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Only when their respective conditions are met can these forms of justice be objective and binding on all. Even in a non-Buddhist worldview, these forms of justice lead to inevitable conflicts. In the Buddha’s worldview, though, it’s impossible that their conditions could ever be met.

This relates to the second set of lessons about justice that the Buddha gained from his awakening, lessons about time and rebirth. In the first knowledge he gained on the night of his awakening, he saw his own past lives, back through countless eons, repeatedly rising and falling through many levels of being and through the evolution and collapse of many universes. As he later said, the beginning point of the process—called samsara, this bad habit we have of “wandering on”—was inconceivable. Not just unknowable. Inconceivable. This means that there can be no clear point from which we can begin the tally of wrongs and rights that retributive justice demands.

In the second knowledge, he saw that the process of death and rebirth applied to all beings in the universe, and that—because it had gone on so long—it would be hard to find a person who had never been your mother, father, brother, sister, son, or daughter in the course of that long, long time. We’ve all been oppressors and oppressed, over and over again.

He also saw that the universe was shaped by the conflicting intentions of all its many beings, and that it serves the designs of no one in particular. As one dhamma summary has it, “There is no one in charge” (Majjhima Nikaya 82). This means that the universe has no purpose, there’s no ideal state to return to, and there’s no source to determine how the goods of the universe should be distributed. So there’s no way that ideas of restorative or distributive justice could be universally binding.

What’s more, the universe has the potential to continue without end. Unlike a monotheistic universe, with its creator passing final judgment, samsara offers no prospect of a fair or just closure—or even, apart from nibbana, any closure at all.

This point has two consequences. The first is that there can be no valid theory of ends justifying the means, because samsara involves nothing but means. This is why the Buddha answered the question of how to attain long-term happiness within the universe not with a demand for a fair society but with a recommendation for meritorious actions—i.e., actions that, in creating happiness and freedom, harm no one.

These actions come down to three: generosity, virtue, and the development of universal goodwill. To provide for your own long-term happiness, you adopt these actions yourself. To provide for the long-term happiness of others, you persuade them to adopt them. Unlike theories of justice, which require stories to justify the punishments they often call for, meritorious actions require no justifications at all. They obviously come from a good heart, and because they spread their goodness all around, they’re genuine means for fostering harmony and peace.

For a just society to be possible, it’s essential that people first train their hearts and minds.

The second consequence of the fact that, aside from nibbana, there is no closure to samsara is that even if you could create a just society, it wouldn’t last. That’s because, unless the human heart is trained, justice wouldn’t satisfy it. As the Buddha commented to Mara—the only being who ever invited him to rule justly over others (Samyutta Nikaya 4:20)—even two mountains the size of the Himalayas made of solid gold wouldn’t be enough to satisfy the wants of any one person. No matter how fairly wealth and opportunities were distributed under your rule, there would always be those dissatisfied with their portions. As a result, there would always be people you’d have to fight in order to maintain your power.

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