social and economic ethic, which resembles the program for a liberal capitalist welfare state: subsidies of food and seed-corn to farmers, adequate wages and food to people in government services, and investment capital to merchants and tradesmen.