Dharmischer Diktator oder erleuchtete Kommunen?

Abstract Drawing on an account of the socio-political mythologems and theorems of early Buddhism and their development in the history of ideas, the article identifies both the ideal of a centralized authoritarian form of government as the overarching commonality of traditional Buddhist political thought and an unresolved tension between a radical Buddhist pacifism on the one hand and different variants of a Buddhist realpolitik with its concomitant legitimisation of violence on the other at its core. The article then traces the development of Buddhist political theory from the 19th century until the present and reconstructs the emergence of Buddhist socialism, totalitarianism and anarchism. Abstracting these conceptual patterns of the dynamics between political and religious authority within the history of Buddhist traditions, the article concludes by applying them to the contemporary context of socially-engaged Eco-Buddhism.