The Indian Origin of the Network State

In October 2025, I was lucky to attend the Network State Conference hosted by Balaji Srinivasan in Singapore. Unlike others who smartly networked during most of the event, I sat in every single session, taking copious notes. There stood out a trend.

The Network State, as envisioned by Balaji Srinivasan, was not seen as a new invention. Instead, that credit went to Christianity. Jesus Christ’s message inspired devotees who organized in the shadow of his crucifixion to formalize and live out his new moral creed. They gathered in churches and preached like madmen on the streets, eventually reaching enough people to topple and capture the same empire that had brutally persecuted them prior.

Here, Christianity fits neatly with Balaji’s framework for a proto-network state: Christianity had clear shared values (Christ’s doctrine), membership criteria (baptism), internal governance (Council of Nicaea), and collective action (church gathering and missionary work). As islands of Christianity took over the ocean of the pagan Roman Empire, the religion would have a formalized government structure with its theocratic capture of Rome as well as a formal protocol with the Roman Catholic Church.

The thing is, this has all happened before. And I do not fault the speakers, who were primarily Western, for this belief in Christian innovation and exceptionalism. This is the natural yet flawed mindset of not just the West but much of the world. Europe’s victory does not simply come from Spanish gunpowder, British armadas, Dutch financial instruments, Greek logic, Roman governance, etc. It comes from words. Voice became volume as the sheer level of documentation, systemization, and preservation of knowledge occurring on Eurasia’s far western peninsula dwarfed all other lands. Reality was what could be read, and thus the West became a giant amongst men.

But I believe that there was another; a more ancient network state that may have even lent some inspiration to Christianity itself.

The Vedic Protocol

In the ages of Bronze and Iron, Middle Eastern city-states would commonly persecute each other by destroying their temples and defiling their gods. Beyond theological reasons for this, I believe this comes down to scarcity. India, on the other hand, created a different type of religion. A far cry from the harsh deserts that incubated the religions of Abraham, India was ironically Edenic. A lush land of plenty that differed greatly from the scarcity typical of the Middle East. Naturally, alternate ideas of religion evolved here according to the environment.

What defines Indian religion is pluralism. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism – the Dharmic religions – not only have a kaleidoscope of sects within them but inter and intra-religious violence in India was historically very rare compared to other places, at least for Dharmic religions. The seed of this pluralistic ethos was planted long ago when Gods and Demons were said to have walked the Earth.

In northwest India, sometime in the 2nd millennium BCE, a man by the name of Sudas went to war with ten kings. With the aid of his patron god, Lord Indra, Sudas struck down the ten like lightning breaking trees. In the aftermath, Sudas did not choose annihilation of his enemies; instead, he chose assimilation. The defeated kings would partake in the sacred fire ritual of ancient Indians, the yajna. Their poets’ verses would be enjoined to the most sacred of scriptures, the Vedas. Their gods and ways were combined with that of the tribe of Sudas, the Bharatas. A great syncretism emerged that would birth the Vedic protocol – assimilation over annihilation.

A network began. The main source code was preserved by the Brahmins, scholar-priests whose life mission was condemning their bodies to austerity and focusing their minds on preserving the Vedas. Each Brahmin would conserve a section of the Vedas and perform a ‘check’ with others to reconcile differences and uphold the Vedas with computer-like precision. This was a blockchain in its earliest form. Into the Vedic source code, other groups could plug in their own ways and Gods, forming bridges between communities yet maintaining their own distinctness. In this way, the black God Vishnu would descend from the heavens, appearing in his midnight form to various Indian peoples, etching himself into their histories and hearts. Bound by the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean, the people of the subcontinent would coalesce into one, yet many.

However, this network of pluralism is still fuzzy. It does not strictly conform to a network state. To find a true network state, we have to examine another core aspect of early Indian religion. Across India, men had forsaken their material lives to don saffron robes. And it is in the folds of these robes that we will find our answers.

Ascetic Aesthetics

To understand Indian asceticism, we have to examine something that is lost. In an ancient manual of Sanskrit grammar, the author Pāṇini refers to an ancient code for ascetics, the Bhikshushastras. The Bhikshushastras outlined the proper methods of ascetics, a now burgeoning phenomenon as India’s urbanization picked up steam with more forests being felled to be fashioned into cities. Yet this was simply a formalization of an old practice. Over a millennium prior, the Vedas mention men draped in ochre robes, travelling with the winds, and following the path of the Gods. Even earlier still, in the Indus Valley Civilization, seals and figurines displayed humans contorting their bodies into strange shapes and contouring their minds in meditation. This was an ageless way.

While the Bhikshushastras have been swallowed by time, we know that networks of ascetics roamed India for millennia. They had their own rules and were intertwined with Vedic life and ritual. Indeed, the saffron color on their clothing was an homage to the sacred ritual fire itself. But what really pushed Indian asceticism into a formal network state-like endeavor was the emergence of Buddhism.

Buddhism emerged from a strain of Dharma called Śramaṇa. Śramaṇa was a renunciant movement that emphasized ascetic pursuits rather than householder mores. Meditation and metaphysics were its mainstays. Nonetheless, early Indian sects danced across the stage of history, embracing and separating from each other at whim and will. Lord Buddha would be tremendously influenced by the Vedic milieu while ascetics across the spectrum blurred lines like astigmatics.

Lord Buddha’s core innovation for our concern is numeration: Four Noble Truths. Three Marks of Existence. The Eightfold Path. The Shakyamuni systemized asceticism and Indian religion in a form that had not been done prior. The culmination of this was the Sangha, a monastic organization for Buddhist monks whose goal was to spread the Dharma to the horizons of the world. It is here that India, nay the world’s, first network state was born.

The Sangha State

After his Enlightenment, Siddhartha Gautama, now the Buddha, gave his first sermon to five disciples. This was known as the turning of the Wheel of Dharma. Upon reaching 55 disciples, Lord Buddha commanded his followers to travel in different directions to spread the Dharma. The Buddha did not designate a successor; on the contrary, he forged the Sangha as an article of consensus, of democracy some may say.

Gautama believed that his message was eternal, not original. He criticized the Brahmins at the time for forsaking their ascetic values, imploring them to live up to the ancient virtues of Brahminhood: non-violence, austerity, and compassion. Modeling his monks after this old path, he coined them as “bhikshus.” They were told to beg for alms and organize into monasteries. The cloud of Buddhist ideals became corporeal as a result.

Monasteries sprawled across the Gangetic plain. The Sangha connected through these monastic nodes. The Vinaya – 227 rules for monks and 311 for nuns – was formulated like a protocol. Those who adhered to the Vinaya’s qualifications and rules for monkhood could join the network, the Sangha. Rituals such as meditation, communal chanting, confessions of transgressions, fortnightly ceremonies at the full and new moon, and other practices were formalized. Lay followers could also join the Sangha. Early Buddhists did not demand abandonment of local gods or customs; rather, Buddhism became a ‘Layer 2’ atop the Vedic-Hindu foundation of India.

As Buddha’s message moved minds, patrons donated to this burgeoning structure, including King Bimbisara, the rising ruler of the Magadha city-state, a precursor to the pan-Indian Mauryan Empire. Monasteries were soon embedded in Indian economic life, attracting tithes and endowments. Monasteries also lent money at interest with formal contracts and leased agricultural land. Kingdoms would rise and fall, but the Sangha would remain because of this decentralized patronage and the Vedic values of pluralism. At the monastery of Bharhut, only 4 of 222 donor inscriptions came from royalty; the rest were from traders and guilds. The Sangha had a code of ideals, physical land, and a self-sustaining economic model. What else to call this than a network state?

Skill or Scale Issue?

Emperor Ashoka convened the Third Buddhist Council in 250 BCE. Stalwarts of the Sangha converged on a mission: to spread Buddhism to the ends of the Earth. Missionaries were sent to the jungles of the Malay Peninsula, the remote island of Sri Lanka, across the sky-streaking Himalayas, the endless steppes of interior Asia, and a great way west to Mediterranean coasts.

Centuries later near Alexandria, a community called the Therapeutae may have carried this legacy. Members practiced renunciation of property, silent meditation, communal prayer and chanting, vegetarianism, and weekly gatherings with an elder to discuss scripture and spirituality. Writing around 10 CE, the philosopher Philo of Alexandria believed them to be heterodox Jewish mystics, but you and I can parse the obvious parallels. A double century later, Christian ascetics called the Desert Fathers were observed following similar practices.

Whether direct influence occurred is debatable. The timeline is not.

Gautama turned the wheel of Dharma in his first sermon over 500 years prior to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. The codification of the Sangha tips over 800 years prior to the equivalent Council of Nicaea. The formalization of the Sangha’s network state in the Vinaya concurs with this precedence as well. What Network State Conference speakers claim occurred with the emergence of Anno Domini appeared centuries earlier with the Advent of Dharma.

The Sangha’s shared moral law (Vinaya), formalized initiation (taking refuge in the Three Jewels), missionary expansion, distributed physical presence (monasteries), and economic sustainability from said monasteries gives us a definitive case for the world’s first Network State. Informed by earlier Hindu protocols of pluralism and decentralization, Buddhism spread across Asia not through force and destruction of local deities and traditions, but by assimilation and persuasion.

Today, the network state is portrayed as a new model of governance, but in reality, it’s been here for thousands of years. India proved how a non-violent network state can scale tremendously. It showed how decentralization produces anti-fragility in ideas and traditions through the distribution and pluralism of Dharma. Buddha’s Sangha serves as a prototype for what we can accomplish in the present. What we now see as novel is actually ages ancient; it just took another Indian to remind us of it.