Looking for harmony. Plato's and Śāntideva's Creative Attempts to Stay Together.

This chapter shows how Plato’s goal of a harmonious community requires a ruler who displays creativity. By attributing roles, designing laws and education, the ruler keeps the different elements together that make up the whole of their community. Throughout his dialogues, Plato shows how rulers cannot automatically apply any previous knowledge but need to creatively adapt it to the specific whole of which they are in charge. To sharpen our understanding of harmony in Plato’s works, the chapter compares them with Śāntideva’s Guide. Śāntideva gives pointers towards responsiveness that creates harmony in situations that might lead to suffering. He gives importance to mindfulness and introspection—which somehow parallel the monitoring role of Plato’s ruler—when bad emotions afflict the aspiring bodhisattva. However, the accomplished bodhisattva does not need monitoring: they display creative responsiveness that relieves suffering by harmonizing potentially conflicting elements, without the need to postulate a whole to which such elements belong.