El transporte

According to the Buddha, human suffering is primarily caused by unwholesome actions driven by ignorance. This basic principle governs the fortunes of all sentient beings, including humans, and even the most powerful of humans. Further, unlike the powerless, these powerful individuals possess a unique ability to affect the wellbeing of others—their ignorance not only affects themselves, it undermines the wellbeing of everyone who is subject to them. According to Buddhist cosmology, they must have accumulated much merit to attain that position of power, but their situation is also tenuous. Their actions could have immense positive benefit for others, or they could inflict much misery on others and result in negative karmic consequences for themselves in the future.2 Perhaps, it is in part for these reasons that leading Buddhist prelates have a long history of association with kings and other people of power, challenging their prevailing worldview and presenting an alternative Buddhist regime of truth. This is the tradition in which ’Phags pa’s relationship with Qubilai was situated and, therefore, in order to understand the full context of their relationship, it is important to understand this tradition.

The English term “speaking truth to power” may have first been coined by anti- war Quakers in the mid-twentieth century,3 but it has many precedents in a variety of cultures. The fundamentals of these precedents are all similar. In them, people who are understood to be possessed of a greater truth than the functioning of political and martial power are called upon to contextualise the actions of the powerful in relation to this greater truth. They are asked to contextualise the power of the powerful and reframe

1 _{Chos rgyal ’Phags pa (1968i: 186, folio 2).}

2 _{Indeed, from an ethically radical perspective, there is no viable way of combining religious practice and}

statecraft given that rulership inevitably involves compromising the Buddhist ideal of non-violence. For a discussion of this and other perspectives on the karmic implications of the kings’ participation in

punishment, see Michael Zimmermann (2006: 213–42).

3 _{Haughton Buzz (1999: 55–67).}

it within a larger—either temporal or geographical—cosmography that pays attention to those more powerful than the powerful, like God or gods, for example, and those much less powerful than they, like their subjects.

As would be expected given that the beliefs and practices of Buddhism include both a vast cosmography, in which earthly kings play an important but not central role, and a focus on the morality of everyday actions, a tradition of speaking truth to power can be found in Buddhism. This tradition traces its root to the historical Buddha, and during the past two millennia many leading Buddhist prelates have participated in it. What is more, their thoughts and activities have been recorded repeatedly in the religion’s literature, such that later speakers of truth can find many precedents for their actions within the canons of Buddhism, and within other forms of Buddhist literature.

The literary genres in which this tradition have been preserved are manifold; they include texts dedicated specifically to providing advice to kings, for example, in the form of an epistle, and other instances where such advice was proffered in a more general setting, such as in a sermon. But all these works are united by the common central theme of “speaking truth to power”. ’Phags pa’s Advice to the King is one such text; its central theme and organising principle can be seen as the speaking of truth to power.

This corpus predominantly presents only the voices of Buddhist prelates and not the voices of kings, meaning that, considered on their own, little can be inferred about how these texts were received and what impact they may have had on their recipients. Nevertheless, these texts do enunciate the nature and intent of the discourses and they provide insights regarding the sorts of teachings that have been given by Buddhist advisors and what sorts of results they may have hoped to achieve.

In these works, Buddhist prelates consistently assert the theory of no-self (Skt.

anātman; Tib. bdag med), the lack of a personal and phenomenal “self” (Skt. ātman; Tib. bdag);4 and karma, the principle that one must face an outcome determined by past actions. Through elucidating the lack of essence and intrinsic existence of all phenomena including the false concept of “self”, they devalue the power and possessions that accompany kingship and seek to dislodge their audiences from their materialistic and self-centred beliefs. And through their exposition of the law of karma, they underscore that even kings cannot escape the consequences of their actions but that

4 _{While not all schools of thought in Buddhism accept the lack of a phenomenal self, the focus of this}

chapter is primarily on the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition, which does posit the lack of both a personal and phenomenal “self”. This is also known as the theory of “emptiness”.

through the prelates and their teachings rescue is possible—a power that is otherwise beyond the kings’ reach.

It is a discourse that invites the kings to adopt the Buddhist faith and submit to the Three Jewels: the Buddha, Dharma and Saṃgha. Concurrently, this discourse sets an ideal of dharmarāja or righteous kingship—rulership in accordance with the precepts of the Dharma5—towards which the kings would have to strive in order to fulfil the faith’s requirements of them. Hence, to the extent that they sought to live up to this ideal, these kings who were above the law can be viewed as effectively becoming bound by the rules of the Dharma and its principles.6

This chapter draws out examples of advice from the tradition of speaking truth to power, highlighting these common salient themes while tracing the development of the tradition from its Indian origins to the Tibetan Buddhist world. It also discusses ’Phags pa’s contribution to the tradition.