tantaman

The Alchemy of Power

Published 2025-12-18

There’s a pattern that repeats across civilizations, across millennia, across traditions that share almost nothing in common except this: spiritual breakthroughs get stabilized, standardized, and captured by power.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s closer to institutional physics—the predictable behavior of ideas as they pass through the machinery of human organization. Understanding this pattern won’t make you cynical about religion; it should make you literate about power itself. Because the same forces that transformed “the Kingdom is not of this world” into compulsory confession operate today in secular institutions: in how workplace “wellness” programs function, in how revolutionary political movements calcify into bureaucracies, in how the language of therapy becomes a management technique.

The mechanism works like this:

  1. An insight appears—a way of seeing, a liberation, a path

  2. A community forms around the teacher and the teaching

  3. Stabilizers arrive: texts, offices, rules, money, schools

  4. Rulers notice that stable meaning can stabilize people—and that moral authority converts into administrative authority

  5. Selection pressure favors interpretations that are legible, enforceable, fundable, and identity-forming

Let’s watch this happen, across traditions, through their own words.

The Original Insight: What Gets Said Before Power Arrives

Every tradition begins with something that resists capture—an insight that points beyond institutional control.

In early Christianity, when asked about his authority, Jesus draws a sharp line:

“My kingdom is not of this world.”

The Daoist classic Daodejing goes further, explicitly warning that law itself breeds the disorder it claims to prevent:

“The more laws and ordinances are promulgated, the more thieves and robbers there will be.”

And it names the danger of ritual directly:

“Ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.”

Buddhism’s founder, facing death, refuses to name a successor or centralize authority:

“Be islands unto yourselves… with the Dhamma as your island, with the Dhamma as your refuge.”

The Upanishads dissolve all conceptual grasping:

“Not this, not this” (neti neti)—ultimate reality escapes every category.

These are not institution-friendly statements. They point toward something that can’t be administered, taxed, or turned into a membership card. And yet.

The First Capture: Text Becomes Law

The earliest move is always the same: someone writes it down, and someone decides what counts as “it.”

In Christianity, Athanasius’s Easter letter of 367 CE draws the boundary:

“Let no man add to these, neither let him take ought from these.”

A canon is born. What was a living tradition of stories, letters, and teachings becomes an authorized library—and authorization implies an authorizer. The question “what did Jesus teach?” becomes “what do the approved texts say?”—and who controls the approved texts controls the teaching.

Buddhism follows the same arc. The Dīpavaṁsa describes how oral teaching became written scripture:

Monks “recorded… in written books” so “the Religion might endure for a long time.”

Endurance requires fixation. Fixation requires someone to do the fixing. The specialist class of reciters and memorizers becomes the gatekeeper of “what counts.”

In Judaism, the Mishnah (c. 200 CE) transforms oral tradition into legal procedure:

“Cases concerning monetary law are adjudicated by three judges.”

Religion becomes court. And the Pirkei Avot explicitly endorses interpretive expansion as a control mechanism:

“Raise many disciples and make a fence round the Torah.”

Build a fence. Expand the boundary. More rules means more jurisdiction for rule-interpreters.

The State Discovers Religion

Once a teaching becomes textual and institutional, it becomes visible to power. And power always asks the same question: “Is this useful?”

The answer, historically, has been yes.

Christianity gets its state debut in 313 CE with the Edict of Milan:

“We thought fit… to grant both to the Christians and to all men freedom [to follow religion].”

This sounds like tolerance. It was also recognition—the Church now had legal standing, property rights, and room to grow. Sixty-seven years later, Emperor Theodosius closed the circle with the Edict of Thessalonica:

“All peoples… shall hold the faith… delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter.”

“All peoples… shall hold.” Orthodoxy is now enforceable. The inner drama of salvation has become a state-administered identity.

Islam moves faster because its founding texts already contain the template. The Quran instructs:

“Obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you.” (4:59)

And it builds fiscal capacity directly into piety:

“Take from their wealth a charity by which you purify them.” (9:103)

Zakat isn’t just generosity—it’s an institutional revenue channel. The Charter of Medina (622 CE) creates a constitutional community from the start. By the classical period, al-Mawardi can describe the purpose of Islamic governance in terms that any administrator would recognize: the imamate exists to “guard religion and manage worldly affairs.”

Buddhism found its imperial patron in Aśoka, whose rock edicts (3rd century BCE) transformed Buddhist ethics into state branding:

“All my people are my children; I yearn for their welfare…”

Aśoka sent missionaries, built monasteries, promoted a “Dhamma” that was part Buddhist teaching, part imperial moral program. The line between enlightenment and empire blurred.

The Machinery of Control: Confession, Credentials, Courts

Once the state and the institution are allied, control technologies proliferate.

Confession is the masterpiece. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) made it mandatory:

“[Every Christian] bound to confess… at least once a year.”

Your parish priest now receives regular reports on your inner life. Augustine had already provided theological justification for enforcement, rereading Luke’s parable of the banquet—”compel them to come in”—as license to coerce heretics for their own salvation.

Credentialing creates the specialist class that interprets the rules. The madrasa system in Islam, the monastic schools in Christianity, the yeshiva in Judaism—all function as pipelines that produce authorized interpreters. The Tang Dynasty in China took this further, requiring officials to keep a copy of the Daodejing at home (733 CE) and basing civil service exams partly on its content.

Courts make religion enforceable. The Dharmaśāstras in Hindu tradition turn religious norms into governance manuals—the king becomes enforcer of dharma. The Ottoman Mecelle (1869–1876) recoded Islamic jurisprudence into numbered articles, making fiqh usable by modern state courts.

Registration turns belonging into bureaucracy. Religious Daoism developed registers (lu) that tracked membership and rank—a parallel bureaucracy mirroring the state. The Celestial Masters movement collected “five pecks of rice” as dues. Heaven was organized like earth.

The Colonial Acceleration: When Empires Classify Religion

European colonialism didn’t invent religious capture, but it industrialized it.

In 1772, the British East India Company decreed that Hindu disputes would be decided by “the laws of the Shaster”—extracting fluid, contextual traditions into a fixed legal code that could be administered by foreign judges. What had been a living conversation among pandits became a static rule-set.

In Hawaiʻi, the process was compressed into a single generation. The kapu system—where the sacred saturated land, rank, and cosmos—was abolished from above in 1819. The king “ordered the destruction of all heiau” (temples). Into the vacuum came American missionaries with literacy, print, and constitutional theology. The 1839 Declaration of Rights announced:

“God hath made of one blood all nations of men…”

By 1848, the Māhele had “divided nearly all the lands” into private property holdings. Sacred land relations became legal titles. Paperwork decided reality.

Backlash and the Recurring Cycle

The pattern isn’t unidirectional. When institutions accumulate too much wealth or power, states push back.

The Tang Dynasty’s suppression of Buddhism in 845 CE confiscated monastic property and forced monks back into lay life. The monasteries had become tax havens and land rivals—intolerable to a state that needed revenue and control.

This cycle repeats: patronage creates institutional power; institutional power creates state anxiety; anxiety triggers suppression or forced reform. Then, often, renewed patronage begins again under different terms.

Modern states manage this through regulation rather than suppression. Religion becomes a “sector”—with registered associations, licensed clergy, approved curricula. The People’s Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, Israel, India, France—each manages religion through different bureaucratic instruments, but all share the assumption that religion is something the state must supervise.

What This Means for You

You might read this as a story about religion. It’s actually a story about how meaning becomes management.

The same pattern operates in secular contexts:

The mechanism is constant: any idea that moves people can be captured by structures that organize people. The sincere guardian, the procedural manager, and the ambitious patron form an alliance—sometimes explicit, usually unconscious—that selects for interpretations that are legible (can be written down), enforceable (can be monitored), fundable (can attract resources), and identity-forming (can distinguish us from them).

Understanding this doesn’t mean every institution is corrupt or every reform is cynical. Many repackagers are sincere. The deeper point is structural: once an insight becomes a durable organization, it must solve governance problems—and governance tends to reward control-friendly interpretations.

The Daodejing’s warning applies beyond religion:

“Ritual is the husk of faith, the beginning of confusion.”

Every tradition contains escape hatches—non-duality, prophetic critique, the teaching that the Dhamma is your refuge, not the institution. These are the immune system against capture. They survive precisely because they’re hard to administer.

But they keep getting administered anyway. The question isn’t whether this will happen—it’s whether you can see it happening, and maintain some relationship to the insight underneath.

A closer examination of this process in Christian history: