Buddhism without
Hinduism
It is significant
that the context of the Hakone discussions was the rapidly
spreading culture of 'a modernising invasive industrialism'
based on capitalist economics. Many of the delegates were no doubt
pondering what a modern Buddha would have to say about this and
were searching for a practice more suitable for a scientific and
democratic society. Indeed, some Buddhist scholars have set
aside such crucial elements of traditional Buddhism as rebirth and
karma. Whilst not denying that the founder taught these
doctrines, they attribute them to the Hindu world in which the
Buddha had grown up arguing that they aren't necessary to Buddha's
genius as expressed in the
"four noble
truths." Their aim
therefore is to get at the core of Buddhist practice, free of
"accretions" imposed by various Asian traditions. Of course, most
westerners are still attracted to Buddhism by the rich Baroque
trappings of the Tibetans, the subtle Theravada traditions of
southeast Asia or the spare paradoxes in Zen
cultures.
From a Buddhist
perspective, an economic system that sustains itself by
stoking
desire and reinforcing
the notion that acquiring things will not make us happier. We
aquire entertaining consumer products that soon end up in
landfills, but we fail to provide for some basic human needs, like
health care for everyone.
Perhaps the economic lessons to be learned from
Buddhism relate to the interactions between capitalism and
consumerism, and their financial basis in our modern
societies. To a Buddhist these are indicators of greed in our
practices of year by year increases in consumption and lack of
self-discipline in our accumulation of
wealth. Something more fundamental
needs to be changed, and it is not merely the ruling party or an
economic system. What needs to be changed is the perspective of
happiness. Buddha's happiness can be attained by the virtue of
right livelihood, including righteous means of earning wealth,
which includes the ethics and wisdom of sharing and giving. He
pointed out more than 2500 years ago that satisfying the boundless
desires cannot attain true happiness. Therefore, economic
development must consider and include reduction of inequalities of
poverty and wealth inequality first, before true economic growth
can prevail for all those in society.
E. F.
Schumacher
In the early 1950s
E. F. Schumacher became interested in Asian philosophies. He was
influenced by Mohandas Ghandi and G.I. Gurdjieff, and also by his
friend, the Buddhist writer Edward Conze. In 1955 Schumacher went
to Burma to work as an economic consultant. While he was there, he
spent weekends in a Buddhist monastery learning to meditate. The
meditation, he said, gave him more mental clarity than he had ever
had before. While in Burma he wrote a paper called "Economics
in a Buddhist Country" in which he argued that economics does not
stand on its own feet, but instead "is derived from a view of the
meaning and purpose of life -- whether the economist himself knows
this or not." In this paper, he wrote that a Buddhist approach to
economics would be based on two principles:
-
The ideal is sufficiency, not surfeit.
"Economic 'progress' is good only to the point of sufficiency,
beyond that, it is evil, destructive,
uneconomic."
-
A Buddhist economy distinguishes
between renewable and non-renewable resources. A civilization built
on renewable resources is superior to one built on non-renewable
resources.
Schumacher wrote
that western economics measures "standard of living" by
"consumption" and assumes a person who consumes more is better off
than one who consumes less. He also discusses the fact that
employers consider their workers to be "cost" to be reduced as much
as possible, and that modern manufacturing uses production
processes that require little skill. And he pointed to discussions
among economic theories about whether full employment "pays," or
whether some amount of unemployment might be better "for the
economy."
"From a Buddhist
point of view," Schumacher wrote, "this is standing the truth on
its head by considering goods as more important than people and
consumption as more important than creative activity. It means
shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that
is, from the human to the subhuman, a surrender to the forces of
evil."
In short, Schumacher
argued that an economy should exist to serve the needs of people.
But in a "materialist" economy, people exist to serve the
economy.
He also wrote that
labour should be about more than production. Work has psychological
and spiritual value also (see "
Right
Livelihood"), and these
should be respected.
Buddhist
refuges
James E. Burroughs
in a 2002 paper in the Journal of Consumer
Research (Vol. 29, No. 3), concludes that the unhappiest
materialists are those whose materialistic and higher-order values
are most conflicted. The team first gauged people's levels of
stress, materialistic values and prosocial values in the domains of
family, religion and community--in keeping with the theory that
some values unavoidably conflict with one another. Then in an
experimental study, they ascertained the degree of conflict people
felt when making a decision between the two value
domains.
The unhappiest
people were those with the most conflict--those who reported high
prosocial and high materialistic values, says
Burroughs. The other three groups--those low in materialism and
high in prosocial values, those low in prosocial values and high in
materialism, and those lukewarm in both arenas--reported similar,
but lower levels of life stress.
Taken together,
social surveys indicate that when facing a stressful event,
materialistic people will experience high level of stress and will
try to cope with it, unsuccessfully, using maladaptive consumption
behaviors which are harmful by nature. In other words, materialism
makes bad situations even worse!
These results may
extend to a wide variety of contexts, as post-traumatic stress
arises from a host of events such as car accidents, criminal
attacks and natural disasters. Future research should address the
relationship between stress and materialism in different
contexts.
Buddha offers three
refuges from the life stress, which has been described as the dark
side of consumerism. These refuges are the Three Jewels, also
called the Three Treasures; the Buddha, the Dharma, and the
Sangha. The formal ceremony of Ti Samana Gamana (Pali),
or "taking the three refuges," is performed in nearly all schools
of Buddhism. However, anyone who sincerely wants to follow the
Buddha's path may begin that commitment by reciting these
lines:
I take refuge in the
Buddha.
I take refuge in the
Dharma.
I take refuge in the
Sangha
The English word
refuge refers to a place of shelter and protection. In the context
of life stress the Three Jewels offer shelter from feeling
distressed and broken, from pain and suffering, from the fear of
death.
The meaning of
taking refuge in the Three Jewels is explained somewhat differently
by the various schools of Buddhism. Taking the refuges will not
summon supernatural spirits to come and save you. The power of the
vow comes from your own sincerity and commitment. Robert Thurman, a
Tibetan Buddhist and Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at
Columbia University, said of the Three Jewels,
"Remember that
awakening, freedom from suffering, salvation, if you will,
liberation, omniscience, buddhahood, all come from your own
understanding, your insight into your own reality. It cannot come
just from the blessing of another, from some magical empowerment,
from some sort of secret gimmick, or from membership in a
group."
Ch'an Master
Sheno-Yen said. "The genuine Three Jewels, in essence, are none
other than the enlightened Buddha nature that is already inside
you."
"Taking refuge in
the Buddha, we learn to transform anger into compassion; taking
refuge in the Dharma, we learn to transform delusion into wisdom;
taking refuge in the Sangha, we learn to transform desire into
generosity." (Red Pine, The Heart Sutra: The Womb of Buddhas, p.
132)
