ABSTRACT
The early Buddhist tradition was equivocal about the extent to which political activity is compatible with religious practice. On the one hand it had a powerful renunciatory strand that tended to regard worldly engagement as ultimately futile. The Buddha, for instance, is supposed to have renounced power in the most spectacular manner by giving up his opportunity to be a king and, instead, taking up the life of a wandering ascetic. Another important theme was the notion of mundane power as tainted. Thus in the Pāli Brahmajāla Sutta the Buddha exhorts his monks to avoid ‘frivolous chatter, such as: talk about kings, thieves, and ministers of state; talk about armies, dangers and wars…’ Such sources support the view, expressed by Weber and his disciples, that Buddhism ‘…perhaps presents the opposition to the spirit of politics in its most acute form’ (Troeltsch 1923: 157). They also underpin the Chinese monk Huiyuan's On Why Monks Do Not Bow Down Before Kings (404 CE), a work arguing that the other-worldly status of Buddhist monks meant that they should not be required to kowtow to the emperor.
