Shall We Pave the Planet, or Learn To Wear Shoes?
A Buddhist Perspective on Greed and Globalization
By David R. Loy
Buddhism is known as the Middle Way. Shakyamuni Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, renounced a privileged life of pleasure and leisure for the arduous life of a forest dweller, but his severe ascetic practices did not lead to the enlightenment he sought. The middle way he discovered does not simply split the difference between sense-enjoyment and sense-denial. It focuses on calming and understanding the mind, for such insight is what can liberate us from our usual preoccupation with trying to become happy by satisfying our cravings. The goal is not to eliminate all desires, but to experience them in an non-attached way, so we are not controlled by them. Contrary to the stereotype of Buddhism as a world-denying religion, that does not necessarily involve transcending this world in order to experience some other one. It means attaining a wisdom that realizes the true nature of this world, including the true nature of oneself.1
These concerns are reflected in the Buddhist attitude toward wealth and poverty:
To know the dhamma, to see things truly, is to recognize the self as a conditioned, temporal reality and to reject self-indulgent cravings as harmful illusions. Thus, a non-attached orientation toward life does not require a flat renunciation of all material possessions. Rather, it specifies an attitude to be cultivated and expressed in whatever material condition one finds oneself. To be non-attached is to possess and use material things but not to be possessed or used by them. Therefore, the idea of non-attachment applies all across Buddhist society, to laymen and monk alike.2
The main issue is not how poor or wealthy we are, but how we respond to our situation. The wisdom that develops naturally from non-attachment is knowing how to be content with what we have. Santutthi paramam dhanam, "the greatest wealth is contentment" (Dhammapada verse 204).
This does not mean that Buddhism encourages poverty or denigrates wealth. As Shakyamuni Buddha emphasized many times, the goal of the Buddhist path is to end our dukkha (often translated as "suffering" but better understood as "ill-being" or "unhappiness"). He summarized his teachings into four noble (or ennobling) truths: life is dukkha. The cause of dukkha is craving (tanha). There is an end to dukkha (nirvana). The way to end dukkha is to follow the eightfold path (magga). None of these truths involves recommending poverty, for poverty is a source of unhappiness in itself and also makes it more difficult to follow a spiritual path.3 In the Anguttara Nikaya, for example, the Buddha says that poverty (daliddiya) is miserable, because it leads (among other things) to borrowing, mounting debts and ever-increasing suffering (III, 350-352).
Sakyamuni also said that there are three types of people in the world. Some are blind in both eyes, because they know neither how to be successful in the world nor how to live a virtuous life; some are blind in one eye, because they know how to pursue worldly success but do not know how to live virtuously; and a few are blind in neither eye, because they know how to do both (Anguttara Nikaya I, 128). As this implies, Buddhism recommends neither material nor spiritual (or moral) deprivation.
Nevertheless, it would be a big mistake to conclude that Buddhism approves of a life devoted primarily to acquiring wealth. The ultimate goal of liberating insight may be more difficult to pursue if we are destitute, but a life focused on money may be as bad, or worse. Shakyamuni warned repeatedly against that danger: "those people who, having obtained vast wealth, are not intoxicated by it, are not led into heedlessness and reckless indulgence which endangers others, are very rare in this world" (Samyutta Nikaya I, 74). An intense acquisitive drive for material riches is one of the main causes of our dukkha. It involves much anxiety but very little real satisfaction.
Instead, the Buddha praised those who renounce all psychological attachment to material things in favor of a life devoted wholeheartedly to the path of liberation, by joining the sangha community of bhikkhu monks and bhikkhuni nuns. The material needs of such renunciates are known as the four requisites: food sufficient to alleviate hunger and maintain one's health, clothing sufficient to be socially decent and to protect the body, shelter sufficient for cultivating the mind, and health care sufficient to cure and prevent disease. Needless to say, this is hardly a recommendation of wealth. In fact, today these four requisites could be used as a benchmark for measuring the level of subsistence below which people should not be allowed to fall.
On the other side, however, and despite all the cautions above about not being attached to riches, Buddhism does not claim that wealth is in itself an obstacle to following the Buddhist path. The five basic precepts that all Buddhists are expected to follow -- to avoid killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, and intoxicating drugs mention nothing about abstaining from wealth or property, although they do imply much about how we should pursue them. The value of money cannot be compared with the supreme goal of enlightenment, yet properly acquired wealth has traditionally been seen as a sign of virtue, and properly used wealth can be a boon for everyone. Wealth creates greater opportunities to benefit people, and to cultivate non-attachment by developing one's generosity.
The problem with wealth, then, is not its possession but its abuse. The wise realize that wealth is not a goal in itself but can be a valuable means for reducing dukkha and promoting spiritual advancement. "Wealth destroys the foolish, though not those who search for the Goal" (Dhammapada 355). In short, what is blameworthy is to earn wealth improperly, to become attached to it and not to spend it for the well-being of everyone, instead squandering it foolishly or using it to cause suffering to others.4 Right livelihood, the fifth part of the eightfold path, emphasizes that our work should not harm other living beings and specifically prohibits trading in weapons, poisons, intoxicants, or slaves.
That wealth can indicate virtue follows from the Buddhist belief in karma and rebirth. If karma is an exceptionless law of the universe, what happens to us later (either in this life or in a future lifetime) is a result of what we have done in the past and are doing now. This makes wealth a consequence of previous generosity, and poverty a result of misbehavior (most likely avarice or seeking wealth in an immoral way). Not all contemporary Buddhists accept that karma is so inexorable, or understand it so literally, but this traditional belief implies our personal responsibility for whatever happens to us and (in the long run, at least) complete harmony between our morality and our prosperity. Today the effects of economic globalization and a concern for social justice cast a somewhat different light on this issue, and it is one that we shall return to later.
Buddhist Economics
Everything mentioned above concerns attitudes that we as individuals should cultivate or avoid. What do they imply about how society as a whole should be organized? What kind of economic system is compatible with Buddhist teachings? Buddhism, like Christianity, lacks an intrinsic social theory. The Buddha never taught specifically about economics in the sense that we understand it now. This means that we cannot look to traditional Buddhist texts for specific answers to the economic issues that concern us today. However, some Pali sutras do have significant social implications. Perhaps the most important is the Lion's Roar Sutra (Cakkavatti-sihanada Sutra), which shows how poverty can lead to social deterioration.
In this sutra the Buddha tells the story of a monarch in the distant past who initially respected and relied upon the Buddhist teachings, doing as his sage advised: "Let no crime prevail in your kingdom, and to those who are in need, give property." Later, however, he began to rule according to his own ideas and did not give property to the needy. As a result, poverty became widespread. Due to poverty one man took what was not given [i.e., stole] and was arrested. When the king asked him why he stole, the man said he had nothing to live on. So the king gave him enough property to carry on a business and support his family.
Exactly the same thing happened to another man, and when other people heard about this they too decided to steal so they would be treated in a similar way. This made the king realize that if he continued to give property to thieves, theft would continue to increase. So he decided to get tough on the next one: "I had better make an end of him, finish him off once for all, and cut his head off." And he did.
At this point in the story we might expect a parable about the importance of deterring crime, but it turns in exactly the opposite direction:
Hearing about this, people thought: "Now let us get sharp swords made for us, and then we can take from anybody what is not given, we will make an end of them, finish them off once and for all and cut off their heads." So, having procured some sharp swords, they launched murderous assaults on villages, towns and cities, and went in for highway-robbery, killing their victims by cutting off their heads.
Thus, from the not giving of property to the needy, poverty became widespread, from the growth of poverty, the taking of what was not given increased, from the increase of theft, the use of weapons increased, from the increased use of weapons, the taking of life increased . . . (Digha-Nikaya III, 65 ff.)5
The long-term result was degradation of life and social collapse.
Despite some fanciful elements, this myth has clear economic implications. Poverty is presented as a root cause of immoral behavior such as theft and violence. Unlike what we might expect from a supposedly world-denying religion, the Buddhist solution to such deprivation is not accepting one's "poverty karma." The problem begins when the king neglects his responsibility to give property to those who need it. This influential sutra implies that social breakdown cannot be separated from broader questions about the benevolence of the social order. The solution to poverty-induced crime is not more severe punishment but helping people provide for their basic needs.
However, notice also what the sutra does not say. Today we usually evaluate such situations by talking about the need for "social justice" and the state's role in "distributive justice." This emphasis on social justice, so central in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), is not important in traditional Buddhism. As the above story indicates, this does not mean that Buddhism is insensitive to the problem of poverty. But emphasis on karma implies a different way of understanding and addressing that social problem. The traditional Buddhist solution is dana "giving" or generosity.
Dana is the most important concept in Buddhist thinking about society and economics, because it is the main way our non-attachment is cultivated and demonstrated. We are called upon to show compassion and help those who need it. The doctrine of karma implies that such unfortunates are reaping the fruit of their previous deeds, but this is not understood in a punitive way, and the importance of generosity for those walking the Buddhist path does not permit us to be indifferent to their misfortune. We are expected, even spiritually required, to lend what assistance we can to them. The appeal is not to justice for a victim of circumstances. Instead, it is the morality and spiritual progress of the giver that is the issue. In the language of contemporary ethical theory, this is a "virtue ethics." It offers a different perspective that cuts through the usual political opposition between conservative (right) and liberal (left) economic views. According to Buddhism, no one can evade responsibility for one's own deeds and efforts, but generosity is not merely optional: we have a spiritual obligation to respond compassionately to those in need. The king started the social breakdown when he did not.
Does this emphasis on dana offer a viable alternative to contemporary Western discourse about social justice? However valuable individual generosity may be as a personal trait, it is difficult to see how that by itself could be an adequate response to the widespread social problems being created by rapid economic globalization. It is also difficult for many Buddhists today to accept that the increasing poverty apparently caused by impersonal economic developments is really just an effect of individual bad karma created in previous lifetimes. The concept of social justice may not be original to Buddhism but it is not incompatible with Buddhist teachings, and some socially engaged Buddhists are attempting to incorporate it.
In modern times, the social consequences of dana in most Asian Buddhist countries have become somewhat limited, because the popular emphasis has been on "making merit" by supporting the sangha, which has been dependent on that support (bhikkhu and bhikkhuni are not allowed to work for money). Karma is often understood in a commodified way, as something that can be accumulated by dana-giving, and the amount of merit gained is believed to depend upon the worthiness of the recipient. Since members of the Buddhist sangha are viewed as the most worthy recipients, one receives more merit from donating food to a well-fed bhikkhu than to a poor and hungry layperson.
This preoccupation with accumulating merit (usually for a better rebirth) may be incompatible with the Buddhist emphasis on non-attachment, and seems to encourage a "spiritual materialism" ultimately at odds with the highest goal of spiritual liberation. The benefits of this support rebound on the rest of society, since the sangha is primarily responsible for practicing and propagating the teachings of Buddhism. Nevertheless, I wonder if the present economic relationship between sangha and laypeople should be re-examined. Rural Thailand, for example, needs new hospitals and clinics more than it needs new temples. According to the popular view, however, a wealthy person gains more merit by funding the construction of a temple whether or not one is needed in that area! Such a narrow but commonplace understanding of dana as merit-making has worked well to provide for sangha needs, but this cannot be an adequate spiritual response to the challenges provided by globalization.
One possible Buddhist alternative, or supplement, is the bodhisattva ideal emphasized in Mahayana Buddhism. The bodhisattva is a spiritually-advanced person wholly devoted to responding to the needs of all beings, not just those of the sangha. A bodhisattva's entire life is dana, not as a way to accumulate merit but because of the bodhisattva's insight that he or she is not separate from others. According to the usual understanding, a bodhisattva does not follow the eightfold path but a slightly different version that emphasizes perfecting six virtues: dana generosity, sila morality, ksanti patience, virya vigor, dhyana meditation and prajna wisdom. The most important virtue is believed to be dana, since that implies all the others.
Of course, such a religious model is not easily institutionalized. Yet that is not the main point. Today dana cannot substitute for social justice, but there is also no substitute for the social practice of dana as a fundamental aspect of any healthy society. When those who have much feel no responsibility for those who have noting, a social crisis is inevitable.
A Buddhist View of Globalization
The above reflections on dana and merit-making bring us to the larger issue of a Buddhist perspective on the economic globalization. We have already noticed that traditional Buddhist teachings do not include a developed social theory but do have many important social implications. Those implications can be developed to analyze and understand the new world order.
The first thing to be noticed is also perhaps the most important: as the parable of the unwise king shows, Buddhism does not separate economic issues from ethical or spiritual ones. The notion that economics is a "social science" discovering and applying impersonal economic laws obscures two important truths. First, who gets what, and who does not, always has moral dimensions, so production and distribution of economic goods and services should not be left only to the supposedly objective rules of the marketplace. If some people have much more than they need, and others have much less, some sort of redistribution is necessary. Dana is the traditional Buddhist way of redistributing.
The second important truth is that no economic system is value-free; every system of production and consumption encourages the development of certain values and discourages others. As Phra Payutto, Thailand's most distinguished scholar-monk, puts it:
It may be asked how it is possible for economics to be free of values when, in fact, it is rooted in the human mind. The economic process begins with want, continues with choice, and ends with satisfaction, all of which are functions of the mind. Abstract values are thus the beginning, the middle and the end of economics, and so it is impossible for economics to be value-free. Yet as it stands, many economists avoid any consideration of values, ethics, or mental qualities, despite the fact that these will always have a bearing on economic concerns.6
This clarifies the basic Buddhist approach. When we evaluate an economic system, we should consider not only how efficiently it produces and distributes goods, but also its effects on human values, and through them its larger social effects. The collective values that it encourages should be consistent with the individual Buddhist values that reduce our dukkha. The crucial issue is whether our economic system is conducive to the ethical and spiritual development of its members, because individual and social values cannot be delinked.
Much of the philosophical reflection on economics has focused on questions about human nature. Those who defend market capitalism argue that its emphasis on competition and personal gain is grounded in the fact that humans are fundamentally self-centered and self-interested. Critics of capitalism argue that our basic nature is more cooperative and generous that is, we are naturally more selfless.
Buddhism avoids that debate by taking a different approach. The Buddha emphasized that we all have both unwholesome and unwholesome traits (kusala/akusalamula). The important issue is the practical matter of how to reduce our unwholesome characteristics and develop the more wholesome ones. This process is symbolized by the lotus flower. Although rooted in the mud and muck at the bottom of a pond, the lotus grows upwards to bloom on the surface, thus representing our potential to purify ourselves.
What are our unwholesome characteristics? They are usually summarized as the "three poisons" or three roots of evil: lobha greed, dosa ill-will and moha delusion.7 The goal of the Buddhist way of life is to eliminate these roots by transforming them into their positive counterparts: greed into generosity (dana), ill-will into loving-kindness (metta), and delusion into wisdom (prajna). If collective economic values should not be separated from personal moral values, the important issue becomes: which traits does our globalizing economic system encourage?
Greed is an unpopular word both in corporate boardrooms and in economic theory. Economists talk about demand, but their concern to be objective and value-neutral does not allow them to evaluate different types of demand. From a Buddhist perspective, however, our capitalist system promotes and even requires greed in two ways. The "engine" of the economic process is the desire for continual profits, and in order to keep making those profits people must keep wanting to consume more.
Harnessing this type of motivation has been extraordinarily successful depending, of course, on your definition of success. According to the Worldwatch Institute, more goods and services were consumed in the forty years between 1950 and 1990 (measured in constant dollars) than by all the previous generations in human history.8 This binge did not occur by itself; it took a lot of encouragement. According to the United Nations Human Development Report for 1999, the world spent at least $435 billion the previous year for advertising, plus well over $100 billion for public relations and marketing. The result is 270 million "global teens" who now inhabit a single pop-culture world, consuming the same designer clothes, music, and soft drinks.
While this growth has given us opportunities that our grandparents never dreamed of, we have also become more sensitive to the negative consequences: its staggering ecological impact, and the worsening mal-distribution of this wealth. A child in the developed countries consumes and pollutes 30 to 50 times as much as a poor one in an undeveloped country, according to the same UNHDR. Today 1.2 billion people survive on less than a dollar a day, and almost half the world's population live on less than two dollars a day. The 20% of people in the richest countries enjoy 86% of the world's consumption, the poorest 20% only 1.3% -- a gap that globalization is increasing, not decreasing.
Clearly something is very wrong with this new world order. But these grim facts about "their" dukkha should not keep us from noticing the consequences for "our own" dukkha. The problem is not merely how to share the wealth. How much does our economic system promote individual dukkha by encouraging us to be greedy? And how much does our pooled greed promote collective dukkha, by contributing to the recurrent social crises now afflicting almost all the "developed" nations?
From a Buddhist perspective, the fundamental problem with consumerism is the delusion that genuine happiness can be found this way. If insatiable desires (tanha) are the source of the frustration (dukkha) that we experience in our daily lives, then such consumption, which distracts us and intoxicates us, is not the solution to our unhappiness but one of its main symptoms. That brings us to the final irony of this addiction to consumption: also according to the 1999 UNHDR, the percentage of Americans who considered themselves happy peaked in 1957, despite the fact that consumption per person has more than doubled since then. At the same time, studies of U.S. households have found that between 1986 and 1994 the amount of money people think they need to live happily has doubled! That seems paradoxical, but it is not difficult to explain: when we define ourselves as consumers, we can never have enough. For reasons we never quite understand, consumerism never really gives us what we want from it; it works by keeping us thinking that the next thing we buy will satisfy us.
Higher incomes have certainly enabled many people to become more generous, but this has not been their main effect, because capitalism is based upon a very different principle: that capital should be used to create more capital. Rather than redistributing our wealth, we prefer to invest that wealth as a means to accumulate more and spend more, regardless of whether or not we need more. In fact, the question of whether or not we really need more has become rather quaint; you can never be too rich.
This way of thinking has become natural for us, but it is uncommon in societies where advertising has not yet conditioned people into believing that happiness is something you purchase. International development agencies have been slow to realize what anthropologists have long understood: in traditional cultures, income is not the primary criterion of well-being. Sometimes it is not even a major one, as Delia Paul discovered in Zambia:
One of the things we found in the village which surprised us was people's idea of well-being and how that related to having money. We talked to a family, asking them to rank everybody in the village from the richest to the poorest and asking them why they would rank somebody as being less well off, and someone as poor. And we found that in the analysis money meant very little to the people. The person who was ranked as poorest in the village was a man who was probably the only person who was receiving a salary.9
His review of the literature led Robert Chambers to conclude: "Income, the reductionist criterion of normal economists, has never, in my experience or in the evidence I have been able to review, been given explicit primacy."10
To assume that we in the "developed" world know something about worldly well-being which such people do not looks increasingly like a form of cultural imperialism. Our obsession with economic growth seems natural to us because we have forgotten the historicity of the "needs" we now take for granted, and therefore what for Buddhism is an essential human attribute if we are to be happy: the importance of self-limitation, which requires some degree of non-attachment. Until they are seduced by the globalizing dream of a technological cornucopia, it does not occur to traditionally "poor" people to become fixated on fantasies about all the things they might have. Their ends are an expression of the means available to them. We project our own values when we assume that they must be unhappy, and that the only way to become happy is to start on the treadmill of a lifestyle increasingly preoccupied with consumption.
All this is expressed better in a Tibetan Buddhist analogy. The world is full of thorns and sharp stones (and now broken glass too). What should we do about this? One solution is to pave over the entire earth, but a simpler alternative is to wear shoes. "Paving the whole planet" is a good metaphor for how our collective technological and economic project is attempting to make us happy. Without the wisdom of self-limitation, we will not be satisfied even when we have used up all the earth's resources. The other solution is for our minds to learn how to "wear shoes," so that our collective ends become an expression of the renewable means that the biosphere provides.
Why do we assume that "income/consumption poverty" must be dukkha? That brings us to the heart of the matter. For us, material wealth has become increasingly important because of our eroding faith in any other possibility of salvation - for example, in heaven with God, or the secular heaven of a worldly utopia, or even (when we despair about the ecological crisis) the future progress of humankind. Increasing our "standard of living" has become so compulsive for us because it serves as a substitute for traditional religious values.
If so, our evangelical efforts to economically "develop" other societies, which cherish their own spiritual values and community traditions, may be viewed as a contemporary form of religious imperialism, a new kind of mission to convert the heathen. . . . Despite their benighted violence, do "Third World terrorists" understand this aspect of globalization better than we do?
Ill-will. Conventional economic theory assumes that resources are limited but our desires are infinitely expandable. Without self-limitation, this becomes a formula for strife. As we know, desire frustrated is a major cause perhaps the major cause -- of ill will. The Buddha warned against negative feelings such as envy (issa) and avarice (macchariya).11 Issa becomes intense when certain possessions are enjoyed by one section of society while another section does not have the opportunity to acquire them. Macchariya is the selfish enjoyment of goods while greedily guarding them from others. A society in which these psychological tendencies predominate may be materially wealthy but it is spiritually poor.
The most important point, from a Buddhist point of view, is that our economic emphasis on competition and individual gain my benefit is your loss encourages the development of ill will rather than loving-kindness. A society where people do not feel that they benefit from sharing with each other is a society that has already begun to break down.
Delusion. For its proponents, the globalization of market capitalism is a victory for "free trade" over the inefficiencies of protectionism and special interests. Free trade seems to realize in the economic sphere the supreme value that we place on freedom. It optimizes access to resources and markets. What could be wrong with that?
Quite a bit, if we view "free trade" from the rather different perspective provided by Buddhism. Such a different viewpoint helps us to see presuppositions usually taken for granted. The Buddhist critique of a value-free economics suggests that globalizing capitalism is neither natural (as economists, eager to be scientific, would have us believe) nor inevitable; despite its success, it is only one historically-conditioned way of understanding and reorganizing the world.
The critical stage in the development of market capitalism occurred during the industrial revolution (1750 1850 in England), when new technologies led to the "liberation" of a critical mass of land, labor, and capital. They became understood in a new way, as commodities to be bought and sold. The world had to be converted into exchangeable "resources" in order for market forces to interact freely and productively. There was nothing inevitable about this. In fact, it was strongly resisted by most people at the time, and was successfully implemented only because of strong government support for it.
For those who had capital to invest, the industrial revolution was often very profitable, but for most people industrial commodification seems to have been experienced as a tragedy. The earth (our mother as well as our home) became commodified into a collection of resources to be exploited. Human life became commodified into labor, or work time, also priced according to supply and demand. Family patrimony, the cherished inheritance preserved for one's descendants, became commodified into capital for investment, a new source of income for an entrepreneurial few. All three became means which the new economy used to generate more capital.
From a religious perspective, an alternative way to describe this process is that the world and its beings (including us) became de-sacralized. When things become treated as commodities they lose their spiritual dimension. Today we see biotechnology doing this to the genetic code of life; soon our awe at the mysteries of reproduction will be replaced by the ultimate shopping experience . The developed world is now largely de-sacralized, but this social and economic transformation is far from finished. That is why the IMF and the World Trade Organization have become so important. Their role is to ensure that nothing stands in the way of converting the rest of the earth -- the "undeveloped world," to use our revealing term for it -- into resources and markets.
This commodified understanding presupposes a sharp duality between humans and the rest of the earth. All value is created by our goals and desires; the rest of the world has no meaning or value except when it serves our purposes. This now seems quite natural to us, because we have been conditioned to think and live this way. For Buddhism, however, such a dualistic understanding is delusive. There are different accounts of what Buddha experienced when he became enlightened, but they agree that he realized the nondual interdependence of things. The world is a web; nothing has any reality of its own apart from that web, because everything is dependent on everything else, including us. The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has expressed this well:
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow, and without trees we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. . . .
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the tree cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger's father and mother are in it too. . . .
You cannot point out one thing that is not here -- time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. . . . As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.12
This interdependence challenges our usual sense of separation from the world. The feeling that I am "in here," behind my eyes, and the world is "out there," is at the root of our dukkha, for it alienates us from the world we are "in." The Buddhist path works by helping us to realize our interdependence and nonduality with the world, and to live in accordance with that. This path is incompatible with a consumerist way of understanding that commodifies the earth and thus reinforces our dualistic sense of separation from it and other people.
Conclusion
Buddhism began with the enlightenment of Shakyamuni Buddha. His "awakening" (the literal meaning of "Buddha") shows us the possibility of a different way of life, based on a different way of understanding the relationship between ourselves and the world. From a materialistic perspective, including the "social science" of economics, such religious responses are superstitious and escapist. From a Buddhist perspective, however, economic growth and consumerism are unsatisfactory alternatives because they evade the basic problem of life by distracting us with symbolic substitutes such as money, status, and power. Similar critiques of idolatry are found in all the great religions, and rampant economic globalization makes that message all the more important today.13
NOTES
1. As it spread and adapted to different cultures, Buddhism has changed so much that it is difficult to generalize about its teachings. In this short essay, however, there is no space to distinguish between the different Buddhist traditions. My focus is on the teachings of Shakyamuni as preserved in the Theravada Buddhism of south and southeast Asia. The Pali sutras, which are believed to record his original teachings, provide a foundation generally accepted by all Buddhist traditions. The Nikayas cited in my text are an important part of those teachings. The Dhammapada is a very popular collection of Buddhist aphorisms taken from the Pali canon. In a few places I refer to the teachings of Mahayana Buddhism, which today are found predominantly north of the Himalayas.
2. Russell F. Sizemore and Donald K. Swearer, "Introduction" to Sizemore and Swearer, eds., Ethics, Wealth and Salvation: A Study in Buddhist Social Ethics (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina, 1990), p. 2.
3. For an example of the latter, see the story of the poor peasant in Digha Nikaya III 189-192.
4. See, for example, Anguttara Nikaya IV 285 and II 67-68, Samyutta Nikaya I 90
5. In The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digha Nikaya, trans. Maurice Walshe (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995), pp. 396-405
6. P. A. Payutto, Buddhist Economics: A Middle Way for the Market Place, trans. Dhammavijaya and Bruce Evans, second ed. (Bangkok: Buddhadhamma Foundation, 1994), p. 27.
7. The familiar Tibetan Buddhist mandala known as the "Wheel of Life" symbolizes the three poisons as a cock (greed), a snake (ill-will) and a pig (delusion), joined together at the center or axle of the wheel, which as a whole represents samsara, this world of dukkha.
8. Alan Durning, How Much Is Enough? (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 38.
9. Quoted in Robert Chambers, Whose Reality Counts? (London: Intermediate Technology, 1997), p. 179. This book has the wittiest endnotes I have ever read!
10. Whose Reality Counts? p. 178.
11. See, for example, Majjhima Nikaya I 281-283, II 247, and III 204.
12. Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of Understanding (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1988), pp. 3-5.
13. I am grateful to Jon Watts for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chambers, Robert. Whose Reality Counts? (London: Intermediate Technology, 1997).
Durning, Alan. How Much Is Enough? (New York: Norton, 1992).
Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Heart of Understanding (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1988).
The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digha Nikaya,, trans. Maurice Walshe (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995).
Payutto, P. A. Buddhist Economics: A Middle Way for the Market Place, trans. Dhammavijaya and Bruce Evans, second ed. (Bangkok: Buddhadhamma Foundation, 1994).
Sizemore, Russell F. and Donald K. Swearer, eds., Ethics, Wealth and Salvation: A Study in Buddhist Social Ethics (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina, 1990).
SUGGESTED FURTHER READINGS
Buddhist Peace Fellowship webpage at <>
David R. Loy, "The Religion of the Market" in Visions of a New Earth: Religious Perspectives on Population, Consumption and Ecology, edited by Harold Coward and Dan Maguire (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1999.
P. A. Payutto, Buddhist Economics: A Middle Way for the Market Place, translated by Dhammavijaya and Bruce Evans, second ed. (Bangkok: Buddhadhamma Foundation, 1994).
Russell F. Sizemore and Donald K. Swearer, eds., Ethics, Wealth and Salvation: A Study in Buddhist Social Ethics (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina, 1990).
E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered (New York: Harper, 1975).
David Loy
Faculty of International Studies
Bunkyo University
JAPAN
E-mail: loy@shonan.bunkyo.ac.jp
