Buddhism’s relationship with social and political action is genuinely contested. The tradition contains resources for a powerful ethic of structural change, and it contains a well-documented history of quietism, complicity, and — in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — participation in ethnic violence.

An honest treatment has to hold both.

The case for engagement #

Several strands of the tradition support it directly.

The first precept is unconditional. Refraining from killing and harm applies to all beings, with no exemption for harm done at a distance, through institutions, or by omission.

The bodhisattva precepts make omission a fault. Mahayana ethics is not primarily about abstention: failing to help when one could is itself a breach. This is the clearest doctrinal warrant for activism.

Dependent origination is a structural analysis. If suffering arises from conditions, and some conditions are economic, legal, and political, then changing those conditions is addressing causes rather than symptoms.

The canon addresses political questions. The Cakkavatti-Sihanada Sutta (DN 26) makes a striking claim: that poverty is the root of theft, and theft of violence, and that a ruler who fails to provide for the destitute causes crime. The remedy the discourse prescribes is economic — provide capital to traders, seed to farmers, wages to officials — not punitive. The Kutadanta Sutta makes the same argument against a king proposing a great sacrifice to quell unrest.

The Buddha rejected caste claims. Not the social institution as such, but the brahminical claim to inherent superiority by birth. The Vasettha Sutta argues at length that one is a brahmin by conduct, not by birth. The order admitted members of all castes, and the canon records the Buddha’s insistence that once ordained, prior status is irrelevant — as rivers lose their names on reaching the sea.

Ashoka set a precedent. Whatever its limits, the edicts’ programme of medical provision, wells, shade trees, and restraint on slaughter is a model of Buddhist governance that later rulers invoked.

The case against, and its answers #

Three objections recur, two of them from within the tradition.

“Change your mind, not the world” #

The argument: suffering arises from craving, craving is internal, so the remedy is internal. Social change addresses circumstances, which the first noble truth says are not the problem.

The answer: the tradition distinguishes what can be changed by practice from what cannot. The Buddha did not tell hungry people that hunger was a mental construct; he told rulers to feed them. And the Sivaka Sutta’s eight causes of feeling explicitly include external assault and careless behaviour alongside karmic ripening — not all suffering is internally generated.

The karma objection #

The argument: people’s circumstances result from their past actions, so intervening is interference and possibly harmful.

The answer: this is a misreading, and the texts say so. The Sivaka Sutta names the view that everything experienced is caused by past karma as a wrong view. Karma is one of eight causes of felt experience, and the discourse rejects the totalising version by name.

The objection is nonetheless made constantly, and it has caused real harm. Its clearest modern rejection came from B. R. Ambedkar, who removed rebirth-karma from his presentation of Buddhism precisely because he saw it functioning in India as the ideological support of caste.

“Attachment to outcomes” #

The argument: activism involves anger, partisanship, and attachment to results, all of which are afflictions.

The answer: the tradition distinguishes the action from the state of mind producing it. The perfection of patience rules out acting from hatred, not acting forcefully. A bodhisattva may intervene to stop harm; what is ruled out is doing so with ill will.

There is a genuine practice question underneath this, and engaged Buddhists take it seriously: sustained activism produces anger and burnout, and the traditions have resources — tonglen, the brahmaviharas, equanimity — that address exactly this.

Ambedkar and caste #

The largest Buddhist social justice movement in history is Ambedkarite Buddhism in India.

Ambedkar’s analysis was that caste is constitutive of Hindu religion rather than incidental to it, and that Dalit liberation therefore required leaving the religion rather than reforming it. His mass conversion at Nagpur in 1956, with several hundred thousand followers, was a political act framed in explicitly religious terms — and the twenty-two vows he administered are half repudiation of Hindu practice and half ethical commitment.

His Buddhism is unlike any other: no meditation at its centre, rebirth removed, and liberty, equality, fraternity offered as the summary of the Dhamma.

The failures #

Any account that stops at the resources would be dishonest. The record includes the following.

Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka. The Mahavamsa chronicle’s account of the island as the Buddha’s chosen land, and of a king’s war against Tamil forces as righteous, has been mobilised in modern Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. Monks have been active in nationalist politics; the Jathika Hela Urumaya is a party of monks; and Buddhist institutions were implicated in the ideological framing of the civil war.

Myanmar. The 969 movement and Ma Ba Tha, with the monk Ashin Wirathu as the most visible figure, have propagated anti-Muslim rhetoric. The persecution of the Rohingya, described by UN investigators as bearing the hallmarks of genocide, occurred in a Buddhist-majority state with visible support from parts of the sangha. Aung San Suu Kyi’s defence of the military at the International Court of Justice was made by a Buddhist leader long celebrated internationally for nonviolence.

Japan. Zen and other institutions supported imperial militarism, with doctrinal arguments offered for killing without karmic consequence. See Zen in Japan and Brian Victoria’s Zen at War.

Thailand. The monk Kittivuddho’s statement in 1976 that killing communists was not demeritorious, made during a period of state violence against students.

Tibet. The pre-1959 polity was a hierarchical society with a monastic estate holding land and labour obligations. Acknowledging this does not validate the Chinese account of liberation, and the two are frequently presented as the only available options.

Caste in Buddhist Asia. Buddhism did not abolish caste where it was dominant, and Buddhist societies have had their own hierarchies.

The general point, made by Christopher Queen among others, is that Buddhism has no immunity to the uses religion is put to. Traditions with excellent ethical resources have repeatedly been mobilised for the opposite, and Buddhism is not an exception to this.

What engaged Buddhism looks like #

The contemporary movement takes several forms.

Ambedkarite Buddhism in India — the largest, and organised around caste.

The Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka, founded by A. T. Ariyaratne, which has worked in thousands of villages on development organised around Buddhist principles.

The International Network of Engaged Buddhists, founded by Sulak Sivaraksa in Thailand — Sivaraksa has been repeatedly prosecuted under lèse-majesté laws for his criticism of Thai political and economic arrangements.

The Free Burma / democracy movement, in which monks were central, particularly in the 2007 Saffron Revolution.

Buddhist Peace Fellowship, founded in 1978 in the United States, working on militarism, prisons, and economic justice.

Prison dharma — meditation and Buddhist teaching in prisons, now a substantial programme in several countries.

Race and inclusion work within Western convert Buddhism, discussed in Buddhism in America.

Common questions #

Is Buddhism political? The tradition has generally avoided partisan alignment and has consistently addressed the conduct of rulers, the causes of crime, and the obligations of the powerful. The canonical texts on kingship are recognisably political documents.

Does Buddhism support any particular economic system? No. It has resources that bear on economic questions — the analysis of craving, the emphasis on contentment, the critique of harmful livelihood, and the discourses connecting poverty to crime — that have been read in support of very different programmes.

Should practice be about self or society? The tradition’s answer is that the question is malformed. The bodhisattva framing makes personal practice the means of becoming useful, and useful action the expression of practice.

Is anger ever justified? The traditions are close to unanimous that anger is an affliction regardless of its object, and equally clear that forceful action to prevent harm is permitted and sometimes required. The distinction is between the act and the state producing it, and it is easier to state than to maintain.

How should I think about Buddhist violence? As evidence that religious traditions do not immunise their adherents, and that a tradition’s ethical resources have to be actively maintained rather than assumed. Pretending it did not happen serves nobody.

Sources & further reading #

Christopher S. Queen & Sallie B. King (eds.), Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia (SUNY, 1996) — the standard survey. Sallie B. King, Socially Engaged Buddhism (University of Hawai’i Press, 2009). Michael Jerryson & Mark Juergensmeyer (eds.), Buddhist Warfare (Oxford, 2010) — the record of violence, documented. B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936; Verso ed. 2014). Sulak Sivaraksa, Seeds of Peace (Parallax, 1992).