Editor's Note: The following is a written transcription of a dharma talk that Winton Higgins gave to the Kookaburra Sangha in Sydney, Australia on November 8, 2025. 

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The Mahāparinibbāna sutta (Digha nikāya [Long discourses] no. 16) recounts Gotama the Buddha’s last weeks of life and his death. It is the longest sutta in the Pali canon. It starts with a curious scene that rarely enjoys an airing in dharma circles.

We find the 80-year-old Gotama at his favourite retreat, Vulture Peak in Rajagaha. The unsavoury local king, Ajātasattu, wants to attack and wipe out the Vajjis – citizens of a small neighbouring republic. But first he wants some authoritative feedback on his plan. Somewhat surprisingly, he sends his chief minister, Vassakāra, to Gotama’s lodgings to run his plan past him.

There’s a certain method in the king’s madness. Gotama grew up in a small republic like the Vajjian one, and his father convened the governing council. So he would have enjoyed a fine education in military and political affairs. He also has a bit of a reputation as a sage.

When Vassakāra comes to him, Gotama accepts the consultancy. He doesn’t address his visitor directly. He chooses to discuss the matter in the minister’s presence with his cousin, nurse and memorist, Ānanda, who is busy fanning him. Gotama tells Ānanda that he’s heard that the Vajjis meet regularly, often and harmoniously in governing themselves. ‘I’ve heard that too,’ Ānanda replies. Gotama surmises that people like that ‘could be expected to grow and not decline’.

(Compare this formulation with Gotama’s description of an imagined city of dharma practitioners: ‘successful and prosperous, filled with people, attained to growth and expansion’ (Saṃyutta Nikāya [Connected discourses] 12:65]).

Gotama goes on to mention other Vajjian qualities he’s heard about: they remain true to their traditions; they listen to their elders; they don’t abduct women and girls, and frown on forced marriages; they practise public piety; and they see to the welfare of their spiritual leaders. At the mention of each item on the list Ānanda says he’s heard similar reports, and Gotama affirms anew his expectation that people who conduct themselves like this are likely to flourish and not go under.

After listening to this dialogue, Vassakāra gets it. If the king attacks the Vajjis they’ll have him for breakfast. The minister bows and returns to the palace.

The view from Athens

Around 30 years before this incident, in 431 BCE, the prominent Athenian politician Pericles delivered a funeral oration over his city’s fallen heroes from the Peloponnesian war against Sparta. His speech takes up the same theme as Gotama, and remains one of the sources of democratic theory today.

Yes, military prowess has made Athens great, Pericles says, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg of Athenian virtue and strength. Athens is a democracy: ‘the administration is in the hands of the many and not the few,’ as he puts it. The people have agency, and that secures their freedom from domination. (Hold that thought.)

We are a cultivated people that educates its youth to bring forth all the virtues; we don’t brutalise them with a merely military discipline like the Spartans do, Pericles goes on. We prepare them for active citizenship. Thus ‘the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace.’  

Civic virtue

Both Gotama and Pericles extolled a notion of active citizenship that came to be known as civic virtue, from classical Greece to the present day. The Vajjis and the Athenians retain their freedom and agency by being the sort of people they’re educated to be, and by conducting their civic affairs in the way they do. Fast forward to 1922 CE, when we find the good burghers of Manhattan even raising a statue depicting civic virtue in front of their city hall.

(Today it stands in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, with all that that fact might imply. But just last week civic virtue staged a spectacular rebirth in New York.)

As Aristotle pointed out, we humans are herd animals, so political hurly-burly inheres in the human condition. One must play one’s part. In Athens only free, native-born men enjoyed citizen status, but its civic demands on those so favoured just about amounted to a full-time job. Those citizens who shirked their civic responsibilities were labelled idiots – a word the Greeks coined for just such couch potatoes. Engagement in civic affairs is an essential learning experience, Aristotle taught, and those who avoid it aren’t fully-rounded human beings.   

Civic virtue is a key concept in a strand of political philosophy as old as the dharma – civic republicanism, these days perhaps best represented by the American political philosopher Michael Sandel. Its key tenet is this: public issues (res publica in Latin) should be transacted in public by the public.

This tradition turns on the eternal struggle between freedom and tyranny. Freedom comes down to the dispersal of political power to the citizenry and its exercise in the service of the common good. Tyranny represents the concentration of arbitrary power in the service of self-interest, thus feeding vice and corruption. We don’t have to look very far to see the latter combination playing out in our own time.

At best, traditional Buddhism has failed to encourage civic virtue. At worst, it has discouraged active citizenship. Just why it has done so would launch a separate research project – one for another day.

Machiavelli’s riddle

To my mind the most intriguing and stimulating contributor to civic republicanism is Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527). His demonic reputation derives from publicists for those whom he has threatened over the centuries – holders of concentrated, arbitrary power, be they emperors, popes, monarchs, or tyrants claiming various other titles. From popes and kings to Joseph Stalin, they’ve banned his work. But down through the centuries he has also accumulated many devotees among those seeking to bring down these very despots.

Machiavelli wrote his masterpiece, The prince (better translated as ‘The ruler’) ostensibly as a contribution to a swelling genre of contemporary handbooks called ‘mirrors to princes’. These books pretended to advise absolute powerholders on how to be good Christian rulers, ones chosen by God and doing His will – good shepherds to their flocks. In fact the books set out to sanctify everything the tyrants in question chose to do. They were all about spin.

By contrast, Machiavelli’s ruler is a dishonest, cruel, scheming, rotten bastard. His tricks of the trade are exposed in cool, value-free terms. God is nowhere to be seen.

If you read The prince as one of the ‘mirrors’, you have to wonder what on earth is going on. Not only because the author rips the sanctimonious mask off the prince’s unlovely face. But also because he keeps hopping from one standpoint to another, one minute advising the prince on how to concentrate power and set up a tyranny, the next minute tipping off those who want to destroy him, pointing out his vulnerabilities.

The best way into Machiavelli’s thought is through a fable penned by his near-contemporary, Trajano Boccalini. A sheep makes its way up Mount Parnassus to request Apollo, the god of order and reason, to endow its species with canine incisor teeth - fangs. Every other species enjoys some means of self-defence, the sheep argues – claws, beaks, horns, fangs, or venom. They can thus live freely. But sheep alone have no means of self-defence whatsoever and cannot live freely.

Apollo hears the sheep out but refuses its request. Sheep are in fact protected by the most ferocious species on earth: humans, who love wool, mutton and cheese made from ewes’ milk, he says. Humans won’t let any harm befall their sheep. So sheep increase their numbers year by year, while all the other animals live precariously and struggle to survive. And if he, Apollo, accedes to the sheep’s request, shepherds would be confronted by snarling, unmanageable mobs instead of the docile flocks they’ve always tended.

 So the sheep returns home disappointed. A little later a traveller on a moonlit night sees a flock of sheep grazing in a field he’s passing. He spots a suspicious figure moving through the flock messing with the sheep’s mouths. He’s implanting fangs in them. When the figure looks around, the traveller recognises him. It’s Niccolò Machiavelli.

Those who struggle for their freedom must first understand exactly how the tyranny they’re up against works. They have to beat it at its own game – amassing and deploying an irresistible counter-power to overthrow it. Machiavelli helps greatly with this project. His fan club abounds in would-be and successful liberators.

But there’s a catch that Machiavelli sees. Liberation and freedom are two different things and infer two different projects. Liberation relies on the concentration of power; but freedom demands the dispersal of power. Many liberators just turn into new tyrants, so nothing changes. They’ve followed Machiavelli assiduously on their road to power. But once there, they find they must ban his work in order to entrench their power. This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union. In 1936 Stalin had the old Bolshevik Lev Kamenev shot for republishing The prince.

Democracy – real democracy, based on universal suffrage and engaged citizens – is the answer to Machiavelli’s liberation/freedom riddle. We all have to exercise our agency as active, civically-virtuous citizens, thus dispersing political power. And we’re no longer just citizens of our city, or even of our national political community; we’re now citizens of an interconnected world. We can advance our dharmic ethics across the globe.