Hi AnagarikaMichael. I guess I just have to disagree respectfully with you on this. I don’t think the Buddha was much of an activist, or anything like a modern “engaged Buddhist”. He abandoned both his family and his life in his community, along with the ceaseless rounds of struggles, passions, acquisition, fear and violence that are inherent in worldly affairs, to become a homeless wanderer. After achieving his goal of final release from all worldly bonds, and the blissful joy and peace that come from having totally put down the burden of our unsatisfiable cravings for one preferred form of existence or another, in this world or any other kind of world, he decided to help others achieve the same thing he had achieved, and gathered around himself a groups of followers who were equally sickened by worldly life, and sought to follow the Buddha in the holy life.
This vision of life, which is both pessimistic about the human social world and its miserable typical affairs, but optimistic about the potential of human beings trapped in this world to achieve liberation from it, sits very uneasily with our modern, post-enlightenment western progressive outlooks. Many of us have absorbed through our modern upbringing the idea of the perfectibility of the human race, the progressive forward thrust of history, and a conception of the good and moral life that is heavily politicized and socially active, and defined by social duties. I don’t believe that was the Buddha’s vision. In all of those rebirth stories, for example, the social worlds that are described, and are supposed to have existed aeons ago, look remarkably identical to the ancient Indian world in which the Buddha existed, and the vision of of the future in the legends of Buddhas to come also seems little different from the present. It is a wheel of Sisyphean recurrence, without discernible beginning or end, of aging, sickness and death in a world on fire with greed, hatred and confusion. The Buddha attempted to teach a way of life whereby individuals could get off the wheel, not a scheme of long-term social improvement.
I do think this vision, and the kind of life it holds up as best, has a potentially positive impact on ordinary social life, however, because it transforms the worldly hierarchy of values. Instead of valorizing the normal, animal human drives toward sensual gratification, lust and reproduction, struggle, territory, conquest and domination, it presents the highest possible attainment of human life as a place of peace that lies in precisely the opposite direction from the direction those ordinary animal drives push, and can be achieved by resisting and restraining those drives, deepening one’s detachment from the restless “I” of our swirling thoughts and bodily states, and moving against their natural grain or flow. The monastic sangha keeps alive the possibility, and reality, of the holy life and its lofty, blissful goal. And by venerating that life and goal, the community of lay worldly Buddhists is able to keep its vision directed, at least occasionally, in the right place, and away from the proliferating confusions of sensual attachments and the pain they inevitably bring.
I think it is up to lay Buddhists to do the speaking on how to apply the Buddha’s vision in some constructive way to the management of our fraught worldly affairs. People like Aung San Suu Kyi can try doing that. But let’s leave those poor holy monks in peace, to seek peace, and to maintain a refuge for people who need to escape from worldy misery when it becomes too great for them, and not try to draft the monks into the armies of Mara and the wars of worldly life. We can feed them, make sure they are housed and clothed and have enough medicine, and otherwise try to keep the worldly winds from battering down their door.
There may be some frustration in Theravada communities these days with the absence of prominent public voices speaking to give the Theravada Buddhist “position” on all sorts of social issues. Maybe they have Pope-envy or Dalai Lama-envy. But to my mind, that is a strength of Theravada, which adheres much more closely to the authentic and original Buddhist path. On most public policy questions, which tend to be very complex and interconnected in many ways, I don’t think there is a clearly definable Buddhist position anyway. But bhikkhus can continue to remind everyone how hatred, grasping and sensual desire or craving bring suffering into our lives - everyone’s lives.
It could also be that we westerners, even if we are not Christians, have absorbed much of our conception of what a religion is from the traditions of the Christian Church. We might think there is a Buddhist “church” that is supposed to have a magisterial teaching authority touching almost all human affairs, or think monks are supposed to be “pastors” - shepherds leading their flocks through the world. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think this was the Buddha’s conception of the right relationship between sangha and laity.
In the United States - and I assume it’s similar in other western countries - a degenerate (to my mind) form of Buddhism is taking hold, where it has been reduced to an extension of the conventional secular liberal western worldview, defined by the usual progressive causes and attitudes, with a little bit poetry, metaphysical philosophy and psychotherapeutic stress reduction thrown in. It is losing sight, in my opinion, of the summum bonum of the Buddhist path. Now there are even prominent Buddhists teaching people that there is “good” anger and “good” passion, etc., in direct contradistinction, I think, to clear Buddhist teaching.
don’t say ‘degenerate’ as it unreasonably puts me in mind of that Nazi thing about Mahler’s music and the rest … anything from “misguided” to name-calling would do 
Metta to you all