Scholarly Research Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies, Online ISSN 2278-8808, SJIF 2021 = 7.380, www.srjis.com PEER REVIEWED & REFEREED JOURNAL, JULY-AUGUST, 2022, VOL- 10/72
REFLECTION OF DEMOCRACY IN BUDDHISM Dipty Subba, Ph. D. Asst. Professor, Department of Education, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.
Paper Received On: 25 AUGUST 2022 Peer Reviewed On: 31 AUGUST 2022 Published On: 01 SEPTEMBER 2022
Abstract Despite the rapid advances made by civilization in this century, the most immediate cause of our present dilemma is our undue emphasis solely on material development. Today we have abandoned to foster the most basic human needs of love, kindness, cooperation and caring. We have lost the essential humanity that is our foundation. Buddhism is a way of life. Buddhism is not thinkable without the towering figure of the Buddha. It is also an attitude. From these two features stems the uniqueness of Buddhism in the world. It has flourished in a diversity of forms, while repeatedly renewing, through study and practice, its roots in the teachings of the Buddha. This kind of pluralistic approach, in which individuals themselves are responsible, is very much in accord with a democratic outlook. As a spiritual community its cohesion has sprung from a unifying sense of brotherhood and sisterhood. This paper is an attempt to draw attention to democracy and democratic values in Buddhism and also to bring forth the remarkable contributions of Buddhism in this aspect. Keywords: Buddhism, Democracy, Democratic Values Scholarly Research Journal's is licensed Based on a work at www.srjis.com
Introduction Democracy has a long history and one has to go back to more than two thousand years to trace its origin and to find out and realize its features, practices and institutions. Ideas about modern representational democracy spread in Western Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries and so we see a lot of democracies mounting in Europe in more recent times. Today, suddenly there is a great surge of democracy in the Western world. In Eastern Europe, in many parts of the Third World, democracy is rising and this is becoming an era of democracy. Non-Western political democracy takes its early form in India, in village 'Panchayats' in isolated places about 2300, 2400 or 2500 years ago. Some of these developed under the influence of Buddhism. But for a long time most of the countries in Asia were governed by autocratic monarchs and colonialism till the 20th century. We must then conclude that as a wide range of government, democracy had a very limited history Copyright © 2022, Scholarly Research Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies