The Bodhisattva Ideal of Burmese Kingship

Abstract

Aspirations toward the attainment of future Buddhahood, [purha lon = paya laun:],¹ aspirations to be born as the future Buddha Mettaya, whose coming had been foretold by the Buddha Gautama, the aspiration to bring a state of society that prophecies associated with Mettaya, became an ideal that Burmese kingship inherited from medieval Ceylon² (cf. p. 45f.). It meant a rationalization and idealization of kingship in a Buddhist sense. The ruler received through Buddhism the exemplary soteriological charisma of the Bodhisattva Mettaya, a being aspiring toward the liberation of all living beings from Saṃsâra. In this sense Burma’s Buddhist kingship has formulated — particularly in its epigraphy — a soteriological rationalization of the State. The institution of kingship was thereby given an ideological foundation; the charisma of kingship came to rest to a certain extent on Buddhist ethics. On the other hand, there survived from pre-Buddhist times concepts of kingship as agents of cosmic harmony that linked the earth of the realm with the fructifying forces of the universe (cf. p. 51). On the royal observation of Buddhist ethics were to depend the fertility and the harvests of the kingdom. Therefore it was in the ideal kingdom of the Buddhist Dhamma that were to grow maximum harvests, culminating in the Utopian Wishing-Trees.