Engaged Buddhism

Do We Need It?

For a very long time I have been skeptical of so-called Engaged Buddhism. It’s a nice idea, but is it necessary?

In my opinion, the Dharma and politics should never be mixed. Every time in history, when Buddhists have combined politics with the Dharma to engineer social change, it has ended in oppression, war, and even genocide.

For example, Aśoka is generally held to be a hero of Engaged Buddhism. Aśoka converted to Buddhism, according to the truncated story of his life, over his remorse at waging war. Nevertheless, according to the Aśokāvadāna, after his conversion he carried out a pogrom against Jains, and murdered 18,000 of them over a cartoon he considered insulting to the Buddha (sound familiar?). The first Buddhist dharmarāja, dharma king, was a genocidal religious maniac until his brother’s head was presented to him by a couple seeking the bounty Aśoka had placed on the heads of Jain monks. They had murdered Aśoka’s brother, mistaking him for a Jain. The story goes that after this tragic sequence of events, a much chastened Aśoka mended his ways and became a wise ruler, paving the way for brilliance of the Dharma to shine its light out to world.

Sinhalese Buddhism was born out of a genocidal war against an indigenous population. The Mahāvaṃsa, the detailed chronicle of the founding of the Buddhist Kingdom of Shri Lanka, celebrates the killing of millions of human beings by the Dutugamunu, the Buddhist king, dismissing their deaths as being no more important than the killing of animals.

In India, Tibet, China, and Japan we have 2000 years of history that tells us that trying to mix Dharma into political life never ends well for the Dharma, most recently in Imperialist Japan. War after war was fought in Tibet because of their unifying politics with Dharma. The same in Japan, monastic wars were frequent and always about political power. Many modern Tibetans believe, as do I, that the reason Tibet fell to the communists in the 1950s was due to the mixture of Dharma with worldly politics.

The tragedy of the Myanmar genocide of the Rohingya is well known, as well as the disappointing showing of Ahn San Su Khyi, a one time darling of engaged Buddhists everywhere until she downplayed the atrocities of the Myanmar military. This is yet another example of the corruption of Dharma by mixing it with politics. Thus, we should not deceive ourselves with the vanity that we are more modern, more thoughtful, more ethically sophisticated, and more capable of resisting the corrosive influence of politics. It isn’t true.

Therefore, the way I see it, prohibiting the renunciate Sangha from collective engagement in political life was born out of the Buddha’s insight that the renunciate Sangha needs to remain free of mundane politics for its very survival, if not its reputation and trustworthiness.

The Muslims didn’t destroy Buddhism in India, we did, we did it to ourselves by getting sucked into regional Indian politics. What do you think all the magical wars between Buddhist siddhas and Hindus were really about? Power, control, money, patronage. Eventually we lost.

One of the reasons there is so little traditional Buddhist literature on ethics and governance is that in India it was decided that these were mundane topics—thus ethics is not part of the five sciences, the ten sciences, or even the eighteen sciences. In a traditional Buddhist education, such as mine, there is no discipline of ethics one would recognize as ethics in the western philosophical sense. Absent is inquiry into inequality as in Rousseau, absent too is an interrogation of justice, as in Rawls. There is no thorough interrogation of power as in Foucault, no class analysis as in Marx. Indeed, even justice is a modern concept that is entirely lacking in the Buddhist lexicon. There simply is no word for “justice” in Buddhist language.

The modern literature on Buddhist ethics dwarfs any premodern Buddhist writing that could even be remotely construed as concerning ethics in the Western sense. But the way ethics is written about and assumptions which support this branch of western philosophy, including its application to the subject of Buddhism, is totally foreign to the native Dharma sensibility found in texts on samvara, aka vows or discipline.

Śīla is not about ethics or law. It concerns avoiding taking birth in lower realms, and creating a stable basis for concentration. When renunciates ran into legal troubles, they were remanded to civil courts.

When one looks at arguments around meat eating in some Mahāyāna sutras, like the Lanka, the main appeal is to Indian caste prejudice. Aesthetics, not ethics, is the primary concern—avoiding birth as carnivorous animals, untouchables; hunters; dombas (the ancestors of the modern Roma); or the spawn of ḍākinīs. Some tears are spilled over the poor animals, but the main thrust is why meat eating is bad for us, not Daisy the cow.

Now, I think it’s a good thing people are out in the streets (but not enough of us) resisting ICE, pushing back against AIPAC tentacles on the US gvt., protesting the Gaza genocide, the genocide in Ukraine, etc. We need more of this. I remember when the S. African gvt. was toppled through divestment. We can do that to Israel, and we should—but we don’t need “Engaged Buddhism” to accomplish that goal.

We don’t need to articulate any of this through “Engaged Buddhism.” It has nothing to add here. Through the Dharma, we already know the peril of anger, holding biased views, and so on. We don’t need a new form of Buddhism to inform us of this.

HH Dalai Lama wrote a very good book entitled Beyond Religion, where he points out that rather than trying to shoehorn religious traditions into a modern ethical framework, we need go entirely beyond religion and religious ethics, such as they are, and forge a universal secular ethical framework. He says:

“What we need today is an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without: a secular ethics.”

And to the Dalai Lama’s point, Buddhists should be engaged in trying to help forge a new secular ethic.

We can’t improve the Dharma, but we can improve the world.

Thus, we really do not need Engaged Buddhism. The Dharma we have is already sadhu, sadhu, sadhu—good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end. Let’s not foul it with worldly politics. As I show above, it always ends poorly for the Dharma.