Aśoka found in the Buddhist teaching an ethical, social and cultural guiding principle, i.e., Dharma, which is applicable both to religious and non-religious domains, as well as to all men, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike. (1980: 90)

As is often the case with such statements, this sounds innocuous enough until it is scrutinized more carefully. Was Aśoka really the first to find an “ethical, social and cultural guiding principle” in the Dharma? (Should we join Kitagawa in calling this “the Aśokan turn”?) And if we can discern this “in retrospect,” are we to infer that Aśoka himself was not fully aware of his own “discovery”? If he was the first, are we to infer that, strangely, Śākyamuni Buddha himself did not understand (or for some reason did not act on) the social implications of his own Dharma? Furthermore, were not Śākyamuni’s wandering missionary bhikkhus expected to give spiritual advice and guidance to the laity, and might not this have likely included “ethical, social and cultural guiding principles”? Finally, and most significantly, were there really two distinct “domains” for the early Buddhists, one “religious” and one “non-religious”? One could perhaps imagine that certain early Buddhists might have used some such categories heuristically, but was there really a domain, a sphere of activity, a physical place in which actions (karma) had no soteriological significance for them?

In a manner similar to the Orientalists’ construction of a philosophy/ritual split, Kitagawa has here constructed a dualistic split between a religious and a socio-political sphere, a split that may well have seemed unnatural (or even unacceptable) to the subjects for whom he is presuming to speak. Nevertheless, once such a split has been created, it presents a gap that must be bridged. Kitagawa hails Aśoka as the first to attempt such a feat:

[T]he novelty of Aśoka’s contribution to the history of Buddhism was his attempt to locate religious meaning in the social and political institutions of this world, so that the kingship and the state, which had no religious significance to the early Buddhist, came to be regarded as the instruments ‘to protect according to the Dharma.’ (1980: 91)

Now it is indeed true that Aśoka may have been the first Buddhist king to have been in a position to implement the idea that the institutions of kingship and of the state should be used as instruments “to protect according to the Dharma,” but Kitagawa engages in sheer speculation when he asserts that Aśoka was the first to have the very idea. Moreover, he is quick to appropriate the voices of all Buddhists prior to Aśoka when he asserts that such institutions “had no religious significance to the early Buddhist.”

Kitagawa seems further disappointed that the abstract, disengaged, religious sphere of Dharma that he has constructed in contrast to the “real” socio-political world was never really bridged with any “middle principles” by any Buddhists after Aśoka either:

We can also observe that while Buddhism had lofty universal principles (Dharma) as well as moral codes for individual life, it made little effort in developing what might be called ‘middle principles’ to mediate between universal principles and the empirical socio-political and economic situations in any given society. In the main, Buddhism depended primarily on the idealised notion of the Buddhist king, based on the memory of king Ashoka, as the most feasible link between the religious and non-religious spheres of life. (1980: 100)

An idealized “memory of King Ashoka” was all that later Buddhists would have to depend on. Aśoka’s valiant attempt to bridge the gap (that he, Kitagawa, himself created) was not only the first such attempt but also essentially the last (and hence, only) successful attempt in the succeeding two millennia of Buddhism’s history throughout Asia:

Aśoka’s way of dealing with the two levels of reality provided the only tangible norm for the relation of Buddhism to the socio-political order that was acceptable to many Buddhists …

—that is, of course,

… until the modern period. (1980: 92)

Ken Jones—The Social Face of Buddhism

In 1989 Ken Jones published The Social Face of Buddhism, one of the earliest monographs on engaged Buddhism. This is one of the richest, most nuanced studies on this topic, filled with many useful insights and discussions. Nonetheless, if we first look at what he says Buddhism is not (or should not be) so that we can then better appreciate what he thinks it is (or should be), we will, in this way, be able see how his own categories force him, too, into an extreme Orientalist-style dualism.

Jones is strongly critical of certain attitudes and practices of modern engaged Buddhists. Though I will be arguing shortly that Jones himself constructs and appropriates Buddhism for his own unspoken (modernist) aims, here (ironically) we see Jones making the accusation that it is Western Buddhists who engage in improper appropriation: