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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
generositymay 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 hasbeen 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 consumptionper 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 < http://www.bpf.org/html/index.html>
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@...