APPRECIATING THE BUDDHA AS A PIVOTAL FIGURE IN WORLD HISTORY

I wish to begin by recording my heartfelt gratitude for the generosity of the Numata Foundation. They have done more than any other body, perhaps indeed more than all other organizations combined, to transform Buddhist studies in the West. Consider Buddhist studies in Britain. When I came up to Oxford as a student in 1957, the University employed no one to teach Buddhism, and I don’t think it figured on any syllabus, undergraduate or postgraduate.

Then the Japanese came to the rescue. In the 1980s Mr Yehan Numata, from his base in Tokyo, began to found chairs in Buddhist studies in many parts of the western world. He operated through the Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, better known among us as the Numata Foundation. There was some variation, but the general pattern was for a university to have a visiting scholar to teach each year, paid for by the BDK; and extra money was also paid, with the intention of endowing a permanent chair. Though Mr Numata himself was an adherent of Jodo Shinshu, the Pure Land Buddhist tradition founded by Shinran, the BDK has wisely and nobly supported Buddhist studies in general. Oxford was the first British university to benefit: an annual visiting fellowship, attached to Balliol College, began in 1989. Later SOAS and Cambridge received benefactions from the same source, which is how I come to be here today. The BDK is now headed by Mr Toshihide Numata, the founder’s son, and under his leadership has been so generous as to create a permanent chair at Oxford, the first fully endowed chair in Buddhist studies in the whole of Europe.

I only wish that what I can contribute to Buddhist studies as a teacher and researcher could somehow match this far-sighted generosity. I have tried to choose the topic and manner of my lectures to suit this situation, beginning with a general plea for the importance of Buddhist studies. But that too, I am afraid, requires a rather lengthy preamble.

A professor is someone who talks while other people sleep. Having slept through countless lectures myself, over the best part of half a century, this popular definition rings true to my ears. My father used to point out that a lecture was a prime example of outmoded technology: printing was a far better way of conveying and preserving information. That lectures survive into the age of the Internet is positively quaint.

Academics in the humanities are drawn into their ill paid and nowadays little respected profession by an honourable motive: a love of their subject. They want to find out more about it, to work a little corner of their field in order to increase knowledge and understanding. But universities and other institutions of learning have multiplied; knowledge is vast; and there are so many ideas about, that virtually no one can even keep up with what is going on. This has been absurdly aggravated by pressure to publish; not only one’s job but the very existence of one’s department is threatened if one does not rush one’s half-baked idea or minute discovery into print. To quote my father again, nowadays an academic has time only to read or to write, not both. I am sure that this could be rigorously demonstrated by a well-funded research project. It has indeed been shown that 99% of the articles published in America in the field of English literature are never cited by anyone, which suggests that not many people even read them. I believe that several of my own articles have met the same fate; maybe they too have deserved it.

To quote The Economist newspaper: “Academics have a habit of crawling along the frontiers of knowledge with a magnifying glass, blind to the wide vistas opening up before them, and often reducing the most engaging subjects to tedious debates about methodology.”[1]

There are several interlocking reasons why academics tend to both write and lecture on very detailed subjects in a way that will interest only a few friends and colleagues.

Firstly, I found when I was appointed one of the assessors in a Research Assessment Exercise that a book which makes no claim to originality, whether it be written as a textbook or simply aimed at the general public, was allowed to gain the author (and thus her department) no credit whatever. I found this policy deplorable but was powerless to change it. The Economist may be right to say that “By looking at the big picture, populists restore the excitement of intellectual life,”[2] but the Higher Education Funding Council attaches no value to excitement.

On the other hand, getting publishers to accept a book which appears to be on an academic subject is often extremely difficult. Publishers are not charities, and judge proposals for books by whether they are commercially viable. In the event that a publisher does agree to take on a specialised work, it is so priced that only institutions – and not even very many of those – will be able to afford to buy it. The author has relinquished copyright and finds that publishing has paradoxically reversed its meaning, for access to her work, which will probably never appear in paperback, has now been drastically restricted. For analogous reasons, a shorter piece of work by an academic can only be published in a learned journal. An article in a learned journal is even less likely to come to the notice of the general public than the ridiculously expensive hardback of a publisher’s monograph series.

This is by no means the only reason for the gulf between academics in the humanities and the general public. It is normal in the natural sciences for researchers to come up with new knowledge or understanding, even if most discoveries nowadays are inevitably of such a nature that only a few specialists can fully appreciate them. In the rest of academia, the humanities and social sciences, various disciplines, such as archaeology and anthropology, may of course find new material, but in other respects true discoveries – breakthroughs – are rare. Before they were forced to do so by uncomprehending employers, scholars in the humanities were rightly reluctant to try to emulate their scientific colleagues by producing a steady stream of articles, and tended to devote more of their efforts to teaching, preserving a tradition of learning, than to pretending to have new things to say. Dragooned into publication, they find that it costs much less effort to address oneself to a coterie of fellow specialists without having to spell out the wider background. Besides, supplying that background may well cause one’s article to become too long for the relevant journal.

Not so long ago I had direct experience of this. A colleague of mine, Professor (at that time Dr.) Joanna Jurewicz of Warsaw University, made what I regard as possibly the most exciting discovery in Buddhist studies in modern times. Her discovery concerned the cardinal Buddhist doctrine of the chain of dependent origination, a doctrine which has been subject of various interpretations ever since the Buddha enunciated it: neither ancient nor modern commentators agree about it. Dr. Jurewicz showed that the Buddha was using categories and ideas derived from Vedic thought, contradicting the Vedic theologians in their own terms. Hoping at least to reach a wide academic audience, she submitted the article to the journal Religion. The editor told her that it could not be published without a full introduction explaining to the reader what the doctrine of the chain of dependent origination was and how it fitted into basic Buddhist doctrine. No one would expect the author of an article presenting a discovery in, say, physics to begin by laying out the basics of the field. Her article was already concisely expressed, perhaps even to a fault, and to add such an explanation, in order to make her argument fully intelligible to readers who started off with no basic knowledge of Buddhism, would inevitably have made the piece too long for publication in a journal. Thus for reasons the converse of those I have mentioned already, her article had to be tucked away in a highly specialised journal (in this case the Journal of the Pali Text Society) where hardly anyone would notice it.

Another reason why academic publications tend to be extremely specialised is that authors are terrified that once they have strayed beyond their little corner of expertise they will lay themselves open to criticism. As I have already indicated, it is virtually impossible to keep up with everything that has been published outside a tiny area. Moreover, many academics are deplorably ungenerous in their appraisal of the work of colleagues. In reviewing or commenting on a new work, many find it easier and more satisfying to point out that it has failed to mention some obscure publication on the topic than to praise what has been positively achieved. More than a decade ago I published an article in which I claimed to have discovered, within very narrow limits, the date of the Buddha. It was published in 1992, but I had already sent it to about a hundred scholars in 1989. I want to place on record that the late Professor André Bareau wrote me a letter by return of post congratulating me, saying “Vous avez bien résolu le problème”; but his response was unique. Even if one disagrees with or is sceptical about my overall conclusion, the article does contain a couple of clear-cut discoveries about the meaning and condition of the relevant Pali chronicle, the Diipava.msa. Hardly a single response has referred to these discoveries; colleagues have preferred instead to quibble over minutiae which do not affect them.

But there is a more important issue here. What is so terrible about being wrong? Far too few of us have taken on board Karl Popper’s demonstration that science — indeed, human knowledge — advances by what he calls conjecture and refutation. Throughout life, not just in academia, one proceeds by formulating hypotheses. Rarely does one have sufficient evidence to be absolutely certain; one makes the best guess one can at the moment. What is unforgivable in academia, and in life may indeed be fatal, is to lack the flexibility, or indeed the humility, to accept the refutation of one’s hypothesis. When fresh evidence or better reasoning is presented, one must immediately accept the correction and try to formulate a new, better hypothesis. Here, as in so many other matters, there is an astonishing coincidence between the Buddha’s recorded procedure and Karl Popper’s philosophy. The stupid monk Ari.t.tha, having misunderstood something that the Buddha said, claimed that a monk was permitted to have sexual intercourse. He was not punished, and not punishable, for being wrong in the first instance; he was punished for not changing his view after the Buddha had explained to him that he was wrong [Vin IV, 134-5].[3] The Buddha himself on occasion formulated rules for the Sangha which he later rescinded when he found that they had undesirable consequences. An example is the rule that a monk was not allowed to have more than one novice under him at a time [Vin I, 79, para.52, rescinded Vin I, 83, para 55].

Obviously I am not advocating that people publish careless work: I have already said that one should do the best one can at the moment. But probably all of those who are professional academics are aware what a blight perfectionism can be. Those who refuse to publish because they fear that someone will discover an imperfection in their work are ruining their own careers, are failing to advance their subjects as much as they could, and are guilty of the absurd misconception that perfection is in any case attainable.

What I have said so far, whether or not it is seen as provocative, seems to be a necessary preamble to the lectures I am about to give. For better or for worse, I shall generally try to stick to the following principles.

Firstly, because they are lectures, I shall try to adopt a style which allows my audience to take them in on first hearing, rather than cram in all the facts and references which one would expect on reading an article or book. Of course there will have to be some details, such as Pali or Sanskrit words, and these will be on handouts, but I shall try not to overburden the audience with them.

Secondly, I shall not hesitate to put forward some bold ideas about what the Buddha preached and about the history of Buddhism. I hope that these ideas are correct, but I shall of course be prepared to withdraw or modify them if I am shown that they are false. I shall be extremely scrupulous about saying what we know for certain and what is necessarily just a deduction or a hypothesis, but I shall endeavour to present clear-cut theories rather than sit on every fence within sight.

Thirdly and finally, I shall try to make what I say accessible to non-specialists, even though I am speaking at a distinguished university. I hope that specialists in Buddhism will forgive me for this, and find some compensation for having to listen to things that they already know very well. But I do strongly feel that circumstances have opened a gulf between academics and the general public which damages both sides: the public is unaware of many things which we do which could really interest some of them, and in turn their political representatives are hard put to it to explain, to themselves or others, why our work should be funded at all. It is indeed because I feel strongly about this issue that with my colleague Geoff Bamford I have founded a charity called the Society for the Wider Understanding of the Buddhist Tradition. The Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies is an offshoot of this Society.

I hope to be punctilious in acknowledging my intellectual debts. On the other hand, I shall deliberately devote little attention to the work of scholars with which I disagree. I am fully aware that this runs counter to the tradition of best academic practice. On the other hand, it is surely infinitely tedious and unprofitable for the non-specialist to listen to refutations of theories of which they are perfectly unaware. I know that this will open me to charges of being arrogant, ignorant, slipshod or lazy, and indeed those charges may have some substance, but I think I am old enough by now to take them on the chin.

~•X•~

I have explained how I aspire to lecture. These are the Numata Lectures. The Numata Foundation was established by Mr. Yehan Numata for the purpose of spreading knowledge of Buddhism. In fact its Japanese name, Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, translates as the Society for the Promotion of Buddhism. Buddhism does not aim at conversion in the sense that Christianity and Islam can be said to do. Those monotheistic religions demand an exclusive allegiance. Promoting Buddhism, on the other hand, does not mean asking those who already follow another religion or ideology (such as atheism) to abandon those beliefs; it shows people what the Buddha taught and suggests that they may find that their lives are improved by understanding and perhaps learning from his teachings. Thus the Society for the Promotion of Buddhism and the Society for the Wider Understanding of the Buddhist Tradition, despite the slight difference in wording, can be said to have the same aims.

A wider understanding of the Buddhist tradition has the best chance of coming about if Buddhism finds an appropriate place in the school syllabus. At the moment, not only in Britain but throughout the non-Buddhist world, Buddhism is classed as a religion on a par with, for example, Christianity and Islam. In contemporary Britain, officially recognised as a multi-cultural society, the enlightened authorities have decreed that any religion which is espoused by a sizeable section of the population should be taught in schools, at least as an optional subject. So far so good. However, the religions are taught almost exclusively as religions, a word which in this context is very often considered to be a synonym of “faiths”; indeed, we often talk of a “multi-faith” society. Religions, naturally enough, are taught as a subject which the educational system labels “Religious Studies”.

I think that even Jesus, Moses and Mohammed rarely appear in a syllabus other than Religious Studies. Certainly this is true of the Buddha. Not for a moment am I suggesting that it is inappropriate to regard these great figures as religious leaders and teachers. But whether one has any interest in religion or not, surely every boy or girl who grows up in the modern world must have a rudimentary picture of world history and recognise these religious leaders as figures who made a decisive impact on that history and so helped to shape the world we all live in.

Because of the unimportant role it assigns to divine or supernormal beings, it has often been disputed whether it is right to call Buddhism a religion. That debate is irrelevant to my present purpose. For two and a half millennia millions of people have followed the Buddha and would be or would have been surprised to be told that they did not have a religion. But that is not my point. It is my contention that the thought of the Buddha, whether we choose to call it religious or not (and I think that some of it is and some of it isn’t) has had an extraordinary impact on the history of the world. I see the Buddha as one of the creators of human civilisation and one of the most profound and original thinkers who ever lived. Moreover, whether or not one agrees with his ideas, it is extremely difficult to deny that on the whole Buddhism has been a great force for good in human history. It is of course perfectly true that on innumerable occasions innumerable Buddhists have fallen short of Buddhist ideals and behaved badly; I think that the same can be said of every religious and ideological tradition. But the Buddha had brilliant ideas, even if they have been widely forgotten, and promoted noble ideals, even if they have often been ignored. Besides, his ideas and ideals produced one of the most admirable rulers in history, the Emperor Asoka. Even if the Buddha’s overwhelming concern was to guide individuals towards improving their lives by appropriate use of their minds, and he had comparatively little to say about society and politics, Asoka showed that his teachings could have a great impact in the public arena as well.

I am therefore claiming that to teach our children about the Buddha and the Emperor Asoka is not merely intellectually stimulating and ethically beneficial. To learn about this part of the human heritage may act as a small counterweight to the cynicism and despair which are, understandably, so widespread among the young today.

Surely all our schoolchildren should have at least heard of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle as the founders of our western intellectual tradition, and of Alexander and Julius Caesar as emperors whose conquests changed the world. I know that even this rarely happens at the moment. Of course one cannot teach about everything, and a huge problem in education is information overload. All the more important to know how to prioritise.

I think that at this point I should guard against a possible misunderstanding of the word “pivotal” in my title. It has nothing to do with the theory propounded by Karl Jaspers of what he called an “axial age”, a notion derived from Hegel’s idea of a Zeitgeist, the spirit of an age. Jaspers thought that between 800 and 200 BC a whole set of people popped up across Asia and beyond who, in his words, “laid the spiritual foundations of humanity”: Isaiah, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tse, Socrates, Plato, and several more. But six centuries is a very long time, and we now know that Zoroaster came even earlier. So rather a vapid Zeitgeist. Socrates and the Buddha were almost exact contemporaries, both dying very close to 400 BC at about the age of 80; this is perhaps interesting, and certainly useful as an aide-mémoire, but I do not regard it as significant.

Western philosophy has been described (by Alfred North Whitehead) as a series of footnotes on Plato. Indian philosophy could with equal justice be described as a continuing argument for and against the ideas of the Buddha. In ancient Greece Plato taught Aristotle, whose pupil, Alexander the Great, became the supreme model for kings of later generations. In India Asoka became converted to Buddhism and promulgated a series of edicts, which he had inscribed and displayed all over India. His description of righteous rule was taken as their model by Buddhist kings even many centuries later, as far away as China and Japan.

Let me now state, as briefly and simply as I can, what I take to be the Buddha’s five leading ideas.

(1) Life as we know it is, taken as a whole, sad. It contains satisfactions, but they are transient, and dwarfed by such sorrows as the deaths of those we love and our own impending deaths. But this is a problem to which the Buddha has found a solution.

This idea is first and foremost a religious idea and establishes Buddhism as a religion, not just a philosophy. Unlike the following four ideas, it cannot be fully understood without adding an element which the Buddha inherited and seems not to have questioned: the belief that all sentient beings are caught in a cycle in which death normally leads to rebirth. It follows that the solution that the Buddha propounded involves escaping from the round of rebirth.

(2) All that we can know (and hence talk about) with certainty is our own experience, rather than what “exists”. On the other hand, in crucial respects, such as suffering, our experience is much like that of other people.

This is a philosophical idea – more precisely, an epistemological idea. It suggests that we should confine our metaphysics to ideas which have some practical value.

(3) All that we experience is process. For convenience we tend to act and think as if there were unchanging persons and things, but in fact everything in life is constantly changing. On the other hand, this change is not random but has limits set on it by causal conditions. (This is implied by the English word “process”, but unfortunately no such word was available to the Buddha, who had as it were to discover and spell out the concept.)

This too is a philosophical idea, a very bold one, and of enormous practical resonance. It permeates the rest of the Buddha’s thought.

(4) A crucially important instance of the previous idea, that life is process, is the law of karma. This states that all sentient beings are ethical agents. They have the power to decide whether to do good or ill, but this power is curtailed in that they are influenced by their own previous decisions. Those decisions also play a large part in determining their future suffering or lack of it.

This idea of karma is the foundation of Buddhist ethics.

(5) Buddhist values centre on unselfishness and non-violence. The Buddhist picture of life as a whole makes unselfishness a kind of common sense and also turns intelligence into a virtue. The non-violence the Buddha inherited from the Jains and in fact did not take it as far as they did. The word ahi.msaa literally means “not wishing to harm”, so that “non-aggression” would in my view be the best translation, but since “non-violence” has long gained currency I have retained it.

This series of lectures will be almost entirely devoted to the Buddha, and I shall explore each of these five ideas at length in later lectures, setting them in their historical context.[4] Today however I am approaching the subject from quite a different angle. I have suggested that the Buddha and his influence should be taught in our schools; the rest of this lecture will sketch in points that I think should not be missed.

The ideal way of life that the Buddha propounded could not be fully followed by a layman. There was nothing inherently wrong with lay life as such, but in practice the need to earn a living and support a family, and the thousand distractions of everyday life, were bound to divert a lay person from their religious quest. In particular, a lay person would not have the peace and privacy necessary to meditate, and the Buddha considered that disciplining one’s mind by meditation was necessary in order to attain the final goal of escape from rebirth. The Buddha therefore recommended that anyone who took his teaching seriously and intended to devote their life to following it should become a monk or nun. He therefore set up a monastic order, which survives to this day. The order is called the Sangha, perhaps best translated community; whether it refers to the community as a whole or a particular community on the ground depends simply on context.

The Jains probably had a kind of monastic order already, but the Buddha’s was incomparably better organised. Whereas the early Jain order was for most purposes a mere aggregation of individual renunciates and recluses, the Buddha created an institution in which members were bound to give each other mutual support, and also to support the religious aspirations of the laity. The Buddha saw this community as a middle way between the self-indulgent life of a layman and the pointless asceticism of an isolated renunciate. Buddhist monks followed a life of poverty and chastity. Obedience was perhaps not as prominent a feature as it became in Christian monasticism, because in the latter it meant obedience to the will of God, but Buddhist monks and nuns certainly have to follow a code of rules both substantive and procedural.

We do not know exactly how Christian monasticism derived from Buddhist monasticism, but that it must have done so seems obvious. Christian monasticism began in Egypt in the 3rd century AD, in a period when already for some time there had been intense trade between Egypt and western India. We also know that western India was then full of Buddhist monasteries and that these tended particularly to be found on trade routes.

In this context we can perhaps skip Buddhist metaphysics and soteriology. One great advantage of doing so is that they are much more liable to misunderstanding than Buddhist ethics. But they are also less essential for a grasp of the outlines of human history. I shall concentrate on karma.

The Buddha taught that all thought, words and deeds derive their moral value, positive or negative, from the intention behind them. This does not make the effect of actions irrelevant: Buddhism is no less familiar than is modern law with the idea of negligence. But the basic criterion for morality is intention. Morality and immorality are mental properties of individuals. Metaphorically they were often referred to as purity and impurity. Each good deed makes a person purer and thus makes it slightly easier to repeat such a deed. For instance, I may find it a wrench to give money away the first time, but each time I do so the generosity will come easier. The same applies to bad qualities, such as cruelty. An intention, carried out, becomes a propensity. A proverb cited by Damien Keown in his little book Buddhism: a very short Introduction[5] puts it admirably: “Sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.”

For the Buddha, this moral continuity extends over many lifetimes – in fact, until we finally attain release from rebirth. We are thus heirs of our own deeds, that is our own moral intentions, not just within this present life but over an infinite number of lives. The Buddha himself resolved to attain Buddhahood a vast number of years ago, and about 550 of his lives between then and his reaching his goal are recorded in a famous scripture, the Book of Birth Stories (Jaataka).

Because the Buddha denied the concept of the self which he inherited, many westerners suspect that Buddhism denies moral agency as we understand it. This is truly the grossest possible misunderstanding. The Buddha preached an idea of moral agency and individual responsibility which is far stronger than that held by Christianity or indeed by any other religion or ideology of which I am aware. In the first place there is no external agent, such as a God, who can take the blame for our decisions. We have free will and are wholly responsible for ourselves. Further, this responsibility extends far beyond this present life. So we are entirely responsible for our moral condition and what we make of it.

A great deal of modern education and psychotherapy consists of making people aware that they are responsible for themselves. In fact, we consider that it constitutes a large part of what we mean by becoming a mature person. It is amazing that someone should have promulgated this idea in the 5th century BC, and hardly less remarkable that he found followers.

Introductions to Buddhism written for westerners tend to begin with a reference to the Buddha’s advice to a group of people called the Kaalaamas [AN I, 18-193]. They had complained to him that various teachers came and preached different doctrines to them, and they were confused about which to follow. The Buddha replied that everyone has to make up their own mind on such matters. One should not take any teaching on trust or external authority, but test it on the touchstone of one’s own experience. Naturally, the implication is that people would then find out for themselves that it was the Buddha whose teaching their experience showed them to be correct. It is natural and appropriate for modern authors to highlight this teaching: its implications for tolerance and egalitarianism, at least on the intellectual level, resonate with post-Enlightenment thought. The attitude was not unique in the ancient world: one can imagine the same advice coming from Socrates — though not from Plato. But it is astonishing to find it in the generally hierarchic society of India.

If people are responsible for their own decisions, and in particular for deciding which teaching to follow, this sets a high premium on intelligence. The usual term that the Buddha seems to have used for a morally good act was a word, kusala, which in Sanskrit can mean either “healthy, wholesome” or “skilful”. Scholars have debated which of these translations is more appropriate in Buddhism. I have little doubt that “skilful” fits the bill. If you have intellectual autonomy, you had better have the brains to make good use of it. In every traditional society, including that into which the Buddha was born, education consists largely in parroting what the teacher says. If later some Buddhists parroted, “The teacher says I must think for myself,” we cannot blame the Buddha for that. The Buddha even made a monastic ruling that one of the duties of a pupil towards his teacher is to correct him when he is wrong on doctrine or in danger of saying something unsuitable [Vin I, 49 para 20, 46 para 10]. That, I think, has few parallels in world history.

Though the Buddha’s advice to the Kaalaamas cannot be logically derived from his doctrine of karma, I see the two as of a piece: everyone is ultimately responsible for themselves and has to make their own choices.

As I have mentioned, the Buddha’s message was mainly directed to individuals, showing them how to escape the suffering that we are all born to. I think that one reason why he did not say very much about politics or the ordering of society is that he was vulnerable as a public figure; it is significant both that he agreed to requests from the king with regard to rulings for the Sangha, and that his two main discourses on political matters, the Kuu.tadanta and the Cakkavatti-siihanaada Suttas, are set in the framework of a mythical past. He could clearly see that ruling a society and preserving one’s position as a ruler must rest largely on the use of force, so that an ethical ruler was scarcely conceivable. He did however make a few references to how kings should ideally behave and where they are liable to go wrong.

The general ethical principle is stated in a verse (5) in the Dhammapada: “Never in this world is hostility appeased by hostility; it is appeased by lack of hostility.” I hope everyone here would agree that we need people to carry banners bearing this verse to march daily through every city in the world.

In the Kuu.tadanta Sutta the Buddha memorably applies this to politics. A great king of former times tells his brahmin priest and prime minister (who is later revealed to have been the future Buddha in a former life) that he wants to perform a great sacrifice. This will require him to raise taxes. His wise prime minister warns him that the country is full of crime. He says: “Your Majesty may think that he can root out all crime by killing the criminals, imprisonment, fines, censure or exile. But this will never succeed completely: there will always be survivors, who will go on harassing your kingdom. Here is the only system which will eradicate crime. Your Majesty should supply seed and fodder to those who work in agriculture or animal husbandry; he should supply capital to those who work in commerce; he should organise food and wages for those who work in his service. Then those people will concentrate on their work and not harass the countryside. Your Majesty will acquire a great pile. The countryside will be secure, free from public enemies. People will be happy, and dandling their children in their laps will live, I think, with open doors.”[6]

Another famous text is unique in that it is devoted to quite a lengthy account of how a layman should ideally conduct his life. I have discussed these texts in my book Theravada Buddhism: a social history.

In the same book I devote half a chapter to the Emperor Asoka and show how he was influenced by Buddhist ethics, and in particular by the two texts I have just referred to. Asoka ruled almost the entire subcontinent for over thirty years in the middle of the third century BC. In his inscriptions he urged his subjects to a range of personal virtues, among which thrift, diligence and religious tolerance are prominent. In today’s world, however, it is particularly relevant and interesting to see how the ruler of a huge country adopted an ethic of non-violence. Within his kingdom he abolished the death penalty. He declared many animal species to be protected and limited the slaughter of others. He said that instead of going hunting he went on tours on which he made gifts to brahmins, renunciates and senior citizens, and sought out people to teach him about virtue (dhamma). He urged people to treat their slaves and servants well, which would surely have meant not beating them.

Even more remarkable, however, was Asoka’s conduct of foreign policy. Obviously in the ancient world, as indeed in the modern, pacifism would have rapidly been shown to have been a self-defeating policy as the violent stepped into the shoes of the non-violent. The idea of putting inscriptions on rocks for his subjects to read (or have read to them) probably came to Asoka from the Achaemenid Empire in Iran; but whereas Darius had boasted of winning battles and killing people, and considered his enemies products of the forces of evil, Asoka used the same means to record his revulsion from violence. In his thirteenth major rock edict, dated in 255 BC or very close to that date, he told the world how he had begun in the usually warlike way, but that his campaign against the people of Kalinga (in modern Orissa) had brought death and all kinds of suffering to thousands of innocent people. He hoped never to have to do such a thing again. But he also warned his neighbours that while he would “tolerate what could be tolerated” (his words), they should not provoke him. Though the formula for a perfect solution does not exist, that surely is the right way for a government to minimise violence.

Naturally I would be extremely pleased if every school taught all its children even more about the Buddha and about Asoka, and had them read some of the texts themselves, for adequate English translations are not hard to come by. However, all I have attempted this afternoon is to show what I would regard as the minimum that every present and future citizen should be taught.