Since my early childhood I have been prickly about the injustices that I observed growing up in a brutal right-wing dictatorship and the inequalities I perceived going to church and elsewhere. How could there be so many people who went hungry, lived in primitive shacks, dressed in rags, and had little or no access to health care while a few lived in luxury and the priests and their temples blithely displayed their gold images, rich vestments and jewels, and other signs of extreme wealth? For these and other reasons, I planned to become a lawyer, which I did, and eventually turned to Zen Buddhism, preserving the lawyerly habit of rising up and speaking out even when inconvenient. That seemed to me the right instinct of a Buddhist.
Yet, for years I have perceived a problematic stance in Western Buddhist circles: often Buddhism regards engagement with societal and political injustice as a distraction from genuine practice. The notion is presented gently, even defensively, as if the Dharma itself might be damaged by the abrasiveness of politics or moral conflict. That perception was reinforced when I read an excellent essay by Mike Slott, published on the Buddhist Coalition for Democracy Substack on June 27, 2026, titled On Taking Sides. I arrive at much the same conclusion as Slott — that it is sometimes essential to take sides in economic and political conflicts — but from a different direction. My concern here is the historical and scriptural support.
I understand the reservation. In a time saturated with outrage, there is something appealing about imagining Buddhism as a refuge from all the turmoil. But the claim clashes with our tradition’s own sources. In the suttas, the Vinaya, and major Mahayana texts I have checked (see endnotes), one finds something more demanding and less comfortable. The Buddha did not treat injustice with detachment. He responded to it, sometimes directly, sometimes sharply, but never as a spectator.¹
One illustrative story comes from the commentarial and later biographical traditions rather than the early discourses themselves. King Vidūḍabha, driven by resentment, set out to annihilate the Sakyan people. According to the Pali commentary, on several occasions the Buddha placed himself in the path of King Vidūḍabha’s army, attempting to deter the attack through his presence alone. He did not offer a discourse on impermanence. He did not retreat into metaphysics. He sat on the road. His compassion took the form of physical obstruction.² I admit some unease about this story; is the Buddha modeling engaged resistance, or is later tradition projecting ethical heroism onto him? But on its face, it makes it difficult to maintain that Buddhist practice requires distancing from the exercise of power.
Certain canonical texts reinforce the point less dramatically but more explicitly. In the Samaññaphala Sutta (DN 2), Ajātasattu approaches the Buddha after murdering his father, King Bimbisāra, to seize the throne. The Buddha unambiguously states that parricide is an act with grave karmic consequences and that Ajātasattu’s crime obstructs his capacity to realize the fruits of the path in that lifetime.³ Accounts differ in later traditions about the depth of Ajātasattu’s remorse, but the Buddha does not minimize the act itself. Something similar unfolds in the Buddha’s repeated encounters with King Pasenadi of Kosala in the Saṃyutta Nikāya. Across multiple suttas, the Buddha admonishes Pasenadi when he governs unjustly and affirms him when he rules wisely. Ethical judgment is not suspended because politics is involved.⁴
The Jātaka tales, commentarial rather than canonical in the strict sense, may be read as gentle moral fables, but that reading can miss their sharper edge. In the Kṣāntivādin Jātaka, a sadistic king mutilates an ascetic who embodies patience. The ascetic does not respond with hatred, but the narrative unmistakably condemns the king’s cruelty. Patience is praised; violence is not ignored.⁵ This insistence appears with particular force in the Vinaya. The monastic code repeatedly requires monks and nuns to disclose serious offenses and participate in communal discipline. Knowing concealment of grave offenses constitutes an offense itself. Silence is not neutrality; it is complicity.⁶
Mahayana literature presses the question further. The Upāyakauśalya Sūtra recounts a bodhisattva sea captain who kills a would-be mass murderer to save hundreds of lives and to prevent catastrophic karmic consequences for the killer himself. The text frames inaction as the greater moral failure.⁷ A related critique appears in the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, which portrays appeals to emptiness that become detached from compassion as misunderstandings of nonduality. Insight that does not respond to suffering has gone astray.⁸ Śāntideva addresses the same problem with psychological precision. In the Bodhicaryāvatāra, he distinguishes action motivated by anger from action undertaken to prevent harm. Restraining a wrongdoer can be an act of compassion when it reduces suffering for all involved.⁹
Zen literature sometimes approaches the problem obliquely, through story rather than argument. The familiar parable of the two monks and the woman at the river turns on a subtle but radical point. Compassion responds to the situation at hand. Rules and abstractions matter, but they do not absolve us of responsibility when someone is in danger. To carry the woman across the river is, in that moment, to take a side, without clinging to it afterward.
Historical Buddhist societies largely assumed this obligation. Prince Shōtoku’s Seventeen-Article Constitution (604 CE) instructs officials to investigate abuses and restrain greed. Later Tibetan legal traditions, often tracing their origins to Songtsen Gampo, define just rule as protection of the vulnerable and restraint of the powerful.¹⁰ These texts do not imagine compassion as a private virtue detached from governance. They treat it as a public duty.
The picture that emerges is not one of serene detachment. It is disciplined engagement. The Buddha’s equanimity was not a shield against conflict but a condition that made ethical action possible without hatred. To stand in the road before an army, to rebuke a king, to break silence when harm is occurring, these are not departures from Buddhist practice. They are expressions of it.
Taking sides in the face of injustice is not a modern corruption of the Dharma. It is one of its oldest demands. The tradition asks us to meet suffering as it actually appears, not as we wish it would. Sometimes that means stillness and patience. Sometimes it means refusal, intervention, and speech.
Compassion has never been a spectator sport, and I was right to follow my calling as a Buddhist lawyer.
__________________________________________________________________
This essay draws on early Nikāya texts, Vinaya materials, later Pali commentaries, and Mahāyāna scriptures. These sources occupy varying positions of authority within different Buddhist traditions.
Endnotes
1. Bhikkhu Bodhi, “A Look at the Kalama Sutta,” Access to Insight, https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/bodhi_kalama.html; Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
2. B. E. Burlingame, trans., Buddhist Legends (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), vol. 3; see also Access to Insight summaries, https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/burlingame/dhammapada_cmts.htm.
3. Dīgha Nikāya 2, Samaññaphala Sutta, trans. Bhikkhu Sujato, SuttaCentral, https://suttacentral.net/dn2/en/sujato.
4. Saṃyutta Nikāya 3 (Kosala Saṃyutta), SuttaCentral, https://suttacentral.net/sn3.
5. Jātaka No. 313 (Kṣāntivādin Jātaka), English translation at https://www.jataka.org/jataka313.htm.
6. Vinaya Piṭaka, Pācittiya 64 and related rules on concealment of offenses, SuttaCentral, https://suttacentral.net/pitaka/Vinaya.
7. Upāyakauśalya Sūtra, discussed in Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, chap. 5; see also overview at https://www.learnreligions.com/skillful-means-upaya-449695.
8. Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, chs. 2–3, trans. 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, https://84000.co/translation/toh176.
9. Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra, chs. 5–6, trans. Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); online excerpts at https://www.shantideva.net/guide/.
10. Seventeen-Article Constitution of Prince Shōtoku (604 CE), translation and commentary at https://www.japanesewiki.com/history/Seventeen-Article%20Constitution.html; Rebecca R. French, The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).