 Buddhist discussions of the ethics of punishment are fairly rare, but there is an important passage about punishment in the Precious Garland (Ratnāvalī), a letter to a king from the great Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna. Whether or not Buddhist ethics in general is consequentialist, the theory of punishment Nāgārjuna presents is clearly a consequentialist one. To maintain social order, punishment is a regrettable necessity. But the king should not punish out of anger or a desire for revenge. Instead, he should inflict punishment out of compassion, especially compassion for the criminals themselves, whose destructive actions may have condemned them to many lifetimes of suffering. (See Hopkins 1998 for a translation of the text and Goodman 2009, ch. 9, for discussion.)