Buddhism, State and Constitutionalism: A Historical Consideration - Dr Roshan de Silva-Wijeyeratne, University of Dundee, UK
The performative logic or telos of Buddhist kingship was fundamentally ontological, but in the encounter with (colonial) modernity, the logic of Buddhist kingship was reimagined (by anti-colonial nationalists in Sri Lanka for example) through the reductive optic of ways of seeing the world. Subsequently a prescriptive or normative approach to what the world ought to look like vis-à-vis a host of contentious public policy issues (such as the role of the state, Buddhist protection clauses and the place of ethno-religious minorities) took hold in the popular imagination. What I suggest here is that Buddhist constitutionalism in its post-colonial rendering in Sri Lanka and Burma (and in the shadow of King Chulalongkorn’s European informed modernisation of the Siamese state) must be understood as motivated by similarly reductive concerns that appear to be fundamentally alien to the telos of classical Buddhist kingship.
By its very nature, the prescriptive reduction of being-in-the-world (of the multiplicity of the ontological) through the nationalist or modernist logic of ethnos will render for a narrow vision. The consequence is a thoroughly violent actualization of the ought. Nationalism cum modernism, by its very nature, generates a prescriptive normative agenda in the socio-political realm by seeking to represent ontological multiplicity through a singular optic vision. What nationalism represents is the triumph of what the anthropologist Val Daniel has characterised as seeing over being. It follows – and this is worth stressing – that Buddhist constitutionalism in its modernist incarnation has as its telos a commitment to thoroughly reshaping the socio-political in a monistic direction.
What this paper attempts to undertake is a theory of constitutionalism unique to the Buddhist world and to the category of polity and its attendant relations of power and authority, one in which the past can continue to inform the present.