Addressing the Abuse of Power in Buddhist Political Theory

Buddhist political thought is often summed up by the glittering image of the Chakravartin – the wheel-turning monarch who rules the world through righteousness rather than the sword. But the early Buddhist texts were not naive about power. The same tradition that imagined an ideal king also asked a sharper question: what happens when a ruler turns predatory? The thinkers behind the Digha Nikaya understood that crowns can corrupt, that armies can be turned against the very people they are meant to protect, and that a king without moral restraint is simply the most powerful robber in the land. This is the often-overlooked, realist core of Buddhist statecraft – and it deserves a closer look.

Why Buddhist texts worried about state power 🔗

To understand the Buddhist anxiety about tyranny, we first need to understand how these texts believed the state came into being. Unlike the Brahmanical tradition, which treated kingship as divinely ordained, early Buddhism offered something closer to a social contract. The Aggañña Sutta, the 27th discourse of the Digha Nikaya, describes how human society slid into disorder once private property, theft, and conflict appeared. To restore order, people collectively chose one capable person to rule them, agreeing to give him a share of their produce in return for governance.

This first king was called the Mahasammata, literally “the Great Elect.” The label matters. The sovereign who emerges from this Buddhist contract is not an all-powerful Leviathan accountable to no one, nor a god in human form. He is a person chosen by the community with the specific duty of preserving Dhamma and maintaining justice. The Cambridge volume on Buddhism and constitutional law notes that this framework treats Dhamma as a concept that both enables and constrains the king and the organs of royal power. Because the king’s authority is conditional and functional, it can also be judged a failure when he stops serving its purpose.

This origin story carries an implicit warning. If kingship exists only to prevent disorder and protect subjects, then a king who creates disorder and preys on his subjects has betrayed the very reason for his office.

The king as the biggest robber 🔗

Early Indian political theory was built around a vivid fear known as matsya nyaya, or the “law of the fishes.” The idea is simple and grim: in the absence of a controlling authority, the strong devour the weak just as a big fish swallows a small one. As one analysis of Mauryan political philosophy explains, Kautilya invoked this law of the fishes to argue that without danda (the authority to punish), society degenerates into anarchy where the powerful exploit the powerless.

The state was meant to be the solution to matsya nyaya. But Buddhist thinkers noticed an uncomfortable paradox. The king holds the largest concentration of force in the kingdom. If he abandons righteousness, he does not abolish the law of the fishes – he becomes the biggest fish of all. A despotic ruler who extracts taxes by force, seizes property arbitrarily, and punishes without justice is functionally indistinguishable from the robber or bandit the state was supposed to suppress. The difference is only one of scale and legitimacy, and once righteousness is gone, even legitimacy collapses.

This is why Buddhist texts repeatedly place the tyrannical king in the same conceptual bracket as thieves, floods, fires, and other calamities. All of them threaten the security and prosperity of ordinary people. The crucial insight is that a ruler is not automatically on the side of order. He can just as easily become a source of the very chaos he was appointed to prevent.

Calamities that a king can become 🔗

Traditional Buddhist and broader Indian thought spoke of dangers to the kingdom that could come from fire, flood, disease, famine, internal rebellion, and unjust rulers. Lumping a bad king together with natural disasters was a deliberate rhetorical move. It stripped the monarch of any sacred immunity. A flood does not deserve loyalty simply because it is powerful, and neither does a tyrant. Power, in this view, earns no respect on its own; only righteous power does.

How abuse of power actually unfolds 🔗

The most striking treatment of state failure appears in the Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta of the Digha Nikaya. It tells the story of a line of wheel-turning kings. The early rulers govern by Dhamma, ensure no wrongdoing prevails, and crucially, give wealth to those who are poor. Under them, the kingdom flourishes.

Then a king arises who breaks the chain. As the translation analysed by the Dharmafarers notes, the sutta shows how moral virtue is closely linked with socioeconomic conditions. This king neglects the duty of giving wealth to the poor. Poverty spreads. Poverty leads to theft, because people would rather steal than starve. The king’s clumsy responses – first leniency, then harsh punishment – only make things worse, triggering a downward spiral of crime, violence, and social collapse.

The lesson is radical for an ancient text. The sutta locates the root of crime in economic injustice, not in the wickedness of individuals. When the state fails in its distributive duty, it manufactures the very disorder it then violently tries to suppress. Abuse of power is not only the king actively harming people; it includes the king failing to do what he was appointed to do.

Punishment is not the answer 🔗

The companion Kutadanta Sutta drives the same point home through the story of a king whose realm is plagued by crime. The king wants to perform a grand sacrifice to fix things, but a wise adviser tells him that fines, imprisonment, and executions will be self-defeating. As the discussion of the ten royal virtues explains, the Buddha taught that to eradicate crime, the economic condition of the people should be improved – through fair wages, support for traders, and capital for farmers.

This is a direct critique of one common form of abuse: the temptation to govern through fear and force alone. A state that responds to social problems only by sharpening its instruments of punishment is, in Buddhist terms, treating the symptom while feeding the disease. Repression masquerading as order is itself a kind of misrule.

The Buddhist solution: binding power with Dhamma 🔗

If the danger is the unchecked ruler, the remedy is to subject the ruler to something higher than himself. In Buddhist political theory, that something is Dhamma – the body of moral and natural law that governs righteous conduct. The decisive idea is that Dhamma is, in effect, “the king of the king.” Even the Chakravartin is not the supreme authority; he is a servant of Dhamma. The scholarship on Buddhist constitutionalism notes precisely this, that Dhamma serves as a check on tyranny.

This reframes the entire relationship between ruler and law. The king does not stand above the law as its source; he stands beneath the law as its first subject. He turns the wheel of Dhamma only by aligning himself with it. The moment he rules by personal whim rather than righteous principle, he loses the moral basis of his authority – and, in the logic of the texts, the order he maintains begins to crumble.

The ten royal virtues 🔗

To make this constraint concrete, the tradition spelled out the Dasa-Raja-Dhamma, the ten duties of a righteous ruler. These function as a moral checklist that a king is expected to live up to. They include dana (generosity and charity), sila (morality and good conduct), pariccaga (sacrifice for the people), and ajjava (honesty and integrity). The virtue of ajjava demands that a ruler be straightforward and never resort to crooked means, remaining free from fear or favour in his duties.

The list continues with maddava (gentleness), tapa (self-restraint and austerity), akkodha (freedom from anger and hatred), avihimsa (non-violence), khanti (patience and forbearance), and avirodhana (non-opposition to the will of the people). Read together, these are not vague ideals. They are a series of negative restraints on exactly the behaviours that produce tyranny: cruelty, vengeance, greed, indulgence, and rule against the people’s wishes.

Moral and structural restraints together 🔗

It is worth noting how these restraints operate. Some are internal, asking the ruler to cultivate self-control, patience, and freedom from anger. The Buddhist conviction that authority should flow from moral excellence rather than brute force – the very basis on which the ideal monarch attracts allegiance – means that a king who governs by terror has already abandoned true sovereignty.

Others are effectively structural. The duty to distribute wealth, the duty to seek the counsel of the wise, the duty to prevent wrongdoing, and the principle of non-opposition to the people’s will all impose external expectations that a community could measure a ruler against. In an age before written constitutions, Dhamma and the Dasa-Raja-Dhamma functioned as a kind of unwritten constitutional code – a public standard of legitimacy that no king could simply declare himself exempt from.

Why this still matters 🔗

The Buddhist treatment of abuse of power feels surprisingly modern. It anticipates the idea that legitimate authority is conditional, that rulers are accountable to a higher standard than their own will, and that genuine security comes from justice rather than from the intensity of punishment. The recognition that protection against tyranny requires equality before the law and limits on government places this tradition in conversation with much later constitutional thought.

The deeper contribution is the reframing of power itself. In this worldview, power is never self-justifying. A throne does not sanctify whoever sits on it. Authority is a trust, granted for the welfare of the governed, and forfeited the moment it is used against them. By comparing tyrants to robbers and disasters, and by binding even the mightiest emperor to Dhamma, early Buddhist thinkers built an ethical architecture designed to keep the state on the side of the people it was created to serve.

What do you think? If the legitimacy of a ruler depends entirely on righteous conduct, what should happen when a powerful state stops serving its citizens – and who gets to decide that the line has been crossed? Is the Buddhist insistence that crime springs from economic injustice a more honest account of order than the modern reliance on punishment and policing?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digha_Nikaya
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agga%C3%B1%C3%B1a_Sutta
3. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/buddhism-and-comparative-constitutional-law/religious-and-political-underpinnings/60CFCEE2C56B09D5B6AB45B95BB91D1C
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsya_Nyaya
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Dharma
6. https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/harris/wheel392.html
7. https://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/2017/04/23/dasa-raja-dhamma-the-ten-royal-virtues/
8. https://www.e-ir.info/2023/08/31/the-half-truth-of-western-political-realism-a-buddhist-critique/