Revision summary
The Four Noble Truths, Eightfold Path, middle way, compassion and mindfulness are the Buddhist teachings most usable now. They speak to consumption, hate speech, ecology and stressed officials, without making Buddhism the State. The will to power exists in international relations. It can be guided by strategic reason and by duties in the Charter, treaties and humanitarian law. The leash fails when a State exempts itself; ethics applies the duty at home as well.
Model answer
Introduction
The present is loud with craving, rage and great-power theatre. Part (a) asks which of the Buddha’s teachings still work as public ethics. Part (b) asks whether the will to dominate, which is real in world politics, can be leashed by reason and duty.
Body
(a) Buddha’s teachings most relevant today
- The Four Noble Truths remain a diagnosis of public life: there is suffering; it has causes (craving, hatred, ignorance); it can cease; there is a path. Today’s addictions — to consumption, to outrage, to status — fit that diagnosis better than a new slogan.
- The Noble Eightfold Path (right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, concentration) is a civic syllabus: speech that does not smear, livelihood that does not prey, action that does not harm.
- Ahimsa and compassion (karuna) are relevant to lynching, majoritarian humiliation, and to a development model that treats a river or a forest as an enemy. They do not forbid a police function; they forbid cruelty as policy.
- The Middle Path is relevant to polarisation: neither indulgence in hate-media nor a fake other-worldly withdrawal from voting, paying tax and protecting the weak.
- Anatta and non-clinging challenge identity politics that freezes a person as only a caste or a handle. A citizen is more than the group that claims them.
- Mindfulness is relevant to a civil servant and a soldier under stress: notice the surge before the illegal blow or the communal FIR.
- Dependent origination (pratityasamutpada) is an ecological and social teaching: a factory’s effluent, a rumour’s share, and a child’s malnutrition are not isolated accidents.
- Why today: mental-health load, climate overshoot, fake news, and great-power nuclear risk are all forms of tanha and avijja at scale.
- Limit: Buddhist ethics is not a State religion. Relevance means usable precepts inside a secular Constitution, not a theocracy of any sangha.
- Limit: compassion is not pacifism that abandons a victim. The State still owes Article 21 protection; the teaching judges the motive and the excess, not the existence of law.
(b) Will to power tamed by rationality and moral duty in IR
- The will to power, in Nietzsche’s phrase and in realist IR, is the drive of States (and of leaders) to survive, rank and dominate. It exists. Denying it is sentiment, not analysis.
- Classical realism (Morgenthau) and structural realism (Waltz) treat that drive as the default of anarchy. The quote does not deny the default. It claims a leash.
- Rationality in IR: cost–benefit that includes second-strike, trade, reputation and the risk of a war nobody can win. Nuclear deterrence is a grim rationality; so is a climate treaty that notices a shared atmosphere.
- Moral duty in IR: pacta sunt servanda; distinction and proportionality in IHL; duties in the UN Charter against aggressive war; non-refoulement as a humanitarian floor; common but differentiated climate duty.
- Taming, historically: the Peace of Westphalia’s mutual recognition; the UN system after 1945; NPT and export-control regimes; the nuclear taboo; WTO rules; and India’s own record of UN peacekeeping and a no-first-use nuclear doctrine as attempted restraint.
- India’s neighbourhood: a will to influence is real. Duty and reason require that smaller neighbours are not humiliated, that refugees are not used as pawns, and that water and trade disputes stay in institutions.
- Failure of the leash: Iraq 2003 on a false brief; great-power veto paralysis on mass killing; arms dumped into a civil war; and majoritarianism exported as foreign policy. The will to power then eats the claim of civilisation.
- The quote is therefore right as a project, not as a completed fact. Power can be guided: coalitions, law, verification, and domestic ethics that do not cheer a war crime.
- It is wrong if read as a guarantee. Rationality can also be the rationality of a predator. Moral duty must bind the calculation, including for one’s own State.
- Ethical close for an Indian officer and diplomat: pursue national interest, tell the truth about threats, and still refuse means — torture, fake maps, starving civilians — that make the interest barbarian.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD BT[Buddha] --> FNT[Four Noble Truths] BT --> MP[Middle path and ahimsa] BT --> MF[Mindfulness] FNT --> PUB[Public ethics today] WTP[Will to power] --> REAL[Realist drive] RAT[Rationality] --> TAME[Tamed IR] DUTY[Moral duty IHL UN] --> TAME REAL --> TAME
Conclusion
Buddha’s truths, path, middle way, compassion and mindfulness still name today’s craving, hate and ecological entanglement, inside a secular State. The will to power in IR is real; rationality and moral duty can tame it when law, verification and conscience bind one’s own flag, not only the rival’s.
Quick related
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Next question on this syllabus topic (2020 · Q5). View answer →
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Does ahimsa mean India should not have armed forces?
No. It means force is last, lawful and not cruel. A State that will not protect a citizen has abandoned karuna toward the victim.
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Is realism then unethical?
Realism is a warning about motives. Ethics uses the warning, then still requires that means and weaker parties are not eaten for rank.
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