What the Buddha Told You About Management: A Buddhist Approach to Organizational and Economic Governance

This paper advances the argument that canonical Buddhist texts constitute a coherent, philosophically integrated theory of organizational and economic governance that predates Western management science by approximately two and a half millennia. Drawing on primary sources within the Pali Canon — principally the Vinaya Pitaka, the Sigālovāda Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya 31), the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya 16), the Vyaggapajja Sutta (Aṅguttara Nikāya 8.54), and the Vaṇijjā Sutta (Aṅguttara Nikāya 5.177) — and reading these texts through the analytical lens of classical and contemporary management theory, the study identifies precise structural parallels between Buddhist institutional design and the frameworks of Fayol (1949), Mintzberg (1973), Rousseau (1989), Ostrom (1990), and Kristof-Brown et al. (2005), among others. The paper is organized into six chapters: a definitional survey of management theory; historical evidence for pre-industrial administrative practice; the case for Buddhism as a management framework; a philological analysis of the Sanskrit-Pali term samvidhāna as the indigenous conceptual equivalent of management; a domain-by-domain analysis of Buddhist management principles with canonical citations; and a synthesizing conclusion that articulates Buddhism's distinctive contribution — the insistence that operational effectiveness and ethical integrity are structurally inseparable — as its most enduring and practically relevant legacy for twenty-first-century organizational governance. Keywords: Buddha, Buddhism, Buddhist economic, Buddhist management, Pali Canon, organizational governance, Vinaya Pitaka, Sigālovāda Sutta, samvidhāna, management Find the full article: https://zenodo.org/records/18996168

BUDDHIST MANAGEMENT