The Rise of All-Powerful Monarchical State in Dīgha Nikāya

Buddhism is usually approached as a path of meditation and renunciation, yet the early texts have a great deal to say about power, property, and the state. The Dīgha Nikāya, one of the oldest collections of the Buddha’s discourses, traces how human society moved from a state of harmony into conflict, and why people eventually accepted the authority of a single ruler. Scholar B.G. Gokhale famously divided early Buddhist thinking on the state into three distinct phases. The first explains the origin of kingship through a social contract. The second, which is our focus here, confronts a harder question: what happens when that contractual king grows into an all-powerful monarch? This phase shows the consolidation of royal power, the rise of centralized authority to regulate property and class, and a careful balancing act between the spiritual and temporal worlds.

From social contract to centralized power 🔗

To understand the second phase, we first need the foundation laid by the first. In the Aggañña Sutta, the 27th discourse of the Dīgha Nikāya, the Buddha tells two brahmin disciples, Vāseṭṭha and Bhāradvāja, a remarkable story about how the world and its institutions came into being. Beings originally lived in a kind of luminous harmony, without bodies, without property, and without social distinctions. Over an immense span of time, they began to consume the earth, develop physical forms, and grow attached to appearances.

The turning point arrives with agriculture and ownership. Once beings divided up the rice fields and marked out private plots, theft appeared for the first time. With theft came lying, violence, and punishment. The community realized it could not survive in this condition, so people gathered and chose one among them, the most capable and pleasing, to keep order. This figure was the Mahāsammata, literally “the Great Elect.” In return for maintaining justice, the people agreed to give him a portion of their rice as tax.

This is one of the earliest articulations of a social contract theory anywhere in the world, predating Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau by many centuries. The state here is not divinely ordained. It is a human institution, created out of necessity to protect private property and contain the disorder that property itself produced. The king’s authority flows from popular consent and is tied to specific duties.

Why centralized authority became necessary 🔗

The early Buddhist account is strikingly materialist. Conflict did not arise from some abstract sinfulness but from concrete developments: the rise of agriculture, the institution of private property, and the formation of the family. These created competing interests that the loose, egalitarian community could no longer manage on its own.

The solution was to concentrate authority in one person who could regulate the new social order. The same story explains the emergence of the four social classes, including the ruling, priestly, trading, and laboring groups, not as a divine varna hierarchy but as a division based on function and occupation. In this way, the Aggañña Sutta directly challenges the Vedic theory of caste, replacing sacred birth-order with a practical, contractual logic. Monarchy was preferable to anarchy precisely because a single, accountable authority could restrain the aggressive and self-assertive individuals who threatened everyone else.

The second phase: confronting the all-powerful monarch 🔗

The first phase gives us a modest, almost humble king bound by contract. The second phase, however, deals with political reality. By the Buddha’s lifetime, monarchy was the dominant institution across the Gangetic plain. Powerful kingdoms such as Magadha and Kosala had displaced the older tribal republics, and these monarchs were not modest contractual servants. They were entrenched, ambitious, and capable of despotic power.

This created a genuine problem for the monastic community. The Saṃgha, the order of monks, did not formally derive its authority from the state, but it could not survive without at least a minimum of political support and goodwill. How could a spiritual community that valued renunciation coexist with an all-powerful monarchical despotism? Gokhale’s analysis shows that early Buddhism answered this with a sophisticated theory of two equal spheres of life.

Dhamma and āṇā: the two spheres 🔗

The solution proposed in this phase divides human existence into two distinct but cooperating domains. On one side stands the Dhamma, the spiritual and moral order represented by the Buddha’s teaching and upheld by the Saṃgha. On the other stands the āṇā, the regal or temporal authority, the realm of command, taxation, and coercion exercised by the king.

The relationship between them was meant to be reciprocal rather than competitive. The āṇā provided protection and security to the monasteries, allowing the Dhamma to flourish in peace. In return, the Dhamma supplied the king with moral legitimacy and mass acceptance for his royalty and regalia. Each sphere reinforced the other. The king gained the blessing of righteousness, while the monks gained the material safety they needed to pursue enlightenment.

How the relationship worked in practice 🔗

This was not just theory. The historical kings of the Buddha’s time, especially Bimbisāra and his son Ajātasattu of Magadha, and Pasenadi of Kosala, recognized these two spheres in practice. These rulers became major patrons of the new movement. They built monasteries for the Saṃgha and offered land and protection.

The accommodation flowed both ways. The Buddha and his disciples were, after all, subjects of the states in which they lived and travelled. To remain on good terms with royal power, the monastic community discreetly amended several of its own rules. Many provisions of the Vinaya, the monastic code, were adjusted in deference to the convenience of kings, so that the order would not run afoul of state interests. Persons in royal service, for example, were restricted from ordaining as monks without permission, a clear concession to the demands of the temporal sphere. This mutual adjustment is exactly what the theory of two spheres predicts: practical compromise that preserves the integrity of both domains.

Sovereignty, security, and the king’s expanding role 🔗

In this phase the king’s functions multiply well beyond the simple contract of the Mahāsammata story. The monarch is now the guarantor of security, the enforcer of law, and the protector of social order against the disruptive passions, including greed, vanity, and lust, that the Aggañña Sutta identified as the roots of conflict.

The vocabulary of the texts reflects this consolidation of power. The state is most often referred to by terms such as rattha (country), rajja (kingdom), and vijita (subjugated or conquered territory). For the early Buddhists, the state generally meant the monarch himself; the king and the state were practically synonymous. This is notable given that the Buddha and many of his prominent disciples came from the oligarchic republics such as the Śākyas, Licchavis, and Vajjis, rather than from kingdoms. Even so, the texts accept monarchy as the realistic and effective form of organized authority.

The wheel as a symbol of legitimate rule 🔗

This second phase also prepares the ground for the famous third phase, in which the Dhamma becomes a cosmic force and the ideal of the Cakkavatti, or wheel-turning monarch, fully emerges. The cakkaratana, the wheel-treasure, becomes the central symbol of sovereignty. As Rhys Davids noted, the wheel evokes the solar disc and the idea of an all-encompassing, righteous dominion.

The key shift across the phases is the source of the king’s legitimacy. In the second phase, the monarch’s power is real and potentially despotic, but it is increasingly understood as legitimate only when exercised in harmony with the Dhamma. The contrast that early Buddhism draws is sharp: an arbitrary, despotic king who rules by raw power alone, versus a normative, righteous king whose authority is grounded in moral law. The state may hold immense coercive force, but that force is meant to serve order and welfare, not the ruler’s private will.

Why this phase matters 🔗

The second phase is the pragmatic heart of early Buddhist political thought. The first phase explains where the state comes from, and the third phase imagines the perfect ruler. The second phase deals with the world as it actually was: a world of strong kings who could not be wished away and a spiritual community that needed to find its place alongside them.

What makes the early Buddhist answer distinctive is its refusal to either reject worldly power or surrender to it. Instead of treating the temporal and the spiritual as enemies, it sets them up as two cooperating spheres, each with its own legitimacy. The monarch secures the conditions of order; the Dhamma supplies the moral framework that keeps that order righteous. This vision would go on to shape political legitimacy across South and Southeast Asia for two millennia, influencing how rulers from the Mauryas to the kingdoms of Thailand and Bhutan justified their authority.

What do you think? Does the early Buddhist idea of two equal spheres, where moral authority and political power check and support each other, offer a useful model for thinking about the relationship between religion and the state today? And when a ruler holds overwhelming power, is moral legitimacy a genuine restraint on that power, or merely a comforting story that the powerful tell to justify their rule?

References

1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/BA2C744D9EE302D4E2A435049F3771ED/S0021911800140318a.pdf/early-buddhist-kingship.pdf
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mah%C4%81sammata
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agga%C3%B1%C3%B1a_Sutta
4. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-68042-8_4
5. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/buddhism-and-comparative-constitutional-law/buddhism-and-constitutionalism-in-precolonial-southeast-asia/A68A6D58443E17C6177719884555FAFF
6. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306045589_Buddhist_Public_Administration