Page 30 - kpi15431

KPI Congress 15 th 2

promote one form of Christianity and persecute another. He also declared himself
Supreme Head of the Church of England, thus becoming a kind of self-proclaimed
Dhammaraja. Many subsequent British monarchs have adopted the title fidei defensor,
including the present Queen Elizabeth II, although its meaning today is largely
symbolic. I suspect the record of many Western kings and queens on religion would
include a mixture of the good, the bad and the indifferent, and to arrive at a clear
judgement of their merits would be a complex matter. No doubt the same holds true
of many Asian Buddhist Dhammarajas.

Another form of enquiry, more abstract in character, would be to construct a
definition of the ideal ruler or political system as a type, and see what similarities can
be found at the level of the principles on which these concepts rest. This might take
the form of considering to what extent the notion of Dhammic Socialism or some
other Buddhist-inspired political model is relevant or applicable to societies that have
adopted the Western form of liberal democracy. Since a good deal has been written
on the subject of Dhammic Socialism, I will not pursue that particular topic here.
Instead, I wish to combine some aspects of both the approaches just mentioned –
the historical and conceptual – by way of an experiment to test whether the ancient
notion of the Dhammaraja has any relevance in today’s very different societies. To do
this I will begin in the East with the notion of the Dhammaraja and flesh this out
with the historical example of perhaps the most famous historical Dhammaraja of all,
namely Ashoka. I will then fast forward in time from the third century BC to the
present day and consider to what extent the values and ideals of the Dhammaraja are
applicable to the contemporary West. Here, I will personalize my comparison using the
example of a modern Western head of state as potential candidate for the title of
Dhammaraja, taking as my example the 44 President of the United States of
th
America, Barack Obama.

You may wonder what the point of such a comparison might be. My motivation
is to take the concept of the Dhammaraja out of the history books and apply it to
the world we live in today. While historical studies of past Dhammarajas such as
Ashoka are certainly interesting, for most people these kings inhabit a world remote
from our own and have little bearing on our daily lives. The actions of the President
of the world’s largest economy and only superpower, however, can have an impact on
us all. As the recent banking crisis has shown the global economy is intimately linked
to that of the USA. Apart from economics, the USA claims to be the leader of the
free world, and I think it is instructive to see to what extent the values it claims to
promote coincide with those of the Buddhist Dhammaraja. International panel discussion

You may also wonder why I choose Barack Obama as my example. One
obvious reason is that he is the West’s best-known politician. Also, having been
elected to a second term he has a track record and we know quite a lot about him
and his policies. I did consider the current German Chancellor Angela Merkel who
recently won a third term in office, but conservatives might object that according to