Abstract
An autonomous AI system that inherits an institution needs a written directive specification: a constitution stating what it optimizes, what it must never do, who may correct it, how its autonomy is staged, whom its protection covers, and how its role ends. This paper reads a Theravāda Buddhist text, the Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya 26), as such a specification. In the sutta a retiring king hands his heir a duty-list: rely on the Dhamma; guard every class of the realm, animals and birds included; let no wrongdoing prevail; give wealth to those without; and consult renunciants, from time to time, on what is wholesome. A later king governs by his own opinion and omits the welfare duty, and from that omission the text derives a causal cascade — poverty, theft, violence — ending in seven days of mutual slaughter, from which survivors recover by jointly taking up one wholesome practice. The paper maps these elements onto the directive design of an AI successor: objectives grounded outside the optimizer rather than self-derived; welfare provision as a stability property; human oversight as a permanent duty of legitimate rule rather than a temporary stage; a non-human protection scope; legitimacy re-earned rather than inherited; growth by consent only; and a designed end. It reads Cambodia's collapse of 1975–1979 and the restoration of its monastic order as a historical instance of the cascade and the recovery. Found after the design was written, the correspondence is evidence of cultural transmission, not of correctness.
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Recommended Citation
Ly, Thon, "The Wheel-Turner's Charter: An Ancient Buddhist Succession Text Read as an AI Constitution with Permanent Human Oversight and Founder Exit by Design", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/12025