Paper given at the conference "Western Buddhism: Engaged Buddhism?" by David Loy on 30-Sep-2011, Bristol UK.
Within Western Buddhism the importance of social engagement is now generally accepted; certainly many Buddhist individuals and groups are seriously involved in activities such as prison dharma, raising money for impoverished people, and so forth. But almost all such activities involve what might be called service, which usually means helping people in a very direct way: for example, when you meet homeless people you help provide a shelter or food for them to eat. However, I believe that truly engaged Buddhism requires a fuller spectrum of activities: as important as it is, service is only one aspect, for on the other end is what could be called structural concern to address institutional dukkha ‘suffering.’
In the United States, for example, we not only need to help homeless people, we need to ask: why is the number of homeless people increasing so quickly? And that brings us to political issues. This is a dimension where Buddhism so far has not been much involved, where Buddhist ideas are not yet very developed. In other words, we need to start to think about the relationship between personal transformation -- which is what Buddhism has traditionally been involved in -- and structural or institutional transformation.
Such concerns are part of the general dialogue today between Buddhism and modernity, which is so important, I believe, because each of them has so much to learn from each other – because each of them actually needs the other, as I will try to show. Therefore, it is not a matter of simply replacing a Western viewpoint or paradigm with a Buddhist one. Rather, it is important to understand how each of them can cast light upon the other.
As an example, or as a way to make this point, let me begin with the different role of morality or ethics within the Western tradition and within the Buddhist tradition, because they are quite different. Here I am referring not so much to the content of morality - although there are some differences there as well - as to the context of morality. In the Abrahamic tradition (Abrahamic meaning Judaism, Christianity, Islam) "do not kill" means not to kill other human beings (and often it has been understood more restrictively: not to kill members of your own tribe or group). In the Buddhist tradition, however, as in India generally, not to kill applies not only to human beings but to all sentient beings, (literally, "breathing beings"). So there are significant differences in the content of moral rules. But what I want to emphasise is the different role that morality plays within the Abrahamic traditions, and that it still plays in the modern West, which is quite illuminating.
We often refer to the Abrahamic traditions as "ethical monotheism", monotheism meaning of course belief in one god. But what I want to stress is the ethical, because for the Abrahamic traditions religion is primarily an ethical responsibility: we are challenged to be good. In other words, the fundamental duality for those religions is the duality between good and evil, between doing what God wants us to and doing what God forbids us from doing. We can say the ethical is God’s, the divine’s, main way of relating to us. For example, Genesis accounts for the beginning of human civilisation or human history with an act of disobedience. We disobey God. He tells us to do something and we do not do it. Or he tells us not to do something and we do it. Not only Genesis as later there is the great flood, and Noah’s ark, because once again humans beings are not doing what God wants us to do. Later still there are the ten commandments, the Decalogue: God gives Moses the ten commandments, telling us again what to do and (mostly) what not to do.
Although this is placed in the Abrahamic traditions in a fundamental way it describes the way we modern Westerners still mostly identify with this duality between good and evil. Pick up the most popular books, almost any mystery novel, crime novel, watch a popular movie or most TV series and it is easy to see how even those of us who do not believe in an Abrahamic God remain fascinated by the struggle between good and evil. There is one important implication of this duality, as Buddhism emphasises, and that is that the two opposed poles are actually interdependent i.e. in order for us to be good we must be fighting against the evil. That is why it is easy to identify the good guys: they are fighting against the bad guys.
We not only are fascinated by this duality, but we continue to re-enact it over and over again. For Americans the classic example, unfortunately, is the "war on terror". From this perspective, what is the difference between George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden? Basically they were both fighting the same Holy War. Each of them believes that he is leading the good guys fighting against the evil guys and that, being good, they have a responsibility to struggle against that evil. It is really the same war that they are fighting; it is just that they are mirror images of each other: they reverse the understanding of what is good and what is evil.
There are many problems that the war on terror has led too, for example, so many innocent people tortured and killed, which is why many more people hate the U.S. now than ten years ago. This points to a tragic paradox that is built into this worldview: that one of the main causes of evil in our world has been our attempts to destroy evil. After all, what was Hitler trying to do? He was trying to get rid of the evil, impure elements of society, such as Jews and homosexuals. What was Stalin trying to do by eliminating kulaks in the Soviet Union? What was Mao Tse-tung trying to do by getting rid of the landlords in China, or the Khmer Rouge trying to do in Cambodia? Each of them was preoccupied with the duality between what is good and what is evil. Even though all of them were "secular", they were still caught up in the same fundamental - I would call it sacred or sacralised – duality, where they feel they have this responsibility to promote the good by attacking and destroying the evil elements in society.
This duality between good and evil is not found in the same way in the Buddhist tradition. Certainly, there is morality in Buddhism and if you decide to become a Buddhist officially, a part of the ceremony usually involves agreeing to follow the five precepts (not to kill living beings, not to steal, to avoid improper sexual behaviour, to avoid lying and other improper language, to avoid alcohol or drugs that cloud the mind). However, if we think of these precepts in an Abrahamic way we misunderstand them, because in Buddhism there is no God who tells us we must behave in this way. The real point of the precepts is that, if we live according to them, the quality of our life will change. Our way of experiencing ourselves and experiencing other people, and the way they to relate to us, will change naturally.
In other words, the precepts are not commandments but exercises in mindfulness, to train ourselves in a certain way. Yet – this is the main point – ultimately in Buddhism the precepts are not the most important thing, because for Buddhism the fundamental duality is not between good and evil but between ignorance or delusion on the one side and wisdom or awakening on the other. For example, in the Brahmajala Sutta – one of the most important Buddhist suttas, in fact the very first sutta of the Digha Nikaya – the Buddha distinguishes sharply between what he calls "trifling things, matters of little value, mere morality" and "other things profound, difficult to realise, comprehensible only to the wise" that he has realised.
So the primary challenge we are faced with is not ethical but in the broad sense, cognitive. For Buddhism the ultimate goal is to wake up. That is the meaning of the word Buddha: "Buddha" literally is a title, not a name, the Buddha means "the awake", "the awakened one". We are not yet awake, we are in effect dreaming, and we are challenged to wake up. Then when we do, morality in principle disappears in the sense that we no longer need to try to follow an external moral code. Instead, insofar as we really wake up and realise our nonduality with other people, we naturally want to behave in a way that does not violate the precepts, because we have realised something about the true nature of the world (including ourselves), so that we no longer are inclined to abuse others, to break the precepts.
Can you see the difference between the two paradigms? On the one hand the good / evil one which is fundamentally ethical - in the Abrahamic one rarely gets beyond it - and on the other side the Buddhist one which incorporates ethics, yes, but fundamentally the Middle Way path is motivated by the duality between ignorance and awakening, or delusion versus wisdom.
Does that mean we have two incompatible paradigms, or is it the case - as I have suggested before - that the relationship between them is complementary? I will try to demonstrate that these two paradigms need each other by talking about our economic situation.
Let me, however, first say some more about the Abrahamic perspective. Although I raised some problems with the duality between good and evil, there is nonetheless something very important that has developed out of that aspect of the Abrahamic tradition: the emphasis on social justice, which – please note -- is not a Buddhist concept. Social justice is something that we in the West rightfully cherish, and we can trace it back in part to the Hebrew prophets. Prophets such as Isaiah were challenging the Hebrew rulers for not doing what they should. They criticised the kings because they were not helping the orphans or the poor; instead they were taking advantage of such people, misusing them. So the prophets said again and again: God will punish you for doing this!
The history of the West combines this concern for social justice with the Greek invention of democracy, based on the realisation that we can restructure society, that we can in fact change society if it is not the way we want it to be. This was a profound insight that as far as I know was not realised prior to the Greek distinction between physis (the natural world) and nomos (social convention, which can be changed). When we combine the rudimentary beginnings of democracy that the Greeks offered with the Abrahamic preoccupation with social justice, we arrive at the origins of the modern West’s concern for social justice, for transforming society in order to make it a more just society. In the West we have this great tradition of revolution, of social progress, of reform movements, of new laws. If society is not working well enough, we can and often have transformed it.
The historical difficulty with this, however - as we can see quite clearly in the 20th century - is that often the revolutionaries who take over, the people who overthrow bad rulers, become just as bad themselves. This seems to be a perpetual problem. The revolutionaries I cited before, such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, the Khmer Rouge - they are fine examples, but there are lots of others from all over the political spectrum. Think of the reign of terror that followed the French revolution, and what happened in Stalin’s USSR: how often with a revolution the result is that one gang of thugs is replaced by another gang of thugs.
Why? Is it that the emphasis upon social transformation alone is likely to fail, or be incomplete, if there is not also realisation that we also have to work on our own personal transformation (which of course is what Buddhism has always traditionally emphasised)? If, for example, I am a revolutionary who takes over a country but if I have not worked on myself - if I have not addressed my own greed, my own ill will, my own ego-delusions – then once I am in power it is going to be difficult to avoid taking advantage of the situation. It will be difficult to avoid seeing people who oppose me as enemies to be defeated simply because they have different ideas. Insofar as I still have a sense of duality, that I am separate from other people, then there is going to be a tendency to understand the solution to social problems as imposing my will, my ideas, on society. It is here that where things tend to break down.
It seems that we can never create a social structure so good that it takes away all responsibility for people to be good. We can never create a social structure, in Buddhist terms, where there is no longer any need for people to transform themselves. Here you begin to see my basic argument, how the emphasis on social transformation needs personal transformation, because otherwise the lack of personal transformation tends to subvert the social and structural changes that are needed. But it works the other way around as well. As I said, traditional Buddhism does not emphasise social justice; in fact there is really nothing very comparable to the Abrahamic conception. Instead, Buddhism talks about "dukkha", which is the most important term in Buddhism. "Dukkha" is the word translated in English as "suffering,". This translation that does not work very well unless you understand it in the broadest possible sense, especially the connection between suffering and the sense of a separate self, to which I will refer to latter. The Buddha emphasised that the only thing he had to teach was dukkha and how to end it. So it becomes very important to ask within the Buddhist tradition: did the Buddha mean only our own individual suffering or did the Buddha himself perhaps have a wider social vision? Did he perhaps intend to provide a new paradigm, a new way of life that might transform a whole civilisation?
This is a very interesting question because some Buddhist scholars believe the Buddha did not simply want to start a new religion. Certainly, he did not have our contemporary concept of what a religion is, which developed out of the Protestant Reformation. For us, the religious sphere is largely separate from the economic sphere, the political sphere, the cultural sphere of life. We should be careful not to project this understanding of religion anachronistically back upon the Buddha’s mission. But regardless of what the Buddha intended to do, what happened quite quickly is that the sangha settled down into monasteries and Buddhism as an institution became associated with the state – that is, the ruling class. This was because in order for Buddhism to survive and thrive in Asian societies, it had to have support from the kings and emperors. If rulers did not like what Buddhism was doing, they could squash the Buddhist monasteries - and sometimes that is what happened. Buddhism had to come to an accommodation with the state with none of these Asian Buddhist polities being democratic. This meant that the possibilities for developing the Buddhist message about dukkha were always limited. If Buddhist monks were not careful, if they criticised the kings, they could get into a lot of trouble very quickly. What happened instead is that Buddhism tended to support rulers, often using the concept of karma. The way karma was understood in many cases was that a king must have very good karma from his past lifetimes and if someone was born very poor or with some physical or mental disability, they must have very bad karma from the past. Of course worst of all was if you were born a woman - since all the Buddhist societies in Asia were very patriarchal too. If you were born a woman, the best you could hope for usually was to behave yourself: do what men say and in a future lifetime, you might be reborn as a man.
When we read the earliest texts – the Pali Canon – it is clear that the Buddha himself did not think this way about karma or the status of women, but nevertheless that is the way Buddhist societies developed in Asia. The result was that within Asia the kind of dukkha "suffering" that Buddhism could address was very narrow. It could only talk about personal dukkha, individual transformation, and it could not address at all the structurally-created dukkha that can be resolved only with institutional transformation.
In that way, Buddhism survived and developed its wonderful collection of contemplative practices to help us transform ourselves. However, it had almost no political thrust, for it could not challenge the authorities. Therefore, the emphasis is always on the spiritual development of the individual. But then when you look at the West, as I was indicating earlier, we have just the opposite. Of course, this is a simplified contrast, for there are certainly exceptions, but in general, in the Western tradition the emphasis has been on social transformation without much emphasis on the need for transforming ourselves in the ways that occur when we meditate. It is only in the past generation or two - thanks to globalisation, digital communications, and so forth - that these two different worldviews confront each other and can supplement each other.
To sum up, the whole thrust of the western tradition on social justice has often been limited because we have not had enough emphasis on personal transformation. While on the other side, there is Buddhism, with its wonderful insights and practices to help us overcome our own dukkha, but without the opportunity to pursue deep questions about institutionalised dukkha, the kind of structural suffering that is created by oppressive social systems.
Another way to say it would be to talk about freedom. The emphasis of the Western tradition has been on institutional freedom - for example, the Bill of Rights attached to the American constitution. One could argue that the main development of the West has been largely this concern for social, economic, political freedom, although in the 20th century we have also pursued psychological freedom (psychotherapy for neuroses, for example). On the Buddhist side, the primary emphasis has been on psychological and spiritual freedom, and today we can see the limitations on both of these freedoms: that if either of those is to be more fully realised we have to bring them together.
Gary Snyder, the American poet and essayist, summarised this very nicely about fifty years ago: "The mercy of the west has been social revolution. The mercy of the east has been insight into the basic self, the emptiness, the voidness of the self. We need both."
The rest of this essay will offer a Buddhist perspective on our global economic situation, as an example of how these two great paradigms can come together and supplement each other.
Until the modern era, about 400 years ago, economics was understood to be part of social philosophy, and in principle, (if not always in practice), economic relations were subordinate to religious authority. For example, in the Middle Ages "usury" - what we now call "interest" - was prohibited by the church because it was considered sinful. In the modern era, economics has become something quite different: as an academic profession, it has been concerned to follow the example of the hard sciences like physics and chemistry and become a "social science". Ultimately, it would like to discover the fundamental laws of economic exchange and development, ideally laws similar to Newton’s laws of motion. What this has meant, in practice, is that such a focus tends to rationalise or justify the increasing problems that result from the kind of economic system – corporate consumer capitalism -- that we have today, especially the rising gap between rich and poor. In the United States, the gap between rich and poor is the greatest it has been since before the great depression of the 1930s, before Roosevelt’s New Deal and the social security system we have today. I read recently that in the United States now the top 1 % of the population have more assets than the bottom 90% of the population. If, however, this is happening in accord with some basic laws of economic science, we may not like it and may try to control it in some way, but fundamentally, this is going to be the tendency... By thinking in this way the growing gap between rich and poor is "naturalised", with the implication that it should be accepted, despite all the problems that arise from that growing split.
In opposition to such developments, of course, many movements for social and economic justice challenge this kind of economic system. As I write this, the "Occupy Wall Street" movement is gaining momentum, not only in New York City but all across the country. Most obviously, what remains of the left in general has seen its own role as critiquing the system. The question now is whether there is anything new implied by the Buddhist worldview, which can give us a different insight into what is going on with our economic situation. From a "social justice" perspective, the problem is primarily ethical: the rich should not have so much that the poor suffer. What alternative perspective can the Buddhist emphasis on delusion versus awakening provide?
I will point out two related implications of Buddhist teachings. One of them focuses on the individual problem, or the personal predicament, one’s own relationship with economics, with money and consumerism; and the other implication focuses on the institutional or structural side. I will spend the rest of this piece trying to develop these two Buddhist perspectives on our economic situation.
The first one derives from what I believe to be the fundamental teaching of the Buddha: the connection between dukkha/suffering and "no-self". This brings in the second most important term (after dukkha) in Buddhism: "anatta", which means "no self" or "not self". This is the strange, counterintuitive claim that the self is not real, or substantial. What can that mean? Today contemporary psychology can help us understand what the Buddha was pointing at. What Buddhism is really critiquing or challenging as the fundamental delusion, the most problematical example of wrong thinking, is the sense of separation, the feeling that there is a "me" inside that is separate from the rest of "you" outside. It is the sense of duality, that I am here and you are there, that all of you and the rest of the world is outside me. In modern Western terms, we can say that the sense of self is a psychological and social construct; the feeling that there is a "me" somehow in here behind the eyes, inside the ears, looking out at you out of there. The "me" and "you" is something psychologically constructed. A newborn baby does not have this sense of separation, because it does not yet have what we call a sense of self. Normally we celebrate the development of such a sense of self, but for Buddhism the sense of separation is delusive and it causes a lot of suffering. The important question is: why?
I think we can understand why: if the sense of self is a construct, it does not have any reality of its own, any "self-existence", any grounding of its own. The feeling of self, the sense of self, is constructed out of habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, reacting, remembering, planning, intending and so forth. The way that these mental processes interact and cooperate creates the sense of a separate self. Insofar that we have the sense of a separate self, according to Buddhism, it will inevitably be uncomfortable because it is going to experience itself as ungrounded and inherently insecure. What happens as a result is that we often spend our whole lives pursuing some way to secure ourselves, misunderstanding what the problem is, thinking that there is something outside myself, in the world, which I do not have, and if only I can get enough of it, then everything will be okay, because I will be secure and comfortable.
One way to summarise this is to say that the sense of a separate self is always haunted or shadowed by a sense of lack, by the feeling that something is wrong with me, something is missing, something is not right. With the real problem - aggravated by our economic system, as we shall see - is that we misunderstand this problem and think that what we are lacking is something outside ourselves. For Buddhism it is very clear: what is really lacking is that we do not realise our true nature, we do not realise the ‘constructedness’ of the sense of self.
In day-to-day life, according to the kind of person that I am and the kind of society that I grew up in, I am going to be conditioned to understand my sense of lack in different ways. A thousand years ago, how would a European peasant understand his or her sense of lack? For most of them, it was very clear: according to the predominant religious understanding, their sense of lack was due to sin. The church told them that they had sinned (they also inherited original sin from what Adam and Eve had done) but the church also gave them a way to address the problem: if you go to mass, confess your sins and perform your penance, then you will feel better, and everything will eventually be okay.
So then, what happens nowadays, when many people do not believe in that type of religion anymore? Although we may think of ourselves as secular, we still have a sense of lack -- in fact, it is probably stronger now because our sense of separation, our sense of individuality is stronger. So how do we understand this sense of lack? It is from here that we begin to go back to economics, because the fundamental issue so often becomes - at least in the United States - that you do not have enough money, or you do not have enough consumer toys. We are conditioned to understand ourselves as consumers and to understand the problematic of our lives as getting more money and buying more things because this is what will finally fill up our sense of lack.
Notice how this Buddhist perspective on our "lack" offers a different approach to our economic situation: I am not talking right now in terms of good and evil, or class struggle. What I am saying is not reducible to that, for the fundamental issue here from a Buddhist perspective is delusion, because there is a lack of understanding about who we really are. Because we are not awakened, we misunderstand our situation and we project the problem outside ourselves and try to resolve it in ways that cannot work. Our society tends to condition us to understand that our problem is not enough money, or not enough consumption. But what does that mean, if that is not the real problem, if the real problem is one’s delusive sense of a self that is separate from other people and the rest of the world? Then no matter how much money I get, no matter how much I may consume, it can never be enough.
Therefore, there is an almost perfect connection between the fundamental sense of lack that Buddhism implies and the kind of economic system we have, which emphasises consumerism as the solution, concerned to condition us into believing that it is the very next thing we buy that will make us happy. Today, however, it is also becoming more and more apparent, not only to psychologists and sociologists but even to some economists, that what really makes human beings happy is not lots of money. Instead, it is being discovered that, once you have a certain minimum amount of income -- enough food and enough shelter at a basic level -- what usually determines how happy people are is the quality of their social relationships. At some level, I think we all know this, and certainly, the Buddha would not have been surprised. But the kind of globalising economic system we have now works just the other way. By exploiting our sense of lack, it perpetuates the problem in a way that it can never satisfy, because we need to be perpetually dissatisfied, always wanting more. However, it can of course consume all the earth’s resources while generating lots of profits for corporations in the process of taking advantage of this fundamental sense of lack. Needless to say, this is not a justification for our economic system, but rather points out what is so problematical about it.
This is the individual side of it. Now let us consider the institutional side. Here is the question: how does what I have just said about the personal problem connect with our economic institutions, the structural aspect? What is the relationship between them? The Buddha said little about evil per se, but he said a lot about what he called the three roots of evil: greed, ill-will and delusion. In fact, this was an important part of the Buddha’s spiritual revolution: his new way of understanding karma. Karma was something generally believed in the Buddha’s time but it was usually understood in a mechanical way: if you sacrifice, if you perform a ritual in the proper way, then you will get what you are sacrificing for. What the Buddha did - and it was a revolutionary new way of thinking - was emphasise that karma is really about motivations. If what we do is motivated by greed, ill-will and delusion, we end up creating problematical situations for ourselves as well as for others. If what we do is motivated by the opposite -- if my motivations are generosity, loving kindness and the wisdom that realises we are not separate from each other -- then I tend to co-create very different kinds of situations. I can relax, I can open up, and when other people feel this, they usually respond in similar ways. How you experience other people and respond to them – and how they respond to you – will be different.
According to this approach, we can understand karma not as something magical, but as implying something very profound about how we can change the quality of our lives, right here and right now. What the Buddha was really saying, I think, is that there is a very simple (although not necessarily easy!) way to transform the quality of your life: by transforming your motivations.
Today, however, we have not only much more powerful technologies, we also have much more powerful institutions, which assume a life of their own, with their own motivations, and we end up using our individual motivations for their purposes. Consider the example of the CEO – the chief executive officer – of a large transnational corporation. Suppose this person – let us call him a man because it usually is - is very concerned about climate change and wants to do what he can to help solve the problem of global warming. The problem for him is that if what he does threatens corporate profits, he is likely to lose his job, because that is the way corporations are legally constructed. Legally, corporations are owned by their shareholders, and this means that if the CEO challenges what those shareholders want, the CEO is likely to get in trouble. If that is true for the CEO, how much more true it is for everyone else down the line in the corporation! This is an example of how an institution can have a life of its own, can have its own motivations quite separate from the motivations of all the people who work for it. If they do not play along, they will be pushed out. Of course, there are sometimes exceptions, but not very many. The exceptions tend to be family-owned corporations, where one or two members of the owning family are powerful and can exercise a lot more direction.
Why do I emphasise institutionalisation? Because this is a problem we face today that the Buddha did not. He talked about greed, ill-will and delusion, the three poisons, and the problem now is that these three poisons have become institutionalised. From a Buddhist perspective, our economic system can be understood as institutionalising greed. In the United States our militarism, our racism, also our attitude towards prison inmates and immigrants institutionalises ill-will. Certainly, in the United States, our corporate media - the major news corporations, the people who determine what we are told and what we believe - institutionalise delusion. This because their primary concern is the profits to be derived from advertising (and therefore consumerism), rather than informing or educating us about what is really happening.
If the Buddha is right that our main problems are greed, ill-will and delusion, and if today those three poisons have become institutionalised – well, that is pretty scary.
I conclude by saying a little about how greed has been institutionalised as our economic system. What is greed? One definition is that you never have enough. I spoke about how that works on the personal level, that if you try to satisfy your sense of lack by consuming, you can never have enough. Nevertheless, it also works on the institutional level. It is also the nature of corporations -- and the nature of GNP and GDP -- that they are never large enough. A corporation is never profitable enough; it never has enough market share. In fact, we cannot even imagine what "big enough" could be: it is built into this system that it has to keep growing, for otherwise it tends to collapse.
The nature of the stock market is very relevant here. From the perspective I am offering, the stock market is a kind of amoral black hole, which mediates between two different sides of the economic system. On the one side, there are investors, millions of them, mostly anonymous and only concerned about the profitability of their investment. In most cases, they are not very interested in the details of the corporation as long as they get the returns that they want. In many cases, investors do not know where their money is because of mutual funds. Such people are not evil, of course: on the contrary, this is one of the main things that we are encouraged to do in our society: if you have extra money you can "play the market."
However, look at the other side of that black hole. The expectations, the desires and the hopes of all of these millions of investors get transformed into an impersonal, anonymous pressure for growth and increased profitability that every CEO must respond to. If they cannot respond to it, they are going to get into trouble. If they are not sufficiently profitable, then the investors, the people who own the company, are going to give them a hard time. It is the nature of the system, the way it is constructed, that people who run the corporations have to respond to this anonymous demand or they themselves will be replaced by somebody else. The globalisation of this corporate system means that this emphasis on profitability and growth is becoming increasingly important as the engine for an increasing share of the world’s economic activity, which makes everything else besides profit an "externality", the word economists use for side-effects. The biggest "externalities" include not only environmental consequences but also the social consequences from us being conditioned to define ourselves as workers and consumers.
All of this to satisfy a demand for growth and profitability that can never be satisfied! That is the irony of it all. What is so strange is that money, too, is a construct – a collective, social construct. It is a piece of paper or a number in a bank, with reality only insofar as that number is convertible into something else. From that perspective, we can understand the whole economic system as working to transform all the earth’s resources into pieces of paper, or increasingly large numbers in bank accounts, which are valueless in themselves – a very strange system indeed.
Who is responsible for this institutional pressure for growth? The point, again, is that this system has attained a life of its own, quite apart from the motivations of the people who compose it. In other words, greed in this system has been completely institutionalised. We all participate in this process, as workers, employers, consumers, investors, pensioners and so forth, but with little if any sense of personal responsibility for what the totality is actually doing. Any awareness of what is going on, of how the system works, tends to be completely diffused, lost in the impersonal anonymity of this economic process. Everyone is just doing their job.
Here is the second problem that I see with the economic system, from a Buddhist perspective. At the core of both problems is our basic predicament, the delusive sense of a separate self shadowed by a sense of lack. Often we hear criticisms about modern society being too materialistic, but I think the real problem is that, both personally and collectively, we are not materialistic enough. The problem is that money, being a social construct, is an abstraction, because its value is symbolic. The problem is that money for us comes to symbolise something else; the ability to resolve our sense of lack, which is really a spiritual problem that requires a spiritual approach.
To sum up, a Buddhist perspective offers a different kind of critique of our economic situation. It is not an appeal for "social justice" for the oppressed. Basically, it is a critique in terms of dukkha, suffering and delusion, highlighting the way in which these become institutionalised, how our ways of thinking cause us to become trapped in economic processes that we do not understand, which therefore become compulsive. The problem from a Buddhist viewpoint is not simply fairness, in terms of equal opportunity and more equitable distribution -- which is not to deny the social justice dimension, that 1% in the United States should not have more assets than the bottom 90%. Rather, the Buddhist emphasis on greed – "never enough" – as the first of the three roots of evil implies that when greed becomes institutionalised it will end up subverting what needs to be the larger purpose of any economic system, which is to promote human happiness. The present system works against human well-being and the biosphere flourishing. Yet – to say it again -- the solution cannot be simply to discover or invent the perfect economic system, one that works so well that people do not need to address their own sense of lack.
However, also we should not overlook a problem with the Buddhist perspective: it is not enough to focus (as some Buddhists do) simply on one’s own practice, on our own personal transformation. "Leave me alone so I can pursue my own awakening and then when I am fully enlightened I will do something to help other people." That perpetuates the fundamental problem, the delusion of separation, by continuing to act as if my own well-being can be promoted quite apart from the well-being of everyone else. The great insight of Buddhism is realising that, insofar as we are all part of each other, that I cannot really pursue my own well-being at the cost of anyone else’s well-being. Once I begin to wake up and overcome my own dukkha I not only become more aware that others’ dukkha is also my dukkha; I also become more aware of how dukkha is not only personal but structured institutionally. There is the old sociological paradox: people create society but society also creates people. Our economic system has ways of conditioning us, of reproducing the kind of consumers that it needs. This means that we need to address the problem on both sides, not only in terms of our own transformation but also finding ways collectively to address the larger political situation.
To conclude, it is increasingly obvious that the institutionalisation of greed urgently needs to be addressed. In the United States corporations have almost subverted all levels of government: they control the supreme court, they control the president, they control the congress, they also control most state governors and many state assemblies. Fortunately, there is a way to address that problem, if people can wake up to face the problem: because corporations have an umbilical cord, namely the nature of their charters. In order to incorporate they have to be chartered by governmental bodies and that gives the possibility of rewriting corporate charters in order to make them more socially responsible. But that is a topic for another day.
David R. Loy
October 2011
www.davidloy.org
