Buddhist Social Philosophy

Buddhism and Social Philosophy 
           Some argue that Buddhism offers no social philosophy. However, this argument makes no sense since it all depends on how we define social philosophy. If social philosophy refers to social morality that governs people’s behaviors, Buddhism has many teachings on this sense, like The Five Precepts and The Noble Eightfold Path. But if the social philosophy refers to the way to organize the structure of society, Buddhism stands outside.

         Buddhism admits the individual personality, stating that each person has the right to experience personally. Buddhist social forms aim at promoting mundane equality and maximum freedom, even though they are incapable of creating everlasting peace and contentment in mind. Buddhist society is not to provide home for human beings, but help people to search for a way to go beyond sickness, aging and death.
Buddhism shows no interest in designing a frame for individual relationship, but it does organize a form for the complex forces within the individual. Meanwhile, Buddhism is slow in analyzing the relationship between individual, but does analyze the relationship between the individual and the Buddha. What’s more, Buddhism encourages morality in a society.
Buddhism suggests that a good society is one where all the people are good people from within. Each person improves himself/ herself from within, the whole society will become a well-modeled society. Buddhism focuses more on individual than the system, stressing that the problems of human beings should be corrected within human beings but not in the system. The Buddha teaches that the best society is one with a democracy of socialism administrated by people who are concerned a lot about the well-beings of its people. Buddhist social philosophy is based on the liberation from siuffering and endeavor to make an equal, free, democratic and stable society.