Sabbe Saththa Bhavanthi Sukhi
Thaththa (May all beings be happy)
The sparking of interest:
If you are a follower of the
Buddha’s Dharma and not merely a mainstream, ritual-addicted, gatha-singing,
fear-driven Buddhist, the first thought that might have popped into your
head on reading the title might have
been “What the ….?”.
I don’t blame you.
 |
| The Buddha instructs the laity |
When the phrase first hit my ears in January 2016,
my reaction was not dissimilar. That was when Prof. Clair Brown of the
University of California, Berkley, was visiting with us in Sri Lanka. She it
was who had started the first course in Buddhist Economics in the west after
realizing that her students were tired out by the flat, stale, commonplace and
useless ideas of mainstream economics and starved for something fresh, something new, something
different.
I was tasked with interviewing her and Prof.
Mohan Munasinghe on Buddhist Economics and Sustainomics respectively. As we sat in the reception area at Rupavahini
to discuss my planned structure for the interview, I waded in with, “Well,
Clair, I am not too sure if we can tie a subject like economics which is
worldly and horribly bound to iffy science to something as pristine and steeped
in the truth as the Buddha’s Dharma?”. For me, the oxymoronic nature of
that phrase needed no macroeconomic dissection to figure out. I was rather
taken aback when she didn’t attempt to dispute the point but casually and
disarmingly sidestepped the issue. Diplomacy
kicked in on my side as well and we went on to discuss a few other points and
then live to the studio. While the
interview was more focused on sustainability than economics, there were some
notes, flavors and scents in her responses that seem to arise from an idea of
economics that was people centric and holistic in approach with happiness as an
implied goal and the effort to meet, mesh and marry off the approach to the goal as the process.
Identifying the rationale:
Although still skeptical, I was urged by that exchange to explore this
more worldly aspect of the Buddha’s teaching. An aspect that hitherto, I had no
reason to examine since my practice of the Dharma was purely for the purpose of
enlightenment. So, a few months later
found me sitting in front of my teacher in the blackness of a typical
Kataragama night under a bower created by bo-trees. Detailing at some length the
whole idea of Buddhist economics as I understood it up to that point and expressing
my doubt as to both its validity against the dharma as well as its
effectiveness against future civil and civic disaster.
” Do not think so” he said.
“Start by understanding aarthikaya (economics) as a component of artha-kriyawa
(meaningful action)”. “WOW!” I thought
to myself. It was a gentle reminder, a surge of ever expanding linkages and
understanding of how the dharma can inform us on the conduct of worldly economic
effort and help those of more material bent to live out their lives in an
environment less fraught with worry.
The term itself is not new, first
coined by the German statistician and economist E.F. Schumacher in a 1966 essay
that later became the fourth chapter of his classic “Small is Beautiful”
which is an antithesis of the “Greed is Good” way of economic excess that has
brought us to this calamitous juncture in world history. Ten years later, in
his book, “A confused Society”, economist, former governor of the
Central Bank and former chairman of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka Dr.Neville
Karunatilake describes Buddhist Economics as a system founded on developing
co-operative and harmonious effort in group living where selfish and
acquisitive pursuits are eliminated by developing man himself.
Very nice. That should put a cap
to it and we can very well stop here but indulge me a bit folks. I want to
unpack all of this a bit more and see what it reveals to us.
The basis for Buddhist
Economics:
The key takeoff point for me is
the Buddha’s reading of wealth is stated in the much quoted, mostly
ignored line from the Dhammapada “Santhutti
paraman dhanan” (Happiness is the greatest wealth). This firmly ties wealth to achieving a satisfactory
state of mind and not to the acquisition of an overload of people, position,
power and pieces. According to the
Buddha, in this case as in most, the mind overrules both matter (in this case
fiscal, natural and human resources) and matters ( in this case, production,
distribution and consumption). Here, dhanaya
or wealth is not merely personal acquisitions but rather the entire set of
economic things and actions. And, regardless of how much of these an individual
can control or own, if that individual Is not satisfied and satiated, then
there is no sansindima or contentment and no happiness so the individual
is impoverished.
Now, this is interesting. Since santhutti or happiness as the primary idea of wealth is
something that is internal, once achieved, it is maintainable over the long term with little
further effort. All other ways of determining what constitutes wealth are
external and once acquired, high in risk of loss. We all know that the
acquisition of external wealth forces us
to up the ante, increasing the overall effort of protecting, consolidating and growing
our various acquisitions and assets. We
are all fully aware what a suicidal, lifespan decreasing, earth destroying exercise this is. We have all experienced the
fact that such an effort comes with a veritable symphony of mental trauma and
physical sickness, played upon the
various instruments of competing, controlling, manipulating, conniving,
coercing, threatening, weeping , worrying, stressing, diseasing and dying.
The rational slicing here then is
in how we give ourselves a definition of wealth and how we understand its
import. In the Buddha’s reading, happiness is wealth and
essentially marginalizes every other way of defining it. In every other reading,
wealth is supposed to lead to happiness where such “happiness” is
acquired through the channels of gain, fame, praise and pleasure. Well, human
history has shown us that this effort has the opposite effect to the one
intended. Those who seek happiness through gain, suffer loss. Those who hanker
after it through fame suffer shame. Those who think they can find it through
praise suffer blame. Those who attempt to catch up with it in their pursuit of
pleasure suffer pain. So, if happiness
is the outcome of an effort to remove suffering, then mainstream ideas of
wealth can only compound suffering and never eradicate it. This is an awful
conclusion for it implies that most supposedly civilized effort is mad and most
human beings are deranged. Small wonder then, that in our insanity, we have
only managed to “develop” ourselves to the point where we are just a
hairbreadth away from annihilating ourselves and our planet.
Thus, the whole Buddhist framework
essentially sideswipes into the dustbin classic socioeconomic questions that have vexed us for millennia.
Questions such as how to optimize earning potential, how to minimize effort and
optimize profit, how to infinitely acquire and horde fiscal and natural
resources, how to infinitely consume as much as one can, how to rise within the
serried ranks and tiered hierarchies of foaming,
snorting, angry, jealous, frightened, confused, confounded society are of no
real importance. It also implies that
lasting (sustainable, durable) solutions to the problems of economics must come
from sociology, anthropology and metaphysics rather than from crunching down
and treating the impacts of the lodestones of classic economics such as man-hours, machine hours, money
markets, material management etc.
So, overall them, the only
question that remains is how we can achieve and maintain happiness. That, after
all is said and said and said, is the only thing that really needs doing. To do it, we must figure out how to find real
meaning in our economic actions or, in other words, the arthaya in the aarthika-kriya.
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