Abstract

This paper studies the procedural law of the Theravāda Buddhist monastic code as a source of governance procedures for a federated organization of many sites, and maps them onto a planned network of monasteries whose daily operations are run by AI agents and whose formal acts belong to human monastics. The code's procedural chapters (the Khandhaka of the Vinaya Piṭaka) supply four procedures. (1) The validity of a collective decision: a motion read to the assembly, followed for the weightiest acts by three announcements, with silence taken as assent; an assembly complete within a fixed boundary, with absent members' consent conveyed by proxy; a minimum quorum for each class of act; defects that make an act void from the start; and offences for reopening a matter validly settled. (2) Typed dispute resolution: four kinds of case (disputes, accusations, offences and the community's business) routed to seven settlement procedures. (3) Exception clauses attached to each rule, and allowances written for a defined class of region. (4) Rules recorded with the case that prompted each one and with each later amendment. Each procedure is read from the Pāli text and compared with modern practice: unanimous consent in parliamentary procedure, lazy consensus, consent decision-making, veto-based on-chain governance, multi-door dispute resolution and comply-or-explain codes. The limits are stated: the procedures were built for one assembly meeting in one place, AI agents hold no seat in the formal acts they model, and whether the procedures scale to a large network is open.

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Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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