<![CDATA[Contemporary governance of educational institutions faces dual pressures from the demands of managerial accountability and the need for a foundational value system capable of sustaining institutional longevity. Buddhist values namely mettā (loving-kindness), karuṇā (compassion), paññā (wisdom), sīla (morality), and sati (mindfulness) doctrinally offer a non-egocentric ethical framework relevant to the notion of sustainability, yet they are rarely explicitly positioned within mainstream educational governance literature. This study aims to synthesize the literature from 2020 to 2026 regarding Buddhist value-based leadership and its relevance to sustainable educational governance, employing a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) methodology that follows the PRISMA 2020 guidelines. Comprehensive searches across Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, and DOAJ using combinations of Boolean operators yielded 17 verified, peer-reviewed journal articles that met the inclusion criteria, consisting of 7 Buddhist-specific articles and 10 comparative articles on spiritual and ethical leadership in education. Thematic synthesis indicates that sīla and paññā are the most extensively studied, whereas mettā is rarely analyzed as a standalone construct. Furthermore, Buddhist-specific studies tend to confine their focus to individual-level leadership, seldom extending to institutional governance. A dialogic gap was also identified, wherein Buddhist-specific literature and generic sustainable governance literature operate in parallel without cross-citation. Ultimately, this study formulates the conceptual model of "Buddhist Value-Based Leadership for Sustainable Educational Governance," which elucidates a four-layered mechanism translating a leader's internal values into institutional sustainability, while simultaneously offering a future research agenda to bridge these two distinct academic traditions.]]>
