Political Ideas and Governance in Śramanic Scriptures

The age of the Buddha and Mahavira, roughly the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, was one of the most politically experimental periods in early Indian history. While sixteen great states known as the Mahajanapadas jostled for power, the subcontinent was home not only to powerful monarchies but also to a cluster of self-governing republics where rulers were chosen by assemblies rather than born into power. The Śramanic traditions, chiefly Jainism and Buddhism, grew up in this churning environment. Although both began as movements of renunciation focused on liberation rather than on the affairs of state, their scriptures preserve some of the earliest and most striking reflections on governance, equality, and collective decision-making found anywhere in the ancient world.

What the Śramanic traditions were reacting against 🔗

The word Śramana refers to the wandering ascetics and renouncer communities that emerged as a powerful alternative to the dominant Brāhmanical order. These movements rejected the authority of the Vedas, the elaborate ritual sacrifices controlled by priests, and above all the rigid hierarchy of the caste system. Both Jainism and Buddhism opened their communities to people of every social background, treating spiritual capacity as a matter of effort and ethics rather than of birth.

This was not merely a religious reform. By insisting that radical egalitarianism had deep indigenous roots in Indian thought, the Śramanic movements modelled an open society in which debate and dialogue replaced unquestioning obedience to inherited authority, and where institutions could be organised around ethical principles rather than hereditary privilege. That impulse carried directly into how these communities thought about political life.

Jainism: from spiritual detachment to statecraft 🔗

At first glance, Jainism appears almost anti-political. Its core commitment to ahimsa (non-violence), extended to even the smallest forms of life, and its emphasis on austerity and detachment from worldly affairs seemed to leave little room for the messy business of ruling. Early Jain thought concentrated on individual liberation rather than the organisation of the state.

Yet as the tradition matured and attracted royal patrons, it could not avoid questions of governance. The clearest example is the polymath Hemchandra (1088-1173 CE), the great Jain scholar of the Chaulukya court in Gujarat. In his Yogaśāstra and related works, he set out how Jain ethical principles could guide a ruler’s practical decisions on justice, taxation, and the welfare of subjects.

Ethics as a basis for legitimate rule 🔗

Hemchandra’s significance lies in showing that non-violence and restraint were not obstacles to good government but the foundation of it. A king who governed with compassion, who avoided needless war, and who treated the protection of life as a duty was, in this view, a more legitimate ruler than one who relied on force alone. This reflected a broader Śramanic suggestion that leadership should rest on wisdom and virtue rather than on inherited status, a quietly radical idea in a society built on hereditary kingship.

The Sangha as a working model of self-government 🔗

Buddhism’s most original contribution to political thought was not a treatise on kingship but an institution: the Sangha, the monastic community founded by the Buddha. Far from being a loose gathering of monks, the Sangha functioned along recognisably democratic lines and is often described as an early model of deliberative democracy, built on frequent assembly, open discussion, and problem-solving by all its members as equals regardless of class, caste, or gender.

Within this fraternity, individuals were equal whatever their social origin, with the only distinction being seniority of ordination. The community took decisions by vote and settled differences through consensus, making the Sangha a living example of social equality, the sharing of resources, and collective process. Crucially, membership rested on free choice rather than birth or kinship, which set it apart from the surrounding social order.

The Vinaya: a constitution for the community 🔗

The procedures of the Sangha were codified in the Vinaya, the monastic code of conduct that effectively served as the community’s constitution. The Vinaya did far more than list rules of behaviour. According to scholars who have studied the Vinaya Piṭaka, it describes an election process and methods of voting, the constitution of an assembly hall (the Santhāgāra), the process of moving a resolution, and concepts such as quorum, consent, dissent, and referendum.

The text even preserves three distinct voting procedures: a secret ballot using counting sticks, whispering one’s preference into another monk’s ear, and open voting by a show of hands. These counting sticks, known as salākā, were supervised by an appointed official who tallied them to determine the majority view in a large gathering. Disputes were meant to be resolved face-to-face wherever possible, and only escalated to wider consensus or a special committee when they could not be settled simply. The underlying spirit, as one description puts it, was that the Vinaya dispensed with concentrated power in favour of principle, with no individual holding authority over the whole community.

An ideal of harmony and unity 🔗

Running through the Sangha’s organisation was the value of communal harmony, captured in the idea of sangha-sāmaggī, the unity of the community. Collective well-being was understood to depend on mutual respect, cooperation, and a shared commitment to common values. This was not harmony imposed from above but harmony generated through participation, which is precisely what made the Sangha a compelling political example for later thinkers.

The republics recorded in Buddhist literature 🔗

The Buddha did not invent these democratic procedures in a vacuum. Historians widely accept that he drew inspiration from the self-governing republics, the gana-sanghas, that surrounded him. Buddhist literature, especially the Digha Nikāya, gives us some of the most detailed surviving accounts of these polities.

The most celebrated was the Vajjian confederacy (the Vajji or Vrijji), a league of clans of which the Licchavis of Vaishali were the dominant member. This was a genuine republic rather than a kingdom: descriptions of the Licchavi system point to thousands of heads of households meeting in assembly to elect a ruling chief and a council to assist him. Decisions on war, justice, and major policy were taken collectively rather than by a single hereditary monarch.

The seven conditions of welfare 🔗

The most famous passage links the Sangha and the republics directly. In the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta of the Digha Nikāya, when the powerful king Ajātaśatru of Magadha was preparing to attack the Vajjians, his minister came to ask the Buddha whether the campaign would succeed. The Buddha replied that the Vajjians would remain undefeated as long as they upheld seven principles for their enduring welfare: holding frequent and well-attended assemblies, meeting and dispersing in harmony, not changing established laws arbitrarily, respecting elders and traditions, protecting women from coercion, honouring their shrines, and safeguarding holy persons.

What makes this account so revealing is that the Buddha then turned around and built the very same principles into the rules of his own monastic order. The republic and the Sangha were governed by a shared logic: regular consultation, respect for agreed rules, and the priority of unity over individual ambition. The tradition also records that the Vajjians, while they kept these conditions, were a prosperous and contented community, and that their eventual fall came once internal discord crept in and these practices weakened.

Dhamma without constitutional safeguards 🔗

It is worth noting an important limitation that later commentators have drawn out. The Buddhist tradition relied on order grounded in Dhamma (righteous conduct) enforced through the Vinaya, but it did not develop formal constitutional checks against the abuse of power by a wicked ruler. Within a voluntary monastic community committed to ethical self-discipline, this worked well. In the wider arena of monarchy, however, moral exhortation alone proved a fragile safeguard, a gap that becomes visible in the story of the republics themselves, which were eventually swallowed by the expanding monarchies.

Ashoka’s Dhamma: ethics meets empire 🔗

The grandest experiment in translating Buddhist ethics into statecraft came from the Mauryan emperor Ashoka (reigned c. 268-232 BCE). After the bloodshed of the Kalinga war, Ashoka turned away from conquest and embraced a policy he called Dhamma, broadcasting it across his empire through inscriptions carved on rocks and pillars that survive to this day.

Importantly, Ashoka’s Dhamma was not a narrow sectarian creed. As the historian Romila Thapar has emphasised, although Ashoka personally embraced Buddhism, the Dhamma he promoted in his edicts was largely ecumenical and non-sectarian, defining its main principles as non-violence, tolerance of all sects and opinions, obedience to parents, respect for religious teachers, generosity towards friends, and humane treatment of servants. It functioned as a universal ethical code designed to be acceptable to subjects of every faith.

Welfare as a duty of the state 🔗

Ashoka’s Dhamma converted abstract ethics into concrete administrative action. His edicts record practical welfare measures such as medical treatment for both people and animals, the construction of roads and wells, and the planting of trees. He prohibited many animal sacrifices, attacked wasteful ceremonies as meaningless, and appointed special officers called Dhamma-mahāmattas to spread these principles and look after the interests of all sects.

This represented a profound reimagining of kingship. Drawing on the Buddhist ideal of the righteous ruler, sometimes expressed as the ten duties of the king, including liberality, morality, self-sacrifice for the people, and non-violence, Ashoka recast the monarch as a moral leader responsible for his subjects’ welfare rather than simply a military conqueror. In doing so he produced a genuine synthesis: Buddhist ethical commitments fused with the practical machinery of a vast empire.

Why these ideas still matter 🔗

The political thought of the Śramanic scriptures shows that participatory governance, equality, and welfare-oriented rule were not foreign concepts imported into India in the modern era. They were articulated and, in the case of the Sangha and the republics, actually practised more than two thousand years ago. The deliberative procedures of the Vinaya were so striking that B.R. Ambedkar, the principal architect of India’s Constitution, is widely noted to have drawn inspiration from the democratic principles of the Buddhist sanghas. The contrast the scriptures preserve, between monarchy concentrating power in one person and the republic distributing it among an assembly, remains one of the oldest and most relevant debates in all of political thought.

What do you think? If the Buddhist Sangha could sustain collective decision-making purely through shared ethical commitment, why did the surrounding republics need something more to survive against the monarchies? And was Ashoka’s reliance on moral persuasion rather than constitutional limits on power a strength of his rule or its greatest weakness?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahajanapadas
2. https://philosophy.institute/dalit-philosophy/shramana-tradition-dalit-influence-ideals/
3. https://link.springer.com/book/9783032206909
4. https://www.dalailama.com/messages/buddhism/buddhism-and-democracy
5. https://www.theweek.in/theweek/cover/2023/08/12/ancient-buddhist-sanghas-and-democracy.html
6. https://www.wisdomlib.org/buddhism/book/vinaya-pitaka-1-bhikkhu-vibhanga/d/doc228695.html
7. https://palisuttas.com/2014/12/06/mahali-sutta-dn-6-r/
8. https://grokipedia.com/page/Buddhism_and_democracy
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edicts_of_Ashoka
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashoka%27s_policy_of_Dhamma