Death and Dying in the Theravada Tradition

Death and Dying in Theravada Tradition
by Ajahn Jagaro
More often than not in this society of ours, which is a life-affirming society, a beauty- and pleasure-affirming society, the topic of death and dying is avoided. Not only this society, but most societies, including traditional Buddhist cultures, avoid the topic of death as though it were something unpleasant, depressing, to be avoided; even a bad omen: "Don't talk about it as you may encourage it to happen!" Of course this attitude is not very wise and certainly not in keeping with the Buddhist attitude. So this evening I would like to speak on the Buddhist attitude to death and dying.
Why think about it?
First of all, why should we think about death? Why should we contemplate it? Not only did the Buddha encourage us to speak about death, he encouraged us to actually think about it, contemplate it and reflect on it regularly.
On one occasion the Buddha asked several of the monks, "How often do you contemplate death?"One of them replied, "Lord, I contemplate death every day.""Not good enough," the Buddha said, and asked another monk, who replied,"Lord, I contemplate death with each mouthful that I eat during the meal.""Better, but not good enough," said the Buddha, "What about you?"The third monk said, "Lord, I contemplate death with each inhalation and each exhalation."
That's all it takes, the inhalation comes in, it goes out, and one day it won't come in again - and that's it. That's all there is between you and death, just that inhalation, the next inhalation.Obviously the Buddha considered this a very important part of meditation and training towards becoming more wise and more peaceful. Why is it that this contemplation is encouraged? Because we don't usually want to think or talk about death. Be it conscious or unconscious, there is a fear of death, a tendency to avoid it, a reluctance to come face to face with this reality.Death is very much a part of life; it's just as much a part of life as birth. In fact, the moment of birth implies death. From the moment of conception it is only a matter of time before death must come - to everyone. No one can escape it. That which is born will die. The mind and body which arise at the time of conception develop, grow and mature. In other words, they follow the process of aging. We call it growing up at first, then growing old, but it's just a single process of maturing, developing, evolving towards the inevitable death. Everyone of you has signed a contract, just as I did. You may not remember signing that contract, but everyone has said, "I agree to die." Every living being, not only human, not only animal, but in every plane, in every realm, everywhere there is birth, there is the inevitable balance - death.Today, according to a book I read, about 200,000 people died. That is the average everyday. Apparently about 70 million people die every year. That's a lot of people isn't it? The population of Australia is only about 16 million and every year 70 million people die by various means, 200,000 in one day. That's an awful lot of people. But in our society we have very little contact with death. We are not usually brought face to face with death, we are not encouraged to contemplate death or come to terms with it.What we are usually encouraged to do is to avoid it and live as if we were never going to die. It is quite remarkable that intellectually we all know we are going to die, but we all live as if we are never going to die. This avoidance, this negation, usually means that we will always be afraid of death. As long as there is fear of death, life itself is not being lived at its best. So one of the very fundamental reasons for contemplating death, for making this reality fully conscious, is that of overcoming fear. The contemplation of death is not for making us depressed or morbid, it is rather for the purpose of helping to free us from fear. That's the first reason, which I will explain later in more detail.The second reason is that contemplation of death will change the way we live and our attitudes toward life. The values that we have in life will change quite drastically once we stop living as if we are going to live forever, and we will start living in a quite different way.The third reason is to develop the ability to approach death in the right way. By that I mean dying, the way we actually die.The contemplation of death has three benefits:
relieving fear
bringing a new quality to our lives, enabling us to live our lives with proper values, and
enabling us to die a good death.
It enables us to live a good life and die a good death. What more could you want?
Being conscious of death
First, let's look at the contemplation of death. This entails actually making oneself acknowledge death by consciously bringing into mind the fact: "I am going to die." You may say, "I know that." But you don't know it; not fully, not consciously.There should be many opportunities to do this contemplation, but in present day society there are not, simply because we are so far removed from death. We don't see it. Oh yes, you see it on television and at the movies, but it's all a game, you know they are only acting. It's only a game isn't it? You sit there and watch people being shot, hundreds of them, and it's only a game. This actually has the opposite effect. It makes you even less able to acknowledge the reality of death, because it's like a game, it's not real, it's reinforcing the perception that death is not real.We are very far removed from the experience of death, not because death is not to be found, but because of the way our society is structured. How many of you see death? How many of you see dying people? How many of you are present at the time of death? How many of you have the opportunity to sit with a corpse? Not many of you have that opportunity.But it doesn't matter how far removed you are, you can never be completely removed, because it is such an imposing reality, especially when someone in your family dies. Even so, most often it is taken away from you. People die in hospital. If they die at home you call the funeral directors and they take the body away and put it in the funeral parlour. If you have a service the body is all sealed up and then it is cremated for you.So you have very little contact, which is very different from the way things used to be. In earlier times, in more simple cultures, if a member of your family died you washed the corpse, dressed it, and burned it or buried it yourself. You had to do it; no one was going to come and do it for you. You, your family and your friends had to dress the body, carry it, collect the wood, make a pile and put the body on the pile of wood and burn it.This is how cremation was - very basic. In fact this is very much how we still cremate bodies in our forest monastery in Thailand. There we usually use a very simple coffin that the villagers make themselves. They just collect some planks, knock up a coffin, put the body in it - no lid - put it in the hall and everybody is there to see and contemplate it. Then they make a pile of logs, place the body on top, and burn it while everybody stands around and watches. So there is an opportunity to see the natural end of life, the end of one cycle of life. And that has a very good effect in helping us to rise up and come to terms with this reality, rather than it being a ghost, a skeleton in the closet waiting to sneak out and haunt you.Anything that is not brought out and fully confronted, fully come to term with, can have power over you. Ghosts usually haunt at night when you can't see them. They sneak up behind you when you're not looking and can't see them. When you put on the light there is no ghost. In order to have power over us, to make us frightened, it must be something that we can't face, something that we can't fully, consciously, clearly see. It must remain unknown and mysterious. As long as we allow death to remain that way it will bring fear into our hearts.But through contemplation, through attention and consciously finding ways of bringing this fact into the mind and coming to terms with it, fear can be overcome. This is why the contemplation of death is one of the main contemplations in Buddhism. It can be done in many ways. Most mornings in our monastery we chant one particular reflection which goes:
I am of the nature to age, I have not gone beyond aging. I am of the nature to sicken, I have not gone beyond sickness. I am of the nature to die, I have not gone beyond dying. All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will change, will become otherwise, will become separated from me.
When you contemplate this reality with a peaceful mind and really bring it into consciousness, it has a powerful effect in overcoming the fear of old age, sickness, death and separation. It's not for making us morbid, it's for freeing us from fear. That is why we contemplate death: it's not that we are looking forward to dying, but that we want to live and die without fear. So to have an opportunity to be with a dead body is to be encouraged. It's good if you have such an opportunity to actually sit and be with the body, to actually witness the end of a human life, to ask yourself, "Is this death?"When you die, you can't take anything with you - not even your own body. In Buddhist monasteries this is considered so important that quite often skeletons are displayed in the meditation hall. In one monastery there was a monk who left instructions that after his death his body, fully robed and sitting in full lotus, was to be put in a glass case. There he sat slowly disintegrating. Written on the front of the glass case was: "I used to be like you; soon you will be like me." Now when you see that, it has quite a powerful impact. It's a fact you just can't escape.The fact is that every single person is going to die. This is not a prediction I'm making through clairvoyant powers. It's just the inescapable fact that because you're born, you're going to die. All that remains to be known is the time: when is it going to happen? That's the unknown factor. The fact that you are going to die is not questionable, it is reality.So we contemplate. When there is death it's good to come into contact with it. Someone who was living perhaps ten minutes ago is now dead. Yes, that's what's going to happen to me, too. Even if there is no body, no corpse in sight, one can do this just sitting quietly, just making that thought very clear in one's mind. "I am going to die. I am going to die and I am going to have to leave everything behind, every single thing, every mortal being is going to be left behind."Now remember the purpose of this. It is to force the mind to come to terms with this reality. Quite often you will feel fear. There is still fear because you haven't accepted it yet. That's the purpose of the contemplation: to allow the fear to arise so that we can learn to transcend it, to get above this fear and to be able to acknowledge death without fear.Buddhist monks see a great variety of life. People often think the opposite, that because we're monks we're removed from the realities of life, that we're protected and sheltered, that we live in a remote realm where we don't really know what life's about. In a certain sense that may be true, but in another sense we have more contact with many aspects of life than most people do. This is because the role of monk within a community of people is to act as a spiritual guide and refuge. When there's a birth, everybody brings the baby to the monk and he gives a blessing. The monk experiences what it is for everyone to be happy. When someone is sick: 'Get the monk.' So the monk has very close contact with sickness, pain and fear.When there is death it is very important for the monk to be there, because most people are terrified of death, both those who are dying and those around them. People feel at a loss: 'What do we do?' As a monk I find that I have many occasions to come into contact with these things, both the pleasant and the unpleasant. I have found death to be one of the most rewarding experiences. I have also found it to be one of the most meaningful ways to be of service to others, because that is the time that I feel most useful. You may think that I feel most useful when I'm teaching meditation or giving these talks, but I really feel most useful in situations where there is death. That is the time when I feel that through my contemplation, through my appreciation of this process called life, I can be a refuge for the dying and for the people around the dying. As I said, it is also rewarding as a learning experience, especially the first few occasions when I had to be with someone who was actually dying.So there are opportunities for us to contemplate, to bring into the mind this part of life which is normally avoided. Notice if fear arises. If fear does arise, it must be dealt with, we must rise above it. How do we rise above the fear of death? The first thing is to acknowledge its inevitability. Everything, both animate and inanimate, follows the same process. It is just part of life, there is no problem.It's not that we look forward to it. Some people respond to this with, "Well, if you're not afraid of death, why don't you go and kill yourself?" But we're not afraid of living, either. Just because you're not afraid of something, does that mean that you have to do it?This rising up and acknowledging is part of life. Inevitably, I'm going to die - everybody, every plant, every tree, every insect, every form, every being, follows the same path. Soon it will be autumn, the leaves fall off the trees. We don't cry, it's natural, that's what the leaves are supposed to do at the end of the season. Human beings do the same thing. We have to rise to this occasion and acknowledge this reality.Another quality that is very helpful is confidence. Religious people usually have less fear of death than very materialistic people, because for the materialist there is only one life and that is it. Death is zero - finish - kaput! Of course to some people that's quite appealing, but for most people the thought that's it's all gone is not very desirable, in fact it's quite frightening.But from the Buddhist perspective, death is never seen as the end. From the Buddhist perspective birth is not the beginning and death is not the end. It's just one part of a whole process, a whole cyclic process of birth, death, rebirth, dying again, rebirth, dying again... If one has some appreciation or understanding of that, death begins to lose its sting, because it's not final, it's not really the end. It is only the end of a cycle. Just one cycle along the way and then the way continues with another cycle. The leaves fall off the trees, but it's not the end. They go back to the soil and nourish the roots, next year the tree has new leaves. There's no disappearance into nothing. The same can be said of human life. There are bodies, there are living beings, but death is not the end. Conditioned by the moment of death is rebirth. An appreciation of that helps to relieve a lot of the fear about death.So we bring up the thought of death, we sit and bring it to mind. If fear arises, then we try to rise above that fear so that the mind comes to terms and is at peace with reality.
Living consciously
Now this really does free us up, enabling us to live our lives more fully. The contemplation of death, rather than making us depressed and morbid, can actually help us live our lives more fully, with more joy, with more gratitude and appreciation. If we live our lives as though we were going to live forever, we don't appreciate them. We take them for granted and live in a very foolish and heedless way. We all live in foolish ways, simply because we don't consciously contemplate the fact of death.How do we live our lives in foolish ways? Just consider how much time we waste. For a start, how much time have we wasted today worrying about next year, about the next twenty years, thinking about the future, so that we are not fully living this day: "I'm looking forward to Wednesday. Then two more days to go... Thursday, Friday... then it's Saturday. I'll go to the football, the cricket. Sunday morning... meditation at the Buddhist Society. Great, I'm really looking forward to that."That's the mentality of our Australian society. Five days of the week are spent waiting for the weekend. So you live two days out of seven. Most people just endure five days of the week. From nine to five is a dreary existence, then in the evening they live for a couple of hours. We don't really appreciate life. We don't live our lives fully. We take it all so much for granted, as if we're going to make it till Saturday. You may not make it till Saturday! I may not make it till Saturday. If you or I really aren't going to make it till Saturday, we'd better make the best of today.This is how the contemplation of death helps to break this habitual way of living, where we take so much of life for granted, constantly overlooking the present and looking to the future. That is one of the foolish aspects of the way we live when we're not contemplating the reality of death.Another, which is even worse, concerns some of the things we do to each other. We can be very cruel and mean, holding on to hatred and resentment: "Oh well, let him stew for a few more days." Or: "Let her suffer for a few days, I'll apologise next Sunday." We do a lot of things to each other in unskilful ways in the expectation that next time we can fix it up."Next week, next month, I'll smooth it over." But what if there is no next month, no next week? What if there is no tomorrow? Suppose you have an argument today? You may die tonight, she may die tonight. You really wouldn't want to part having some terrible argument as your last memory, would you? It's better to apologise now before it's too late.You see again how we take for granted that there is always going to be a tomorrow. "But," you say, "I'm sure I'm not going to die tonight." Well, maybe not tonight, but one night or one day. It is so uncertain. It really is uncertain, you really don't know - 200,000 die today, tomorrow another 200,000. There is no guarantee that it won't be one of us.Has this every happened to you? You say, "I'll have to go and see so-and-so," taking it for granted that you will be able to see them. This happened to me with the person whose skeleton now hangs in the meditation hall at Wat Pah Nanachat. The skeleton is of a lay-supporter who used to come to the monastery, but then she developed cancer, which caused her a great deal of suffering. I used to visit her regularly, and one day I had intended visiting her as I was coming back from the town to the monastery, but I thought, "Oh, not today, maybe tomorrow." I was feeling a bit tired, so I thought I'd visit her in a few days time. She died, and I really regretted that I hadn't dropped in. I had assumed that she would be around the day after. That can happen to all of us. If we really recognise that, if we can bring that consciously into our minds, it can help us live our lives a little more wisely, by not leaving unfinished business, negative experiences, resentment, hatred and conflict to linger.I've seen this in practice. For sixteen years my father and I were not on good terms. He resented my wearing this robe and was very unhappy being unable to come to terms with it. He'd also had an argument with his brother, before I was born, and they had not spoken to each other since. My father's brother lived in Italy and the feud between them started before my father left Italy. They wouldn't speak to each other at all, and this went on for thirty or forty years. Then one year my father changed quite radically, quite drastically. One of the factors for this change may have been something I said to him. I said, "If you are not going to change your view about me, then you're going to suffer for the rest of your life, until the day you die." I think that had quite an impact, as he was getting old. At that time he was 74 or 75. He recognised that he was going to die, it became a conscious reality.So he decided to set his home straight. He made peace with me. He went to Italy and resolved the argument with his brother that had being going for forty years. He settled all the financial matters that had been left pending for about fifteen years or so and he came back. I remember him saying to me, "I don't want to die with any of these unfinished things on my mind. I want to die peacefully."That's the effect of contemplating the reality of death. It makes us live more wisely, resolving these unfinished matters. Don't let them linger: the fights, the hatred, the conflicts, the feuds, the debts, whatever. We have the chance, let's get it in order. That's very important. That's a benefit of contemplating death, it affects the way we live our lives. We live them more fully, with gratitude. We don't let things linger on, we don't leave unfinished business.And our values in life will change. What is important in life? What is motivating you? What is the drive in your life? If we really contemplate death it may cause us to reconsider our values. It doesn't matter how much money you've got, you can't take any of it with you. It's true about everybody, about every religion. You can't take anything at all with you. Whether you have a million dollars or just ten cents, you can't take it with you. Your own body has to be left for others to dispose of in one way or another, it's just refuse left behind. You can't take your body with you, you can't take your wealth with you, you can't take your cars or your houses with you; we can't even take our Buddhist temples with us. That should make us consider how important these things are to us. What is important in our lives then? Is there anything that we take with us? What do we take with us? What is important?Maybe the quality of life is more important than material acquisitions. The quality of life is primarily the quality of our minds. How we are living today may be more important than a lot of these other things. Considering that the Buddhist perspective of death is not the end, but the condition for rebirth, and that rebirth is conditioned by death and the quality of the mind, there is one thing you take with you. There is one inheritance that you don't leave behind for others:I am the owner of my kamma, heir to my kamma, Born of my kamma, related to my kamma, abide supported by my kamma. Whatever kamma I shall do, for good or for ill, of that I will be the heir.That is all that follows, the qualities that we develop within us, the qualities of mind and heart, the spiritual qualities, the good or bad qualities. This is what we inherit. This is what conditions rebirth and shapes the future. So again this gives rise to a new value in our lives. The contemplation of death may change our values. Then we may not think it so important to strive so hard to make that extra million. We may not live long enough to enjoy it; we may as well enjoy the million we've already got, living more peacefully and starting to build up some spiritual qualities. It can have a very good effect on the way we live our lives and on the values we develop. It's not just a matter of being successful, it's how we become successful. What we're developing within us is more important than becoming successful.I was giving a talk the other evening to a group of people. In the audience there were quite a few young people and a question was asked about the relevance of Buddhism in this competitive society. I said I don't mind competition, I think competition is good. As long as competition doesn't mean abandoning your humanity, competition is fine. However, it should not be at the expense of your humanity, of the humane qualities of virtue and compassion. You can still compete, you can still strive, but not at the expense of these qualities, because ultimately these are more important. They are your true inheritance. Whether you succeed in getting that business deal or not, whether you make that $100,000 or not, whether you get that new car ten thousand dollars cheaper or not, seems so important in the short term. Ten thousand dollars is a lot of money, but if you have to do that at the expense of your humanity, your moral principles, your virtue and your compassion, it's not worth it, because you'll have to leave the money behind sooner or later - perhaps sooner than you expect. Your only inheritance is the quality of your mind.This contemplation of death can help us to live our lives with more gratitude, with less fear, with more immediacy and with values that are really important. That is why we encourage contemplation of death and the process of dying.
Dying peacefully
Having considered all of this, if dying becomes no longer a contemplation but an actual experience, we can face it without fear. Not only can we face it without fear, we can also do a lot towards dying a good death. If we have led a good life, dying is easier. But regardless of how we have lived, we can still endeavour to die a good death. To help in the dying process, we stress very much the development of the same quality of fearlessness. Death is not to be feared, it's just natural.The fear of death is often connected to the fear of pain. For many people it's more the fear of pain and the fear of separation from all that is loved that is fearsome. At the time of dying encouragement and reassurance are essential. For a start you need to reassure yourself. The pain is difficult to bear, but we are fortunate in that modern medicines make it possible to reduce the amount of physical pain a human being has to experience at death. Pain need not be such an overwhelming object of fear.I usually reassure a dying person, such as someone who has cancer, that they won't be allowed to suffer, that they won't have to endure excruciating pain, that they will be given medicine. They certainly should be given medicine to alleviate the pain. An important result of this is that they can relax and die more peacefully.The other worry is the separation from loved ones, from one's possessions. Of course, if we've contemplated this before, it's a lot easier. We know that to come together implies separation. That's all life is, a meeting and a separation. I came to Melbourne two months ago, in a few days I'll be leaving. That's just the way it is. If we contemplate that, it won't be so frightening to us. If a dying person hasn't done this kind of contemplation, then you need to gently encourage and reassure him or her that the children and those left behind will be taken care of. They need to be reassured that it's all right, that there are friends to take care of them, they need to be encouraged to relax and be peaceful, not to worry about other things, that they'll all be taken care of.The whole emphasis is on trying to encourage the dying person, be it oneself or another, to become more peaceful. How can you die a good death? By becoming more peaceful. The Buddhist way is to try and maintain an atmosphere of peace in the room where someone is dying. It's not very good to have people shouting and screaming, waving and crying and tugging and pulling. What does that do to the poor person who has this very important thing to do, to die? They make it very difficult to die peacefully. Give those present time to become quiet. It is good if friends and relatives are present, people who can show by their presence that they care, that they love, that they are willing to let go, to reassure, to offer support - that's enough.Symbols are very useful. If the dying person is a Buddhist, then a Buddha statue, and possibly the presence of Buddhist monks, soothing words and teachings to allow the person to give up their life with the greatest peace and dignity, is very beneficial. It's a wonderful thing for them to move into their new life in the best possible way.So these are some reflections with regard to death and dying. There are many other aspects to this topic that I could cover but I don't want to go beyond my allotted time. There are a few stories from the Buddha that illustrate very much what I've been saying. The classic one, which I tell at every funeral, is the story about Kisagotami, a woman who lived during the time of the Buddha. She had a baby son of whom she was very proud. Now this little boy got very sick and died. Kisagotami was so disturbed, so distressed by his death that she became a little mentally unhinged. She could not accept the fact that her baby had died. "No, it's only sick, I need medicine. I have to have medicine to cure my baby." She went from place to place, from home to home, from friend to friend, but no one could help her. They told her the baby was dead, but she couldn't accept this and kept asking for medicine.Finally she went to the Buddha because she had heard that he was a spiritual teacher with great psychic powers. She asked the Buddha, "Please give me some medicine to cure my baby." The Buddha said, "Put the baby down here, I will cure your baby provided you can get a few mustard seeds for me. But you must get these mustard seeds from a home where there has never been a death."So she went running off into the town and went to the first house, where she asked for mustard seeds. Being a common commodity of little value they were promptly offered to her. As she was about to accept the mustard seeds she asked, "Has there ever been a death in this home?" Of course the reply was, "Oh yes, only a few months ago so-and-so died." She went from home to home and the experience was exactly the same. This gradually had an effect on her.When she came towards the end of the village realisation finally pushed through her demented state of mind: death is everywhere; in every home there is death. Death is part of life. She was able to recognise this fact and come to terms with reality. She went back to the Buddha who asked her, "Kisagotami, did you get the mustard seeds?" "Enough of mustard seeds, Lord," she replied, and took her baby and cremated it. She came back and became a Buddhist nun and not long afterwards becameenlightened.I like this story because it represents the Buddhist approach to death. Rather than bringing the baby back to life, the Buddhist way is to acknowledge the reality of death. Being a reality, it must be accepted. We don't look for death, but we don't fear it; we don't ask for death, but we're willing to accept it when it comes. Through the understanding that comes from this contemplation of death, we can live good lives with skilful values, with true appreciation, and we can die a good death, peacefully.
---http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/death_jagaro.html

Bardo Thodol: the Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State

Bardo Thödol:
The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State

Tibetan: bar-do thos-grol Pronounced, Bardo Thötröl
The Bardo Thödol (incorrectly translated in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead) can be understood at two levels:
1. as advanced practice for trained meditators, and,
2. as support for beings experiencing the bardo without specific meditative training, experience or empowerment.

The Bardo Thödol is a text based on oral teachings by Padmasambhava and recorded in written form around 760 AD.
Through early misrepresentation to the West by the incomplete translation of Evans-Wentz (1878-1957), the Westerners have come to know this text as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a title that has misguided many. A much better translation is The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State.

Serious meditative practitioners, who have received the proper empowerments (initiations) meditative training and sustained meditative experience, have an opportunity at death to recognize the Clear Light of the Absolute True Nature of Reality and achieve Ultimate Enlightenment at that time. Much of an advanced practitioner's meditative training involves meeting this transformative moment.

To help the dying achieve the goal of auspicious re-birth or even Enlightenment, a spiritual master (lama) whispers guiding instructions through the bardo into the person's ear. Traditionally, these instructions are read from The Bardo Thödol, designed to help guide the deceased's consciousness through the intermediate realm between lives (bardo). Thus the meaning of the Bardo Thödol: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State.

The bardo state is recognized as an opportunity for change; a starting point of transformation. It is understood as a gap between familiar boundaries through which beings can glimpse the Absolute True Nature of Reality. By fully recognizing this ultimate nature, the deceased is capable of breaking the afflictive cycle of rebirth (samsara) and achieving final liberation: Enlightenment for the sake of all sentient Beings.

Buddhism recognizes the fact that human beings tend to avoid thinking about or dealing with the fact of death. The refusal to acknowledge the imminence of death and impermanence is regarded in Buddhism as a fundamental cause of the confusion and ignorance that prevents spiritual progress (Four Noble Truths of Buddhism). Spiritual growth is achieved not by avoiding ‘unpleasant’ facts, but by facing and accepting them with calmness, wisdom and compassion.

Specific meditations enable Buddhist practitioners to seriously consider the truth of impermanence and to comprehend the true nature of human existence. The goal of skillful meditation study and practice is experience and actualization of the Absolute True Nature of Reality (Enlightenment).

Tibetan Buddhism and the Bardo Thödol teach that the first moment of death is marked by a gradual process of disintegration, in which both the mental and physical components of the dying individual begin to collapse. Corresponding to the gradual deterioration of consciousness during death, the dying patient experiences a variety of distinctive visions, each marking a stage in the dying process.

Serious meditators study these stages in order to gain intimate knowledge of them, since a person familiar with the death experience is less likely to be frightened when death finally arrives. But more importantly, a detailed knowledge of the dying process enables advanced practitioners to simulate the experience during meditation. Through cultivation and experience of these subtle visionary states of consciousness the meditator can achieve complete Liberation (Enlightenment) during life or at the moment of death.

But in the case of ordinary individuals without empowerment, training and advanced meditative experience, the deceased is dependent upon the assistance of the lama (or other religious practitioner), to recite the guiding instructions from the Bardo Thödol in order to bring Reality into clear focus for the deceased in the bardo.

The words of the lama communicate the essential truth of the postdeath experience, giving the deceased a point of reference to make sense of the often confusing and terrifying visions with which non-trained and ordinary individuals are confronted during the bardo period. Also, recitation of the texts within a ceremonial setting offers practical wisdom to the participants.

Before the ordinary dying process is complete, relatives and friends are advised to quietly bid the dying person farewell, without creating excessive drama. Tibetan Buddhists believe that it is crucial for both the dying person and those around him/her to avoid causing excessive regret, grief or longing in the patient; and to have a mindful, calm and compassionate state of mind. The state of mind at the time of death is believed to influence directly the experiences of the departing consciousness.

Any thoughts that occur during this time are extremely important; it is vital for the individual to generate and sustain a positive mental state throughout all the stages of dying. The quality of mind at the time of death is a critical component in determining the dying person's experience in the bardo. If disruptive thoughts can be avoided while simultaneously directing the mind toward pure and virtuous thoughts, even the ordinary person without advanced meditative training may be capable of positively effecting the outcome of the dying process.

Further Reading:
Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, THE MIRROR OF MINDFULNESS: The Cycle of the Four Bardos. Presentation of Tibetan Buddhist teachings on the endless cycle of experience, the four bardos: life, death, after-death, and rebirth. Instruction is aimed at inspiring and helping the practitioner achieve liberation from deluded existence and awaken to complete enlightenment for the benefit of others.

Dudjom Rinpoche, COUNSELS FROM MY HEART . As a teacher of legendary kindness and wisdom, Dudjom Rinpoche (deceased, former head of the Nyingma lineage) is highly regarded. This volume contains some of the very few of Dudjom Rinpoche's teachings that have ever been translated and published. In it he discusses the Three Jewels, self and cyclic existence and the bardo states between life and death.Thurman, Robert A. F. (trans.). Bardo Thödol: The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Sogyal Rinpoche, Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
----http://home.earthlink.net/~pcd_dallas/KTGR_March_2005_Bardo_Teachings.htm

Theme 4 handout

Theme 4: Living and Dying
Sources
1 Abhidharma
2 Mahayana school—Yogacara
3 Tibetan Treatises—Bardo Thödol: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State by Padma-sambhava, written in 760 CE., North Indian

Four Existences (bhava) 四有---Abhidharma, Yogacara, etc.
1 Dyingà死有
2. After death/intermediate existence (antaraa-bhava)à中有
3. Moment of Rebirthà生有
4. Birth and Livingà本有

Death---Yogacarabhumi
1.at the end of life span 壽盡
2.at the end of merit 福盡
3.death before one’s time 非命死

Nine Causes of Untimely Death
1. Excessive eating 食無度量
2. Eating the unsuitable 食所不宜
3. Eat before digesting all 不消復食
4. Not get rid of unsuitable food 生而不吐
5. Holding the digested food 熟而持之
6. Not cure serious disease 不近醫藥
7. Not know good food or bad food 不知於己若損若益
8. Having sexual conduct at the wrong time 非時行非梵行
9. Having excessive sexual conduct 非量行非梵行

Confucius also says, “Food and Sex are the (human) nature.” 食色性也

Process of Dying
• Gross disintegration--physical
• Subtle disintegration—mental

Four Great Elements (physical)
Earth Water Fire Wind
Subtle Disintegration (Mental)
• Seeing pleasant or horrific imagery
• Alaya consciousness
• Seed manifestation

What is “Mind”?
1st - 5th consciousness
eye, ear, nose, tongue and body
6th consciousness
7th consciousness
8th consciousness

After Death
• “Soul”?
• Alaya consciousness
• Intermediate existence
• Bardo

Five names for bardo
1
mind-originated
manomaya
意成
2
rebirth-seeking
saṃbhavaiṣin
求生
3
incense-eater
gandharva
食香
4
name-arising
abhinirvṛtti
為起
5
Intermediate being
Antarā-bhava
中有

Intermediate Being (Bardo)
• Stays 7 days looking for rebirth
• Unable reborn, bardo dies and is reborn as bardo again
• 7x7 days decide to reborn=49 days

Clear Light of the Absolute True Nature of Reality—the moment of Liberation
“Serious meditative practitioners, who have received the proper empowerments (initiations) meditative training and sustained meditative experience, have an opportunity at death to recognize the Clear Light of the Absolute True Nature of Reality and achieve Ultimate Enlightenment at that time. Much of an advanced practitioner's meditative training involves meeting this transformative moment.”

Six Realms in Samsara
Heaven Asura Human Animal Hungry ghost Hell

3 Factors for Rebirth
• Primary Karma
• Habitual karma
• The last thought
Rebirth
• Physical part
– sperm from father+ egg from mother
• Mental part
– Intermediate being

The Conditions of Conception---Majjhima Nikaya sutta
• “Monks, it is on the conjunction of three things that there occurs the decent of an intermediate being into the womb....But when the parents come together in union, it is the mother’s proper season and the intermediate being is present, then on the conjunction of these three things the descent of an intermediate being will take place….Then, monks, the mother for nine or ten months carries the fetus in her womb with great concern for her heavy burden.”
父母交會，母親適期，中陰身現行，三者俱合，中陰身即可投胎



Recommended reading
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche
Bardo Thödol: The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Trans. by Thurman, Robert A. F.
Articles on
“Bardo Thodol”
“Living and Dying in Theravada Tradition”
“Buddhism and Bioethics”

Buddhism and Money: The Repression of Emptiness Today

Buddhism and Money: The Repression of Emptiness Today
By David Loy

Buddhist Ethics and Modern SocietyNo. 31 (1991) pp. 297-312
The modern world is so materialistic that we sometimes joke about the religion of "moneytheism." But the joke is on us: for more and more people, the value-system of money is supplanting traditional religions, as part of a profound secular conversion we only dimly understand. I think that Buddhism (with some help from the psychoanalytic concept of repression) can explain this historical transformation and show us how to overcome it.

The Buddhist doctrine of no-self implies that our fundamental repression is not sex (as Freud thought), nor even death (as existential psychologists think), but the intuition that the ego-self does not exist, that our self consciousness is a mental construction. Here, the repressed intuition "returns to consciousness in distorted form" as the symbolic ways we compulsively try to ground ourselves and make ourselves real in the world: such as power, fame, and of course money.

To present a Buddhist critique of the money-complex, and the Buddhist solution, this paper is divided into two parts. The first part summarizes the existential-psychoanalytic understanding of the human condition and modifies that by bringing in the fundamental insight of anatma, the denial of ego-self. The Buddhist critique of the ego-self not only gives us a different perspective on repression, it also suggests a different way of resolving the problem of repression. The second part applies the conclusions to understand the psychological and spiritual role of money for modern secular humanity, demonstrating how the money complex amounts to a demonic religion - demonic because it cannot absolve our sense of lack.

The Repression of Emptiness
When Samuel Johnson was asked, "I wonder what pleasure men can take in making beasts of themselves?" he answered: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." [1]

Dr. Johnson's reply points to why we anaesthetize ourselves with alcohol, television, and so money other physical and mental addictions. (As Dr. Johnson also knew, the alternative to not getting rid of that pain is often depression.) Today, Western philosophy and psychology have finally caught up with his insight: existentialism highlights the anguish of the human condition, and psychoanalysis traces neurosis, including the low-grade neurosis we call normality, back to anxiety. But why is it painful just to be a human being? What causes our anguish and anxiety? This is where Buddhism can carry the analysis one step further.

Freud emphasized that repression is the key discovery underlying all psychoanalysis. The concept is basically simple: when something (usually a thought or a feeling) makes me uncomfortable and I do not want to cope with it consciously, I may choose to ignore or "forget" it. This clears the way for me to concentrate on something else, but at a price: part of my psychic energy must be spent resisting what has been repressed, to keep it out of consciousness, so there is persistent tension. Even worse, what has been repressed usually returns to consciousness, by being transformed into a symptom that is symbolic (because that symptom re-presents the repressed phenomenon in distorted form). Freud understood the histerias and phobias of his middle-class Viennese patients to be symptoms of repressed sexuality, and therefore concluded that sexual repression is our primal repression. As with many of us, however, his attention gradually shifted from sexuality to death as he got older. More recent existential psychologists, such as analysts Rollo May and Irvin Yalom and scholars Norman O. Brown and Ernest Becker, have shifted the focus from sexual dynamics to the fundamental issues of life and death, freedom and responsibility, groundlessness and meaninglessness- concerns that are just as central to Buddhism, and therefore make possible a more fruitful dialogue between Buddhism and psychoanalysis. [2]

William James observed that our "common instinct for reality ... has always held the world to be essentially a theater for heroism." But why do we want to be heroes? Natural narcissism and our need for self-esteem mean that each of us needs to feel we are of special value. Heroism is how we justify that need to count more than anyone or anything else, because it can qualify us for a special destiny. And why do we need a special destiny? Because the alternative is literally too much to contemplate. The irony of humanity's unique ability to symbolize is that it reveals our fate that much more clearly. According to most existential psychoanalysts, our primary repression is not sexuality, but death. Although fear of death is necessary for self-preservation, it must be repressed for us to function with any degree of psychological comfort. Most animals have such fears programmed into them as instincts, but we fashion our fears out of the ways we perceive the world, [3] suggesting that, if we can come to experience the world differently, we might be able to fashion our fears differently, too. Or is it the opposite: do our fears cause us to perceive the world the way we do, and might someone experience the world differently if they were brave enough to face the thing we avoid most?

According to Becker, "everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness." Even our character-traits are an example of this, because they provide an automatic response to situations. These sedimented habits are a necessary protection, for without them the e can only be "full and open psychosis"; to see the world as it really is "devastating and terrifying" "it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible... It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it." Thus the bite in Pascal's aphorism: "Human beings are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." For Becker this is literally true: what we regard as normality is our collective, protective madness, in which we repress the grim truth about the human condition. Those who have difficulty playing this game are the ones we call mentally ill. Schizophrenics are suffering from the truth. Psychoanalysis reveals the high price of denying this truth about the human condition, "what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad." [4]

Thus, the early experience of the child becomes an attempt "to deny the anxiety of his emergence, his fear of losing his support, of standing alone, helpless and afraid." This leads to what Becker calls "the great scientific simplification of psychoanalysis":

This despair is avoided by building defenses; and these defenses allow us to feel a basic sense of self-worth, of meaningfulness, of power. They allow us to feel in control of life and death, that one really does live and act as a willful and free individual, that one has a unique and self-fashioned identity, that we are somebody....All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned to live securely and serenely. [5]

This implies a different way of understanding such key Freudian concepts as guilt and the Oedipal complex. Freud traced guilt back to early ambivalent feelings of the child, especially hate and death-wishes directed toward parents that alternate with fears of losing them. Existential psychoanalysis sees the problem as far more basic: "Guilt, as the existentialists put it, is the guilt of being itself. It reflects the self-conscious animal's bafflement at having emerged from nature, at sticking out too much without knowing what for, at not being able to place himself securely in an eternal meaning system." [6] Such "pure" guilt has nothing to do with feared punishment for secret wishes; rather, the major sin is the sin of being born, as Samuel Beckett put it. It is the worm in the heart of the human condition, apparently an inescapable consequence of self-consciousness itself.

This transforms Freud's Oedipal complex into an Oedipal project: the never-ending attempt to become one's own father, as Freud realized, but not by sleeping with mother. Why? To become one's own father is to become what Nagarjuna described as self-existing - and exposed as an impossibility. Becker calls the Oedipal project a flight from obliteration and contingency. The child wants to conquer death by becoming the creator and sustainer of its own life. To be one's own father is to be one's own origin. In Buddhist terms, we could say that the Oedipal project is the attempt of the developing sense of self to become autonomous. It is the quest to deny one's groundlessness by becoming one's own ground: the ground (socially conditioned and approved but nonetheless illusory) of being an independent person, a self-sufficient Cartesian ego.

From a Buddhist perspective, then, what is called the Oedipal complex is due to the discovery of the child that it is not part of mother, after all. The problem is not so much that Dad has first claim on Mom, as what that means to the child's dawning realization of separation: "But if I am not part of Mom, what am I part of?" This becomes, more generally: what am I? who am I? A need is generated to discover one's own ground, or rather to create it - a futile project never to be fulfilled, except by identifying with something ("I may not be Mom, but I am this!") - which, of course, always includes the fear of losing whatever one is attached to. The result is a delusive sense of self always anxious about its own groundlessness.

If so, the Oedipal project actually derives from our intuition that selfconsciousness is not something obviously "self-existing" but a fiction, ungrounded because it is a mental construct. Rather than being selfsufficient, consciousness is more like the surface of the sea: dependent on unknown depths ("conditions," as the Buddha called them) that it cannot grasp because it is a manifestation of them. The problem arises because this conditioned, and therefore unstable, consciousness wants to ground itself, to make itself real. But to real-ize itself is to objectify itself - meaning to grasp itself, since an object is that-which-is-grasped. The ego-self is this continuing attempt to objectify oneself by grasping oneself, something we can no more do than a hand can grasp itself.

The consequence of this is that the sense of self always has, as its inescapable shadow, a sense of lack, which (alas!) it always tries to escape. It is here that the psychoanalytic concept of repression becomes helpful, for the idea of "the return of the repressed" distorted into a symptom shows us how to link this basic yet hopeless project with the symbolic ways we try to overcome our sense of lack by making ourselves real in the world. We experience this deep sense of lack as the feeling that "there is something wrong with me." It can be manifested in many different for s, and we can react to that felling in many different ways. One of the most popular is the money complex, which will be discussed later. A better example for most intellectuals is the craving to be famous, which illustrates perhaps the main way we try to make ourselves real: through the eyes of others. (If we can persuade enough others that we exist,...) In its "purer" forms lack appears as guilt or anxiety that is almost unbearable, because it gnaws at the very core of one's being. For that reason we are eager to objectify anxiety into fear of something, because then we know what to do: we have ways to defend ourselves against the feared thing.

The tragedy of these objectifications, however, is that (for example) no amount of fame can ever be enough if it is not really fame you want. When we do not understand what is actually motivating us - because what we think we want is only a symptom of something else (here, our desire to become real) - we end up being compulsive, "driven." Such a Buddhist analysis implies that no true "mental health" can be found, except in an enlightenment that puts an end to the sense of lack that "shadows" the sense of self, by putting an end to the sense of self.

I do not know if psychoanalysis is coming close to the same realization, but it has come to agree with the great insight of existentialism: anxiety is fundamental to the self, not something we have but something we are. The anguish and despair neurotics complain of are not the result of their symptoms but their cause; these symptoms shield them from the tragic contradictions at the heart of the human situation: death, guilt, meaninglessness. "The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself that awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive." [7]

This suggests a new perspective on the sense of guilt that seems to bedevil our lives: it is not the cause of our unhappiness, but its effect. "The ultimate problem is not guilt but the incapacity to live. The illusion of guilt is necessary for an animal that cannot enjoy life, in order to organize a life of nonenjoyment." [8] This shifts the essential issue from what we have done to why we feel bad. From the Buddhist perspective, if the autonomy of selfconsciousness is a delusion that can never quite shake off its shadow-feeling that "something is wrong with me," it will need to rationalize that sense of inadequacy somehow. If fear of death rebounds as fear of life, they become two sides of the same coin. Then genuine life cannot be opposed to death but must embrace both life and death. "Whoever rightly understands and celebrates death, at the same time magnifies life" (Rilke). The great irony is that, as long as we crave immortality, we are dead.

Most psychoanalysts have decided that it is not possible to end anxiety, but that conclusion does not necessarily follow. Rather, what follows is that ending death anxiety would require ending the ego-self as usually experienced, a possibility Brown is sympathetic to: "since anxiety is the ego's incapacity to accept death, the sexual organizations [Freud's anal, oral and genital stages of ego-development] were perhaps constructed by the ego in its flight from death, and could be abolished by an ego strong enough to die." [9] An ego strong enough to die: in Buddhist terms this is a sense of self that suspects it is a fiction, a delusive construction, and is brave enough to "let go" of itself.

Anxiety about death is our reaction to becoming aware of ourselves and our inevitable fate; so it is something we have learned. Is the dilemma of life-confronting-death an objective fact we just see, or is this also something constructed and projected, more like an unconscious, deeply repressed game that each of us is playing with ourselves? According to Buddhism, life-against-death is a delusive way of thinking because it is dualistic, but if the denial of death is the way the ego affirms itself as being alive, that also implies it is the act by which the ego constitutes itself. To be self-conscious is to be conscious of oneself, to grasp oneself, as being alive. Then death-terror is not something the ego has, it is what the ego is. The irony here is that the death-terror that is the ego actually defends only itself. Everything outside is what the ungrounded ego is terrified of, but what is inside? Fear is the inside, for that is what makes everything else the outside.

If the ego is mentally constituted by this dualistic way of thinking, the ego should be able to die without physical death. That is precisely the claim of Buddhism: the sense of self can disappear, but there remains something else that cannot die, because it was never born. Anatma is the "middle way" between the extremes of eternalism (the self survives death) and annihilationism (the self is destroyed at death). Buddhism resolves the problem of life-and-death by deconstructing it. The evaporation of t is dualistic way of thinking reveals what is prior to it, which has many names, the most common being "the unborn."

In the Pali canon, the two most famous descriptions of Nirvana both refer to "the unborn," where "neither this world nor the other, nor coming, going or standing, neither death nor birth, nor sense-objects are to be found." [10] Similar claims are common in Mahayana. The most important term in Mahayana is sunyata, "emptiness," and the adjectives most often used to explain sunyata are "unborn," "uncreated" and "unproduced." The laconic Heart Sutra explains that all things are sunya because they are "not created, not annihilated, not impure and not pure, not increasing and not decreasing." [11]

The "Song of Enlightenment" of Yung-chia, a disciple of the sixth Ch'an patriarch, says: "Since i abruptly realized the unborn, I have had no reason for joy or sorrow at any honor or disgrace." [12] That "all things are perfectly resolved in the Unborn" was the great realization and the central teaching of the Japanese Zen master Bankei : "When you dwell in the Unborn itself, you're dwelling at the very well head of Buddhas and patriarchs." The Unborn is the Buddha-mind, which is beyond living and dying. [13]

For Buddhism, the dualism between life and death is only one instance he more general problem with dualistic thinking. We discriminate between such opposites as life and death in order to affirm one and deny the other, and, our tragedy lies in the paradox that the two opposed terms are interdependent. In this case, there is no life without death and - what we are more likely to overlook - there is no death without life. This means our problem is not death but life-and-death. If we can realize that there is no delineated ego-self that is alive now, the problem of life-and-dea th is solved. Since our minds have created this dualism, they should be able to un-create or deconstruct it. This is not a devious intellectual trick to solve the problem logically, while leaving our anguish as deep as before. The examples above refer to a different way of experiencing, not some conceptual understanding. It is no coincidence that the Prajnaparamita sutras of Mahayana also repeatedly emphasize that there are no sentient beings.

The Buddha: "Subhuti, what do you think? You should not say that the Tathagata has this thought: 'I should liberate living beings.' Subhuti, you should not think so. Why? Because there are really no living beings for the Tathagata to liberate. If there were, the Tathagata would hold (the concept of) an ego, a personality, a being and a life. Subhuti, (when) the Tathagata speaks of an ego, there is in reality no ego, although common people think so. Subhuti, the Tathagata says common people are not, but (expediently) called, common people. [14]

If there is no one who has life, then there is no reason to fear death. If the ego-self is not a thing but a continual process of consciousness trying to grab hold of itself and objectify itself - which, since it can never do so, leads to self-paralysis - unmediated experience "of" the Unborn is the final shipwreck of that project. The problem is resolved at its source. The ego-self that has been trying to make itself real by identifying with one thing or another in the objective world collapses. In term of life-versus-death, the ego-self forecloses on its greatest anxiety by letting go and dying now. "Die before you die, so that when you come to die you will not have to die," as the Sufis put it. Of course, if the ego is really a construct - composed of automatized, mutually-reinforcing ways of thinking, feeling and acting - it cannot really die, yet it can evaporate, in the sense that those cease to recur. Insofar as these constitute our basic defense against the world (in psychoanalytic terms) and our main hope of making ourselves real (in Buddhist terms), this letting-go is not going to be easy. It means giving up my most cherished ways of thinking about myself (notice the reflexivity), which are what I think I am, to stand naked and exposed. No wonder it is called the Great Death.

This cannot save the body from aging and deteriorating; then does such ego-death really solve our problem? Yes, because the Buddhist analysis of the "empty" ego-self implies that death is not our deepest fear, and the desire to become immortal is not our deepest hope, for even they are symptoms that represent something else. They symbolize the desire of the sense of self to become a real self, to transform its anguished lack of being into genuine being. Even the terror of death represses something, for hat terror is preferable to facing one's lack of being now: death-fear at least allows us to project the problem into the future, so we avoid facing what we are (or are not) right now.

One way to approach this is to consider whether immortality - the actuality of an existence that never ended - could really satisfy us. As much as we may fear death, is ceaseless life really the solution? Many have suspected that, like "the immortal" in Borges' story of the same title, our existence would eventually become a burden, unless we discovered a meaning system to place it in, a cosmology wherein we had both a home and a role. As the interminable succession of centuries undermined all my futile projects to make myself real, what anguish would accumulate! Mere immortality would become unbearable as soon as I no longer craved it. As with other symbolic (because repressed) games, victory in the form I seek it cannot satisfy me if I really want something else.

This implies that our ultimate hunger is ontological: it can be satisfied by nothing less than becoming real, which in the nondualist terms of Mahayana means realizing that my mind is actually one with -- nothing other than -- the whole universe; and that is possible if the core of my own egoconsciousness is not self-existing but hollow, because groundless: If consciousness is not "inside," there is no outside.'" Then even the desire for immortality is reduced to a symptom, the usual (but distorted) way at we become aware of this repressed spiritual thirst. Death too becomes reduced to a symbol, not only representing the feared failure of this reality project, but also serving as a catch-all for all the ugly, negative, tragic aspects of existence that we cannot cope with and so project as the Shadow of Life. [15]

Why do we need to project ourselves indefinitely into the future, unless something is felt to be lacking now? Obviously, we are afraid of losing something then that we have now. Many have found this unpersuasive, answering it with variations on the theme that, if life is not something we have but something we are, there is nothing to fear because we shall not be around to notice (what) we are missing. Epicurus stoically asserted that "the most horrible of all evils, death, is nothing to us, for when we exist, death is not present; but when death is present, then we are not." A more Buddhist formulation is that, if nothing is lacking now, immortality loses its compulsion as the way to resolve lack, and whether or not we survive physical death becomes, if not irrelevant, at least not the main point.

Then what is the main point? According to "Buddhist psychoanalytics," our most intimate duality is not life-versus-death but being-versus-nonbeing; and our most troublesome repression is not life repressing death but the sense of self repressing its suspected nothingness. Instead of identifying with being the Buddhist approach is to conflate their duality by not rejecting nonbeing; that can lead to the discovery of what is prior to the polarization between them. "Being is not being; non-being is not non being. Miss this rule by a hair and you are off by a thousand miles" (Yung-chia again). The speculations of theologians and metaphysicians are only the most abstract form of this game, which I suspect is our most troublesome game, because the bifurcation between being and nonbeing (or reality versus nothingness, existence versus emptiness, etc.) is not obvious and natural but mentally constructed, a separation that has to be maintained. The tension between them is the core of existential anguish, the source of our sense of lack. Again we see why a sense of lack is the shadow of the sense of self. Like the matter and anti-matter particles of quantum physics, they arise together, opposing each other; and they disappear together by collapsing back into each other - which leaves not the nothingness we so dread (for that is one of the two terms) but... what?

The way to end that bifurcation, like any other dualism, is to yield to the side that we have avoided in this instance, to forget oneself and let go. If it is nothingness we are afraid of, the solution is to become nothing. Meditation is learning to forget the self by becoming absorbed in one's meditation-object (mantra, etc.). If the sense of self is a result of consciousness attempting to reflect back upon itself to grasp itself, meditation is an exercise in de-reflection. Enlightenment or liberation occurs when the usually-automatic reflexivity of consciousness ceases, which is experienced as a letting-go and falling into the void." "Men are afraid to forget their minds, fearing to fall through the Void with nothing to stay their fall. They do not know that the Void is not really void, but the realm of the teal Dharma" (Huang-po). [16] What we fear as nothingness is not really nothingness, for that is the perspective of a groundless sense of self haunted by the fear of losing its grip on itself. Religious faith should provide not a bulwark against such nothingness, but the courage to let oneself fall into it. Letting go of myself and merging with that nothingness leads to something else, the common origin both of what I experience as nothingness and of what I experience as myself. When consciousness stops trying to catch its own tail, I become nothing, and discover that I am everything - or, more precisely, that I can be anything." [17]

The Money Complex

If there is to be a psychoanalysis of money, it must start from the hypothesis that the money complex has the essential structure of religion - or, if you will, the negation of religion, the demonic. The psychoanalytic theory of money must start by establishing the proposition that money is, in Shakespeare's words, the "visible God"; in Luther's words, "the God of this world." [18]

Money is both a religion and the negation of religion, because the money complex is motivated by our religious need to redeem ourselves (fill our sense of lack). In Buddhist terms, the demonic results from the sense of self trying to make itself real (that is, objectify itself) by grasping the spiritual in this world. This can be done only unconsciously, that is, symbolically. Today, our most important symbol is money.

Schopenhauer notes that money is human happiness in abstracto; consequently, one who is no longer capable of happiness in concrete sets one's whole heart on money. It is questionable whether there is really such a thing as happiness in abstraction, but the second half is true: to the extent one becomes preoccupied with symbolic happiness, one is not alive to concrete happiness. The difficulty is not with money as a convenient medium of exchange, but with the "money complex" that arises when money become the desired thing - that is, desirable in itself. How does this happen? Given our sense of lack, how could this not happen?

Money is the "purest" symbol, "because there is nothing in reality that corresponds to it." [19] In itself it is worthless: you cannot eat or drink it, plant it, ride in it or sleep under it. Yet it has more value than anything else because it is value, because it is how we define value, and therefore it can transform into anything else. The psychological problem arises when life becomes motivated by the desire for that pure value. We all sense what is wrong with this, but it is helpful to make it explicit: to the extent that life becomes focused around the desire for money, an ironic reversal takes place between means and ends; everything is degraded into a mere means to that worthless end, all else is devalued to maximize merely symbolic ends, because our desires have been fetishized into that pure symbol. We end up rejoicing not at a worthwhile job well done, or meeting a friend, or hearing a bird-song - the genuine elements of our life - but at accumulating pieces of paper. How such madness could occur be comes apparent when we relate it to the sense of self's sense of lack, whose festering keeps us from being able fully to enjoy that bird-song (just this), etc. Since we no longer believe in am original sin, what can it be that is wrong with us? Without some religious expiation, how can we hope to recover? Today the sociallyapproved explanation -- the contemporary original sin -- is that we do not have enough money; and the solution is to get more, until we have enough and no longer feel any lack -- which ends up being never.

The transition from barter is hard to understand; how can human cravings be fetishized into pieces of metal? The answer is elegant because it reveals not only the origin of money, but its character even today. Money was and still is literally sacred: "It has long been known that the first markets were sacred markets, the first banks were temples, the first to issue money were priests or priest-kings." [20] The first coins were minted and distributed by temples because they were medallions inscribed with the image of their god and embodying his protective power. Containing such manna, they were naturally in demand, not because you could buy things with them but vice-versa: since they were popular, you could exchange them for other things.

The consequence of this was that "now the cosmic powers could be the property of everyman , without even the need to visit temples: you could now traffic in immortality in the marketplace." This eventually led to the emergence of a new kind of person, "who based the value of his life - and so of his immortality - on a new cosmology centered on coins." A new meaning system arose, which our present economic system makes increasingly the meaning-system. "Money becomes the distilled value of all existence ... a single immortality symbol a ready way of relating the increase of oneself to all the important objects and events of one's world." [21] If we replace "immortality" with "becoming real," the point becomes Buddhist: beyond its usefulness as a medium of exchange, money has become modern humanity's most popular way of accumulating Being of coping with our gnawing intuition that we do not really exist. Suspecting that the sense of self is a groundless construction, we went to temples and churches to ground ourselves in God; now we ground ourselves financially.

The problem is that the true meaning of this meaning-system is unconscious, which means, as usual, that we end up paying a heavy price for it. The value we place on money karmically rebounds back against us: the more we value it, the more we use it to evaluate ourselves. In his great historical study of death in Western culture, The Hour of our Death, Philippe Aries considers the modern attitude toward material things and turns our usual critique upside down. Today we complain about materialism, but the modern person is not really materialistic, because "things have become means of production, or objects to be consumed or devoured":

Can one describe a civilization that has emptied things in this way as materialistic? On the contrary, it is the late Middle Ages, up to the beginning of modern times, that were materialistic!... [T]he ordinary person [now] in their daily Life no more believes in matter than they believe in God. The individual in the Middle Ages believed in matter and in God, in life and in death, in the enjoyment of things and their renunciation." [22]

Our problem today is that we no longer believe in things but in symbols, hence our life has passed over into these symbols and their manipulation and then we find ourselves manipulated by the symbols we take so seriously. We are preoccupied not so much with what money can buy, but its power and status; not with a Mercedes-Bent in itself, but what owning a Mercedes says about us. Modern humanity would not be able to endure real economic equality, "because he has no faith in self-transcendent, otherworldly immortality symbols; visible physical worth is the only thing he has to give him eternal life." Or real Being. Our spiritual hunger to become real, or at least to occupy a special place in the cosmos, has been reduced to having a bigger car than our neighbors! It seems that we cannot get rid of the sacred, because we cannot get rid of our ultimate concerns, except by repressing them, whereupon we become "the more uncontrollably driven by them." [23]

The most brilliant chapter of Life Against Death, "Filthy Lucre," links money to guilt: "Whatever the ultimate explanation of guilt may be, we put forward the hypothesis that the whole money complex is rooted in the psychology of guilt." The psychological advantage of archaic society is that it "knew" what the problem was and therefore how to overcome it. Belief in sin allowed the possibility of expiation, in seasonal rituals and sacrifices. This provides a different perspective on the origin of gods: The gods exist to receive gifts, that is to say, sacrifices; the gods exist in order to structure the human need for self-sacrifice." [24] For Christianity that sacrifice is incarnated in Christ, who is believed to "take away" our sins. Religion gives us the opportunity to expiate our sense of lack by means of symbols - for example, the crucifix, the eucharist, the mass - whose validity is socially agreed upon and maintained. Hence, we feel purified and closer to God after taking Holy Communion.

What of the modern "neurotic type," who "feels a sinner without the religious belief in sin, for which he therefore needs a new rational explanation?" [25] What do you do with your sense of lack, when there is no religious explanation for it, and therefore no socially-agreed way to expiate it? The main secular alternative today is to experience our lack as "not yet enough." This converts cyclic time (maintained by seasonal rituals of atonement) into linear time (in which the atonement of lack is reached for but perpetually postponed, because never achieved). The sense of lack remains a constant, but our collective reaction to it has become the need for growth: the "good life" of consumerism (but lack means the consumer never has enough) and the gospel of sustained economic growth (because corporations and the GNP are never big enough). The heart (or rather blood) of both is the money complex. "A dollar is ... a codified psychosis normal in one sub-species of this animal, an institutionalized dream that everyone is having at once." [26]

The result of this is "an economy driven by a pure sense of guilt, unmitigated by any sense of redemption," "the more uncontrollably driven by the sense of guilt because the problem of guilt is repressed by denial into the unconscious." [27] Today our particular form of that insanity is the cult of economic growth, which has become our main religious myth. "We no longer give our surplus to God; the process of producing an ever-expanding surplus is in itself our God.... To quote Schumpeter: "Capitalist rationality does not do away with sub- or super-rational impulses. It merely makes them get out of hand by removing the restraint of sacred or semi-sacred tradition." [28]

Money (the blood) and economic growth (the body) constitute a defective myth because they can provide no expiation of guilt - in Buddhist terms, no resolution of lack. Our new holy or holies, the true temple of modern humanity, is the stock market, and our rite of worship is communing with the Dow Jones average. In return, we receive the kiss of profits and the promise of more to come, but there is no atonement in this. Of course, insofar as we have lost belief in sin, we no longer see anything to atone for, which means we end up unconsciously atoning in the only way we know how, working hard to acquire all those things that society tells us are important and will make us happy. Then we cannot understand why they do not make us happy, why they do not resolve our sense of lack. The reason can only be that we do not yet have enough. "But the fact is that the human animal is distinctively characterized, as a species and from the start, by the drive to produce a surplus.... There is something in the human psyche which commits man to nonenjoyment, to work." Where are we all going so eagerly? "Having no real aim, acquisitiveness, as Aristotle correctly said, has no limit." Not to anywhere but from something, which is why there can be no end to it as long as that something is our own lack shadow. "Economies, archaic and civilized, are ultimately driven by that flight from death which turns life into death-in-life." [29] Or by that flight from emptiness that makes life empty: by an intuition of nothingness that, when repressed, only deepens my sense that there is something very wrong with me.

In Buddhist terms, then, money symbolizes becoming real, but since we never quite become real we only make our sense of lack more real. We end up in infinite deferral, for those chips we have accumulated can never be cashed in. The moment we do so, the illusion that money can resolve lack is dispelled; we are left more empty and lad-ridden than before, being deprived of our fantasy for escaping lack. We unconsciously suspect and fear this; the only answer is to flee faster into the future. This points the fundamental defect of any economic system that requires continual growth to survive: it is based not on needs but on fear, for it feeds on and feeds our sense of lack. In sum, our preoccupation with manipulating the purest symbol, which we symptom to be the means of solving the problem of life, turns out to be a symptom of the problem.

If this critique of the money complex is valid, what is the solution? It is the same solution that Buddhism has always offered: not any quick fix that can be conditioned into us, but the personal transformation that occurs when we make the effort to follow the Buddhist path, which means learning how to let go of ourselves and die. Once we are dead, once we have become nothing and realize that we can be anything, we see money for what it is: not a symbolic way to make ourselves real to measure ourselves by, but a socially-constituted device that expands our freedom and power. Then e become truly free to determine our attitude toward it, toward getting it and using it. If we are dead, there is nothing wrong with money: not money but love of money is the root of evil. However, we also know that our essential nature does not get better or worse; just as it does not come or go, so it has nothing to gain or to lose. For those who do not experience themselves as separate from the world - as other than the world - the value of money becomes closely tied to its ability to help alleviate suffering. Bodhisattvas are not attached to it, and therefore they are not afraid of it; so they know what to do with it.
Notes
1. Murray's Johnsonia.
2. Rollo May et al., ed., Existence (New York: Basic Books, 1958); Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy (New York: Basic Books, 1980); Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (New York: Vintage, 1961); Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973) and Escape from Evil (New York: Free Press, 1975).
3. Becker, Denial of Death, pp. 11-18.
4. Becker, Denial of Death, pp. 27, 66, 60, 29; Becker, Escape from Evil, p. 163. Pascal's Pensees, no. 414.
5. Becker, Denial of Death, pp. 54-55.
6. Becker, Escape from Evil, p. 158.
7. Becker, Denial of Death, pp. 181-82 (quoting Roy D. Waldman), and p. 66 (my emphasis).
8. Brown, p. 268.
9. Brown, p. 113.
10. Udana 6, 7:1-3 (my emphasis in the first selection).
11. Heart Sutra; my translation.
12. All Yung-chia quotations are taken from an unpublished translation by Robert Aitken, director of the Diamond Sangha in Honolulu, Hawaii.
13. Norman Waddell, ed. and trans., The Unborn: The Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), pp. 47, 52, 55. Many other Buddhist examples of "the Unborn" and "the Uncreated" could be cited.
14. Vajracchedika-Prajna-Paramita Sutra (Diamond Sutra), Charles Luk, trans. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Buddhist Book, n.d.), 20; Luk's parentheses.
15. For an analysis of nonduality, especially subject-object nonduality, see David Loy, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
16. The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, John Blofeld, trans. and ed. (London: The Buddhist Society, 1958), p. 41.
17. For a more detailed exposition of the argument condensed in Part I, see David Loy, "The Nonduality of Life and Death," in Philosophy East and West, Vol. XL, no. 2 (April, 1990).
18. Brown, pp. 240-41.
19. Brown, p. 271.
20. Brown, p. 246.
21. Becker, Escape from Evil, pp. 76, 79 (ref. Geza Roheim), 80-81.
22. Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1981), pp. 136-37.
23. Becker, Escape from Evil, p. 85 (ref. Rank). Rilke: "Even for our grandparents a 'house,' a 'well,' a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat: were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost everything a vessel in which they found the human and added to the store of the human. Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life...A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers... Live things, things lived and conscient of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last still to have known such things. Letter to Witold von Hulewicz, 1925, in J. B. Greene and M. D. Herter Norton, trans., Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910-1926 (New York: Norton, 1947), Vol. II, pp. 374-75.
24. Brown, p. 265.
25. Otto Rank, Beyond Psychology (New York: Dover, 1958), p. 194.
26. Weston Labarre, The Human Animal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 173.
27. Brown, p. 272.
28. Brown, p. 261.
29. Brown, pp. 256, 258, 285.
Selected Bibliography
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press, 1973.
Becker, Ernest. Escape from Evil. New York: Free Press, 1975.
Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History. New York: Vintage, 1961.
Huang Po. The Zen Teaching of Huang Po. John Blofeld, trans. and ed. London: The Buddhist Society, 1958.
Loy, David. Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1988.
Loy, David. "The Nonduality of Life and Death." Philosophy East and West, Vol. XL, no. 2 (April 1990).
Luk, Charles, trans. Vajracchedika-Prajna-Paramita Sutra (Diamond Sutra). Hong Kong: Hong Kong Buddhist Book distributor, n.d.
May, Rollo et al., eds. Existence. New York: Basic Books, 1958.
Waddell, Norman, ed. and trans. The Unborn: The Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984.
Yalom, Irvin D. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, 1980.
http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-ENG/loy12.htm

Gross National Happiness: Towards Buddhist Economics

Gross National Happiness: Towards Buddhist Economics
Sander G. Tideman

Finding a way to connect economics and altruism is most difficult. However, these two field can - and should - meet on global and individual levels,
H.H. the Dalai Lama[1]

Introduction

In the last few decades, economic values are having an increasingly profound effect on our societies. Many of us are concerned that these effects erode communal and spiritual values, which have been upheld over many centuries and generations. So it is time to look again at what Buddhism has to offer to balance these effects. In particular, what does Buddhism say about economics?

Economist E.F. Schumacher was the first to introduce the concept of Buddhist economics in his landmark book Small is Beautiful[2]. This was followed by similar writings by P.A. Payutta of Thailand[3] and other Buddhist scholars. The leaders of Bhutan have introduced the concept Gross National Happiness (GNH), which can be regarded as the Buddhist equivalent to Gross National Product (GNP), the conventional indicator for a nation’s economic performance. All these attempts draw on two schools of thought, Buddhism and economics, which take rather different views on reality. So let us have a closer look at these two distinct traditions.

Buddhism is based on teachings of Gautama Buddha who lived 2500 years ago in ancient India. One of his key teachings is that suffering is caused by the way we perceive things and ourselves. Things appear to us as if they have the ability to provide us lasting happiness and comfort, so we become attached to them and we develop desire for them. But this craving is a result of ignorance about reality. The reality of things is that they are transient, impermanent, and therefore cannot produce the lasting happiness that we expect from them.

Buddhism does not reject matter and wealth as inherently evil, but considers them useful. First, material wealth prevents us from poverty and, second, it allows us to practice generosity; which causes ‘merit’ and a more happy society. Thus, “Right livelihood” is one of the eight main requirements of the Buddha’s path, which has been defined as follows:

“One should abstain from making one’s living through a profession that brings harm to others, such as trading in arms and lethal weapons, intoxicating drinks, poisons, killing animals, cheating etc., and one should live by a profession which is honorable, blameless and innocent of harm to others”.[4]

A true Buddhist person not only seeks wealth lawfully and spends it for the good, but also enjoys spiritual freedom. The Buddhist Pali canon states that such person acts as follows[5]:

Seeking wealth lawfully and unarbitrarily
Making oneself happy and cheerful
Sharing with others and doing meritorious deeds
Making use of one’s wealth without greed and longing, possess of the insight that sustains spiritual freedom

These principles provide the ground for attempts to define Buddhist economics. But Buddha himself made it very clear: real happiness does not come from acquiring or consuming material things. Happiness is essentially a state of mind, and mind is distinct from matter. Thus, Buddhism considers the path of mental or spiritual development superior to that of material development. What really matters is to psychologically detach oneself from matter, and strive for liberation and enlightenment, which is considered the ultimate state of happiness and fulfillment. This is achieved by the cultivation of values within one’s mind, such as insight, compassion, tolerance and detachment. Only this will bring true happiness, both for the individual and society[6].

In contrast, economics is focused only on material development. Values, which are the domain of the mind, are outside its scope. Many believe economic theory to be a science, free from subjective values. The only values which appear in classical economics models are those that can be quantified. This emphasis on quantification gives economics the appearance of an exact and neutral science. But is this so?[7] At the heart of economic theory and practice is the assumption that happiness is an experience that can be achieved from matter and in dependence of material resources. The state of mind is not relevant. Further, assuming that these resources are naturally limited and scarce, economic theory has invited a natural element of competition for these resources.

Hence, at least in the popular understanding, economics is associated with values which are very different from those of Buddhism, particularly competition, consumption and the maximization of profits and wealth.

How do we reconcile this with the teachings of Buddhism? How do we reconcile compassion with competition? How do we match detachment with consumption?

This paper will look at the values of Buddhism and economics in closer detail and see where these two worlds meet. We will first review the assumptions behind mainstream economics and the principal economic indicators measuring economic growth, particularly Gross National Product (GNP). We assume that these indicators point us in the direction of greater well-being, but is this really so? Then we will turn to principles of Buddhism and insights in modern science. We will find that new developments in economic thinking tend to converge with ancient Buddhist views. There is common ground emerging between the hitherto separate schools of thought.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to present a study of Buddhist economics, which would require more in depth research. This is merely a modest attempt to bridge seemingly contradictory beliefs and values, based on my personal exposure to them. My twenty years of study and practice of Buddhism and a same period of training and working in economic law and banking, which allowed me first hand work experience in Buddhist communities in Asia, may be worthwhile for others facing the same dilemma.




The world of economics

Economic textbooks talk of economic laws assuming man naturally competes for scarce and limited material resources. Happy is the man who is able to consume these resources, unhappy is the one who is not. Classical economics tell us that it makes no sense to exert time, effort or expense on maintaining values, if money can be made by ignoring them. Intangibles don't count.

One of the great economists of our time, Lord Keynes, wrote in 1930 that the time that everybody would be rich was not yet there: "For at least another hundred years we must pretend ourselves and to everyone else that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Averice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight"[8]. In Keynesian thought, which had a large effect on economists for much of the last century, ethical considerations are not merely irrelevant, they are an actual hindrance.

The assumptions underlying the so-called "economic laws" were developed at a time when religion was being separated from science, the accepted worldview became secularized, the sacred was substituted by belief in matter. Economic theory was affected by great scientific discoveries in physics, biology and psychology, and economic laws were presented with the same authority as laws of nature[9]. Newton and Descartes described reality in terms of a more or less fixed number of “building blocks”, of “things”, subject to measurable laws such as gravity and, put together smartly, operating like a big machine. The world of matter was regarded as a mere machine, to be used by man, his reason and free will.

Darwin had described human beings as a relatively intelligent species evolved from primitive apes motivated by lusts and aggression (as Freud would confirm later in psychology). Our intelligence has taught us to behave socially, but fundamentally we are selfish beings subject to the law of "survival of the fittest".

When Adam Smith, in his famous work The Wealth of Nations, introduced the "invisible hand" of the market, by which the things and building blocks can be exchanged efficiently on the basis of each individual's self interest, we extended these laws into the realm of economics. The concept of the invisible hand made big impact because for the first time in history, economic exchange could be rightfully left to individuals without need from intervention from governments. 19th century economists such as Malthus and Ricardo, added the notion that economies are closed systems, bound by fixed quantities of material goods. No matter how large economies become, they remain closed, thus limited. This has led to an important premise underlying classical economics: scarcity is a natural state. Hence it is believed that competition for scarce resources, or even war, is natural too. We forgot that Adam Smith wrote in his earlier work The Theory of Moral Sentiments that markets could not function without ethics and morals. We have come to believe that greed and selfishness is what economies are all about.

As E.F. Schumacher observed:

"The idea of competition, natural selection and the survival of the fittest, which purports to explain the natural and automatic process of evolution and development, still dominates the minds of educated people today".[10]

In his book "Small is Beautiful", Schumacher convincingly showed that these ideas, combined with the belief in positivism, have wrongly been given universal validity. They simply do not stand up to factual verification. But since they conveniently relieved us from responsibility - we could blame our immoral behavior on "instincts" - these ideas have retained a prominent place in the consciousness of modern man.

In fact, over the last two centuries we have firmly enshrined these principles in our capitalist legal systems, domestically and internationally. For example, when a competitor achieves a monopoly, he is punished under anti-trust laws, for competition must go on. The judge in the antitrust case against Microsoft ruled that the firm's monopoly had done "violence to the competitive process"[11]. The international laws governing the main multilateral agency for international trade, the World Trade Organization (WTO), are based on Ricardo's concept of "comparative advantage", the idea that nations, by specializing, will benefit from unfettered competition. So, whether we like it or not, our modern society is organized on principles that favor and encourage competition.

At the same time we have developed indicators to measure the well-being of our society in terms of economic growth. Inspired by the mathematical approach of the natural sciences, we have chosen indicators which measure things that can be quantified by assigning monetary weightings. Thus, they exclude qualitative distinctions. Yet over the last decades it has appeared that it are exactly the qualitative factors that are crucial to our understanding the ecological, social and psychological dimensions of economic activity. For example, economic calculations ignore the value of things such as fresh water, green forests, clean air, traditional ways of life, to name but a few – simply because they cannot be easily quantified. This partial blindness of our current economic system is increasingly recognized as the most important force behind the accelerating destruction of the global environment.

Gross National Product: what do we measure? [12]

GNP, the most basic measure of a nation’s economic performance, is calculated as part of the System of National Accounts (SNA) on the basis of all quantifiable economic transactions recorded in a given period. Governments want to see this grow each year. Yet GNP statistics are inherently flawed. In calculating GNP, natural resources are not depreciated as they are being exploited. Buildings and factories are depreciated, as well as machinery, equipment, trucks and cars. Taking an example that is familiar for the Buddhist communities in South East Asia, why are forests not depreciated after irresponsible logging and farming methods turn them into barren slopes causing erosion and landslides? The money received from the sale of logs is counted as part of the country’s income for the year. Further, the national statistics would show that the country has gone richer for cleaning up landslides. The funds spent on the chain-saws and logging trucks will be entered on the expense side of the project’s accounts, but those to be spent on the supposed replanting will not. Nowhere in the calculations of this countries GNP will be an entry reflecting the distressing reality that millions of trees are gone forever.

Aside from the environment, traditional GNP calculations ignore the informal, unpaid economy of caring, sharing, nurturing of the young, volunteering and mutual aid. This informal “Compassionate Economy” is hidden from economist’s statistics and therefore public view, yet it represents some fifty percent of all productive work and exchange in all societies.[13] In developing countries, these traditional non-money sectors often predominate. Indeed, the United Nations Human Development Report in 1995 estimated such voluntary work and cooperative exchange at $16 trillion, which is simply missing from the world’s GNP statistics.

Classical economics holds that all participants in the market between supply and demand have ‘perfect information’ about the facts on which they base their choices. This is another assumption that has proven to be incorrect, especially in light of the buyer’s inability to ascertain to what extent a product has depleted natural resources or exploited labor. Our current economic system not only makes unrealistic assumptions about the information available to real people in the real world; it also assumes incorrectly that natural resources are limitless ‘free good’ failing to distinguish between renewable and non renewable goods and simply equating them on the basis of monetary values set by a supposedly ‘informed’ market.

Our system also fails to account for all the associated costs of what is called consumption. Every time we consume something, some sort of waste is created, but these costs are usually overlooked and externalized. For instance, for all the fuel we consume in a given day, we do not account for extra CO2 emission in the atmosphere. Since we equate an increase in consumption with an increase in ‘standard of living’, we encourage ourselves to produce more and more, and also more waste. This has led to the disturbing reality that those countries which are considered richest, produce the most waste.

Discounting the future

Our national accounting standards also contain questionable assumptions about what is valuable in the future as opposed to the present. In particular, the standard discount rate that assesses cash-flows resulting from the use or development of natural resources assumes that all resources belong totally to the present generation. As a result, any value that they may have to future generations is heavily discounted when compared to the value of using them up now. Likewise, by discounting the future value of money on the basis of interest rates, we have accepted that a dollar spent today is more valuable than a dollar spent tomorrow. This has not only caused a dangerous short-term mentality among fund managers who control increasing amounts of investment funds which can be moved from one country to another at the speed of online digital communication. It also provided a whirlpool-like force behind the expansion of our financial markets, which have come to grow to such an extent that national authorities can no longer control them.

The financial markets, in particular, with the daily turnover of more than US$ 1.5 trillion on foreign currency markets worldwide[14], are now setting the pace for continued growth and expansion. Money should be moved in order to make more money. Short term rewards are more important than long term, sustainable investments. An increase in stock prices are equated with economic success, and conversely, a drop is regarded as an economic failure with immediate divestment as a result. This has had already disastrous results, as the 1997-1998 crash in the Asian financial market showed. Many have blamed this entirely on weak and ineffective governance of local markets, while only few recognize that the global system itself is at fault.[15] It should, of course, be quite obvious that preoccupation with growth in an finite environment leads to disaster, but the supertanker of short term capitalism seems unstoppable.

By concentrating on the mere statistics of GNP and other conventional monetary indicators, we fail to distinguish between the qualitative aspects of growth; healthy or unhealthy growth, temporary or sustainable growth. We do not question what growth is actually needed, what is required to actually improve the quality of our life.

Recognizing this dilemma, and out of concern for the rapid depletion of natural resources caused by economic development, the concept of ‘sustainable development’ has emerged. The 1987 report by the World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, spread and popularized the term ‘sustainable development’, which it defined as “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”[16]. This concept became a focus of national attention after the UN conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, 1992. Rio’s Agenda 21 commits all 178 signatory countries to expand their national statistical accounts by including both environmental factors and unpaid work[17].

However, almost a decade later, only very few of these countries have been able to live up to their commitments. National Agenda 21 efforts have led to academic debates, heightened public awareness and minor adjustments in the SNA and taxation rules, but it has not fundamentally altered the way we manage and measure our national economy. National political agenda’s continue to be determined by interest groups dominated by commerce and industry who are locked on old paradigms, while in the meantime the power of national authorities has gradually eroded by the globalization of industry, finance, technology and information.

So it is not surprising that the functioning of our economies still leaves a lot to be desired. While substantial wealth is generated mostly by a minority elite in developed countries, the majority of the world population remains poor. The gap between rich and poor keeps growing in all societies, and also among countries in the world. Environmental degradation seems irreversible. Drugs and new forms of slave trade prosper. Corruption is widespread. Stock markets are turning into global casinos. War is increasingly 'economic', motivated by either the lack or the protection of wealth. Even if the global economy prospers, it seems to prosper at the expense of the air, earth, water, our health and our rights to employment.

So we have to revisit the assumptions that underlie all this. Are the economic laws really uncontrollable? Buddhism tells us that we - our minds and karma (which is defined as the consequences of our actions)[18] - make up reality, so likewise it must be us who make up the economy. For better or for worse, economies and business don't function separately from our decisions, since without us they wouldn't exist. So if we want a better economy we have to look deeply at who we are and how we live.

Buddhist views rediscovered

Buddhism and other spiritual traditions have long described reality in rather different terms than traditional economic theory. While the latter are primarily concerned with a fragment of human behavior, namely "economic" actions defined as those which can be quantified in terms of money, the former approach reality holistically, incorporating all actions - and even thoughts - that make up our being and society. While Newton and classical economics define the world in things, of separate building blocks, spiritual teachings point out there is really no independent "thing" there, and that the focus on "things" will miss the relations and the whole context that make the thing possible. In economic textbooks human beings are isolated consumers and producers interacting at markets driven by monetary gains. In spiritual traditions humans are viewed as being part of a larger whole with which they can communicate by opening up their hearts and minds.

This holistic viewpoint is lent credence by modern physics, which postulate that the universe consists of unified patterns of energy. According to one of Einstein's favorite epigrams, the field generates the object, not vice verse. That is, whole systems give rise to specific things, not the other way around. While in the Cartesian worldview we can only know reality by knowing specific parts, Einstein discovered that in order to know things, we need to know the whole from which they originate. In other words, we are not isolated hard and fast physical things but more like “light beings” or “energy-flows” continuously interrelating and changing. Thus, we are more like “intangibles” - exactly that which cannot be measured in classic economic models.

Most economic strategies are built around the possession of material things such as land, labor and capital. What counts is how much real estate we own, how much money we have and how many hours we work. The ideal for many people is to own enough land and capital, so we don't have to sell our time. This strategy, which no doubt will be recognized by many of us in developed countries, is based on the assumption that land, labor and capital is all there is, that the real world is a closed end system. Spiritual traditions claim the opposite. Buddhists recognize a Buddha nature in every sentient being - the potential to be whole and enlightened. Our minds create and pervade everything, hence physical reality is open for the spiritual.

The concept of scarcity has also been refuted by modern discoveries. Nuclear energy is based on breaking the seemingly closed-end system of the atom and the universe has been found to continuously expand. Like the expanding limits of outer space, the modern business of cyber space and Internet, has created unexpected opportunities and amounts of new wealth. Another example, while being rightfully concerned about the limited availability of the planet's fossil fuel deposits, there is no shortage of energy in our solar system. In fact, we are surrounded by abundant energy sources: sun and wind, as well as the earth's heat, motion and magnetism. But most renewable energy resources are not available to us, not because they don't exist, but because we don't have the know how to tap them.

The key in what we call the New Economy is that what counts here is not merely material possession, but know how and creativity, the domain of the mind. As many of the new Internet based, e-commerce companies know, a company cannot "own" the knowledge that resides in the heads of the employees. Research has shown that most successful business strategies focus less on things but more on how to manage them. It is commonly accepted that all technical and social innovation is based on what is now phrased as 'intellectual capital'. And unlike ordinary capital, intellectual capital is not subject to physical limits.

So what does all this tell us? First, that the traditional concept that we are simply competitive beings chasing scarce material resources is incorrect. Further, intangible values are equally important for our well being. These intangibles are stored in the mind, free from physical constraints and therefore potentially of unlimited supply. Finally, happiness is not merely determined by what we have, how much we consume, but also by what we know, how we can manage and how we can be creative, ultimately by who we are - so not by having, but by being, as Buddha discovered ages ago.

Human nature and motivation

But what kind of beings are we? Altruistic or selfish? Compassionate or competitive? Modest or greedy? These are important questions on which economic theory and Buddhist traditions hold different views.

Economists have accepted the principles of selfish individualism: the more the individual consumes, the better off he will be. Economic growth is achieved when individuals consume more and more so that demand and output are boosted. This leaves no room for altruism, where an individual may incur costs for no conceivable benefit to himself. This approach reduces the meaning of cooperation to a mere reciprocal arrangement among individuals: individual sacrifices on behalf of the community can only be seen as an insurance policy, for it will ensure the individual that the community will help him in the future.

We can understand the need for compassion because of mutual dependence in this increasingly smaller and interconnected world. But spiritual traditions point to another, more profound and personal dimension of compassion. They advise us to make altruism the core of our practice, not only because it is the cheapest and most effective insurance policy for our future, but specifically because the real benefit of compassion is that it will bring about a transformation in the mind of the practitioner. It will make us happy.

How can this be done if our real nature is selfish? Compassion can only work if our nature is receptive to having an altruistic attitude, if somehow compassion is in harmony with our essence, so that we can actually enjoy being compassionate. If we are inherently selfish, any attempt to develop a compassionate attitude would be self defeating.

Most religions state that humanity's nature is good. As we might say, our kind is kind. Buddhism explains that there is no real independently existing self that is either good or bad. Our selfish motives are based on an illusionary belief in an independent self, separating ourselves from others. We do have selfish traits, they may even dominate us, but they can be removed by practice. And since we are so connected to the world, since there is no disconnected self, the practice of compassion is most effective.

Several modern scientific disciplines, such as biology, psychology and medical science, have started to study the effects of empathy on the human mind, body, health and relationships. Not surprisingly, they have ascertained that compassion is of tremendous help to our well being. A compassionate frame of mind has a positive effect on our mental and physical health, as well as on our social life, while the lack of empathy has been found to cause or aggravate serious social, psychological and even physical disorders.[19] Altruism has also been found to be more efficient than market exchange in spheres such as health care and education.[20]

The classical economic model takes a similar shortsighted view that people are naturally motivated by maximizing profits and utility. As economist Stanislav Menchikov observes[21]:

The standard, neoclassical model is actually in conflict with human nature. It does not reflect prevailing patterns of human behavior. [..] If you look around carefully, you will see that most people are not really maximizers, but instead what you might call ‘satisfyers’: they want to satisfy their needs, and that means being in equilibrium with oneself, with other people, with society and with nature. This is reflected in families, where people spent most of their time, and where relations are mostly based on altruism and compassion. So most of our lifetime we are actually altruists and compassionate”.

So compassion is definitely something that we can and need to develop. But what does that mean for our economy? First, we should recognize that even though compassion is a desirable state of mind, there may well remain a role for competitive practices. As the Dalai Lama says, competition can be beneficial if it encourages us to be the best in order to serve others.[22] Tibetan Buddhist monks for whom compassion is the heart practice, know a variety of competitive events, including heated public debates, which help to sharpen the mind. So while compassion is the motivating factor, competition can be a means to achieve the goal.

Faith in the Market

While religion accepts the use of competition, in contemporary economic thought competition has become like a religion. Particularly since the 1980-ies, with the demise of socialism and the promising allure of globalization, we have come to see the competitive market process as sacred. The bodies that rule our global economy today, the G7 (the world’s industrialized countries), IMF and the World Bank (together known as the ‘Washington consensus’) prescribe the world a neoclassical recipe of privatization, decentralization and market reform, assuming that our common interests are best served by the invisible hand of the market.

Critics of this faith are generally silenced by powerful arguments. They are told that government interference in markets will only lead to inefficient wasteful government bureaucracies. They claim that history has shown that the libertarian or laissez faire approach will allow markets to increase wealth, promote innovation and optimize production - and to regulate itself flawlessly at the same time. The fact that humans persist in behaving "irrationally and uneconomically" according to the market model, far from invalidates the model, they say; we simply have not yet learned to appreciate the benefits of competition. Some economists, trying to account for "irrational" religious commitments, such as voluntary gifts or abstention from consumption, even introduced a new economic factor - "afterlife consumption"[23].

But the debate is not simply on government versus markets. As noted earlier, I believe it is about deeper, spiritual issues. Economic thinking is primarily focussed on creating systems of arranging matter for optimal intake of consumption. It assumes that the main human impulses are competition and consumption, and it has sidestepped spiritual and moral issues because it would involve a qualitative judgment on values and other intangibles that go beyond its initial premises. But by assuming that the more we consume, the happier we are, economists have overlooked the intricate working of the human mind.

As Robert Kuttner points out in "Everything for Sale":

"Trust in the unfettered market place, enshrined in politics by Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory and by the clarion call for less government interference in people's lives, is undiminished to this day. Dissenting voices have been drowned out by a stream of circular arguments and complex mathematical models that ignore the real-world conditions and disregard values and pursuits that can't easily be turned into commodities. These values and pursuits happen to be ones that most of us consider integral to our identity: justice, freedom, worship, leisure, family, charity and love".[24]

According to Buddhist logic, at the root of this belief in the market lies a very fundamental misconception[25]. That is, we have not really understood what makes us happy. Blind faith in economics has led us to believe that the market will bring us all the things that we want. We cling to the notion that contentment is obtained by the senses, by sensual experiences derived from consuming material goods. This feeds an emotion of sensual desire. At the same time, we are led to believe that others are our competitors who are longing after the same, limited resources as we are. Hence we experience fear, the fear of losing out, the fear that our desire will not be satisfied.

So we can observe that the whole machine of expanding capitalism is fuelled by two very strong emotions: desire and fear. They are so strong that they appear to be permanent features of our condition. Yet Buddha taught that since these emotions are based on ignorance, a misconception of reality, they can be removed by the understanding of reality, which is the prime object of Buddhist practice. According to Buddhism, happiness is an inner experience, available to anyone, regardless of wealth or poverty. Further, fundamentally there is nothing that we lack. By developing the mind, our inner qualities, we can experience perfect wholeness and contentment. Finally, if we share with others, we will find that we are not surrounded by competitors. Others depend on us as we depend on them.

If Buddha would be alive today, he would probably recreate economic theory based on a correct and complete understanding of what is a human being and what makes him happy. As long as economics is based on a partial or wrong image of man and his reality, it will not produce the results we need. It may continue to create wealth for some, but it will also continue to compromise the quality of our lives and many of us will be left behind.

Towards a new paradigm: humanized economics

But the tide seems to be changing. In order to explain the persistent tension between economic theory and practice, old assumptions should be reviewed. As a result, intangibles such as values and other more "noble" human impulses are gradually moving into the scope of leading thinkers, including economists, historians, social scientist, businessmen and bankers.

Nobel Price winner economist Douglass North says:

"The theory employed, based on the assumption of scarcity and hence competition, is not up to the task. To put it simply, what has been missing [in economic theory] is an understanding of the nature of human coordination and cooperation"[26]

The concept of cooperation, which can be regarded as a natural extension of religious concepts such as compassion, has become an area of growing economic research known as institutional economics. Similarly, the social and psychological research on Emotional Intelligence, pioneered by the Harvard psychologist Daniel Goleman, has shown that success in business is dependent on how well we cooperate with others[27]. Showing respect, sympathy and understanding towards others are needed for advancing in our careers. Many corporations have started to test and train their staff according to Emotional Intelligence indicators, known as EQ. From here it is only a small step to the practice of compassion.

The 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Science went to Amartya Sen, who defines economic development in terms of freedom of basic necessities such as education and healthcare. He observed that as long as the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to the majority of the world population, planning for economic development is of no use. In doing so, he has restored an ethical dimension to the discussion of development. Sen writes in “Development as Freedom”:

"Along with the working of markets, a variety of social institutions contribute to the process of development precisely through their effects on enhancing and sustaining individual freedoms. The formation of values and social ethics are also part of the process of development that needs attention[28].

David Landes, in his best-selling review of two millennia of economic history “the Wealth and Poverty of Nations”[29], concludes: ”If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference”. Just because markets give signals does not mean that people respond timely or well. Some people do this better than others, depending on their culture, and culture is nothing but the aggregation of values.

Even George Soros, the Hungarian born speculator who made fortunes from free market capitalism, now passionately campaigns for a more social face of capitalism. In his recent “Open Society; Reforming Global Capitalism”[30] he states:

“Economic theory presuppose that each participant is a profit center bent on maximizing profits to the exclusion of all other considerations. But there must remain other values at work to sustain society – indeed human life. I contend that at the present moment market values have assumed an importance that is way beyond anything that is appropriate and sustainable. Markets are not designed to take care of the common interest.”

Values are also making a (modest) revival in the business world. Some have started to emphasize values as part of creating a 'corporate identity'. This is mainly motivated by the need to distinguish the growing and increasingly lookalike firms from one another in the market, and to give its increasingly mobile and disloyal staff a sense of belonging. Social research has shown that the company's performance is for at least 30% attributable to the corporate culture, the climate at the workplace, which is a share too large to ignore[31]. The recognition that corporate culture matters has also led to the emergence of Buddhist inspired literature on more enlightened forms of management, focussing on creating a happy work environment instead of simply boosting profits and maintaining control structures.[32]

Further, in response to consumer lobbies, an increasing number of companies are taking steps to show social responsibility. Some companies now publish information on the basis of triple bottom line reporting, i.e. reporting not just on financial performance but also on compliance with environmental and social standards. A corporation which recently improved its environmental responsibility, is British Petroleum which decided to change its slogan to ‘Beyond Petroleum’, indicating its concern for the development of alternative, renewable forms of energy sources. These are all steps making a difference towards a more humane face of business.

We are moving towards a new economic paradigm, one that is not based on maximizing ownership and profits or boosting abstracts statistics such as GNP, but concerned with managing creativity and knowledge, and improving the quality of our lives and children's future. Economists are busy making models that account for the intangible factors that drives the information-based economy, such as know how and other human capital, as well as the environmental and social costs of development, such as the pollution and destruction of air, water, forests and other so called "free goods".[33]

The World Bank in 1995 issued a revolutionary "Wealth Index", which defines the wealth of nations to consist for 60% of 'human capital' (social organization, human skills and knowledge), 20% of environmental capital (nature's contribution) and only 20% of built capital (factories and capital). The United Nations have produced the UN Human Development Index (HDI), measuring factors such as education, life-expectancy, gender and human rights data, which is now commonly used in each of the UN's 187 member countries.

Hazel Henderson, a leading thinker on new economics who pointed us at the informal, unpaid “Compassionate Economy” which remains hidden from GNP statistics, pioneered by developing the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicator.[34] From all new economic indices this one comes closest to measuring values such as compassion by incorporating cultural values (for example as a means to measure safety) and activities of recreation, including practices of self-improvement and participating in social or religious groups.

Many outside the strictly economic sphere are speaking out as well. President Vaclav Havel of Chech Republic called for “a global minimum of shared human values” at the recent Forum 2000 conference in Prague. Christian theologist Hans Kung calls for such global ethical norms in his A Global Ethic For Global Politics and Economics[35], just like the Dalai Lama who expresses similar views in his many lectures and writings[36].

The role of Buddhist communities

These developments in economics and contemporary western thinking run parallel to the sentiment in developing countries where many believe that their indigenous culture, rather than been seen as a hindrance to development, in fact has a lot to offer to development in terms of improving the quality of life. Buddhist communities are a case in point, as we can see from Bhutan's call for Gross National Happiness and the movements in Siam and Ladakh.[37] They point us to the need to base development on spiritual values, transmitted through culture, rather than merely material values.

It is here that Buddhism, with its extensive research on the human condition, has much to offer. By offering a personal path to achieve lasting material and spiritual happiness, Buddhism can rightly claim that its path surpasses any solution offered to obtain happiness in traditional economic terms, which does not go beyond an optimal level of material consumption, wealth and economic stability. From a Buddhist viewpoint, the contribution of economics and material development is nothing more than providing an external condition allowing people to devote time and energy to embark on the more rewarding path of spiritual development. Mind over matter, so to speak. The ideal of Buddhist communities could be to become an example of how to put this path into reality.

But at the same time, Buddhists countries cannot ignore modern-day global economic realities which increasingly have powerful cross-border and cross-cultural impact. In many countries there is a growing sentiment opposing the spread of globalization and free trade, which are so evidently driven by the belief in competition ands consumption. Particularly in certain pre-industrialized societies, where community structures of mutual care have remained intact, there are strong sentiments against opening up to global markets. These communities not only feel physically inadequate to compete with "global" - yet distant - multinational firms and capital markets. Deeper down they fear that forces of globalization and consumerism may erode ancient community values based on mutual support systems. When this happens, they may lose more than cultural values, they may lose their sense of belonging[38]. They find expression in violent protests against the WTO and IMF - the symbols of free trade - or in religiously inspired fundamentalism, such as equating the West with Satan[39].

While these fears are understandable, it would be a mistake for Buddhist leaders to propagate the closure of borders and going back to inward oriented policies of the past, based on distrust of foreign powers. This strategy has failed to produce results elsewhere in the world and in fact has caused ancient cultures to collapse, among them Buddhist ones such as China, Tibet, Mongolia, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The ideals of Buddhism preclude the option to close off from the larger world and prevent the free exchange of information, for liberation requires freedom[40]. Thus, Buddhist leaders have no choice but to take up the challenge of the global economy, to help shaping and steering these economic realities into improvements in quality, rather than merely quantity, so that more people benefit and fewer receive harm.

The key to opening up yet retaining cultural integrity lies in education. It is not simply a choice between western or traditional style education, but rather what is needed is a combination of the two. Buddha taught that we should not accept Buddhism on the basis of any authority, but only on close personal investigation: ”Like one would investigate a piece of gold on the market to see if it is real or not, so should one verify the validity of Buddha’s words”[41]. On this basis, Buddhist culture can be inclusive and absorb those parts of western culture which are of benefit, but reject those which are not. At the same time, this inclusive yet critical attitude will form a much needed contribution to the world at large. There are many societies which share a position on the edge of the global capitalist system, but only very few of them enjoy the Buddhist cultural self-esteem rooted in its traditional yet vibrant culture.

If Buddhist societies can show their values are relevant, then these should ultimately have a noticeable economic effect. They may not be counted as such by number-focussed economists, or even by any of the new economic indicators. Our own individual experience will tell us if our society is happy or not. We will feel the difference between working in a system that is based on competition from an environment that allows close cooperation. If we treat each other merely as competitors, distrust and isolation will be the result. While an environment of compassion and care will naturally foster free exchange and mutual well being.

Towards Buddhist economics: from ideals to practice

We can conclude by saying that while some of the views on what is Buddhist economics are emerging, it is too early to know what it means in practice. Much more research and debate is needed.

A key practical problem is that economics is based on quantifiable data, while Buddhism is based on and incorporates many non-quantifiable, intangible values for which there is no monetary measurement possible at present. The appeal of the conventional economic indicators has been that they are based on money, which can be subjected to mathematical logic and discipline. In contrast, Buddhism deals with the totality of life, which – as we also know from the modern sciences – is extremely complex to measure. Since much of life is non-quantifiable, in essence the dilemma is how to quantify the non-quantifiable.[42]

At this stage, Buddhist development concepts such as GNH are more like an ideal, a target, which will require extensive research and practice before it can be a guiding force for day-to-day economic and political decision making. This is in fact true for all sustainable development indicators.

We should realize that as long as we treasure the freedom and opportunities that the market economy provides, Buddhist economics will have to include principles of competition and market forces. Competition is so much valued in our capitalist economies because it has proven to be the most effective incentive for bringing out the best of our selves. That is why capitalism has 'defeated' communism. But competition without a moral dimension is like an elephant gone wild - it will destroy the very earth it depends on – so Buddhist economics should be based on ethics. At the same time, the failure of Marxism has shown us that values such as compassion or cooperation can never be more than guidelines for individuals or groups. Likewise, Buddhist economics cannot be translated into an ideological system and forced upon us.

Both the West and the East should define principles to reinvent what is known as a 'mixed economy', the idea that market forces could do many things well - but not everything. This will require government and all actors in the economy to reclaim responsibility for their lives and start defining economic objectives in more human terms. The neoclassical principle of ‘laissez-faire’ has wrongly created a mentality of taking things for granted and we have become enslaved by the market and its monetary values. The alternative is not a return to rigid central planning and closing one’s border, but rather the development of an alternative economic model tailor-made to suit the condition of our own society, yet aligned to the wider world.

The concept of Gross National Happiness, Bhutan's contribution to Buddhist economics, is both an excellent starting point and target for this discussion, but the concept will need to be refined, elaborated and tested in practice in order for it to make sense for mainstream economists and politicians. The ideals of Buddhist economics can be achieved if development is measured in terms of economic development, education, health, and the preservation of culture and nature, while based on principles of inclusiveness, ethics, freedom and competition. Here lies a noble task for Buddhist scholars and the new generation of more enlightened economists.


Note: This paper is adapted from a paper presented to a forum with leaders and scholars from Bhutan, in the Netherlands, January, 2001.

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Biography of the author:

Sander Tideman (LL.M.) holds law degrees from the University in Utrecht and the University in London, specializing in international economic law and Asian legal systems. He also studied Chinese language and culture at the Taiwan National Normal University.

In his professional career, he worked as a lawyer for Baker & McKenzie in Taiwan (1987-1989), as Chief Representative of ABN AMRO Bank in Beijing, China (1990-1994), as Vice President of Structured Export Finance for ABN AMRO Bank in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (1995-1997) and Regional Manager Asia for Triodos Bank, the Netherlands (1997-1999).

He is now an independent consultant specialized in micro-finance, enterprise development and sustainable development programs in developing countries in Asia. He also serves on the board of several not-for-profit institutions. These include the Inner Asia Center for Sustainable Development, which he co-founded, and the Bridge Fund, an investment fund for sustainable enterprises on the Tibetan plateau and Mongolia. He takes a special interest in the preservation of culture and nature in Inner Asia.

He is also a director of Maitreya Institute, a Tibetan Buddhist study center in the Netherlands. He has been a student of Buddhism since 1982, studying under teachers in India, Nepal and China. Since 1996 he has been an occasional teacher of Buddhist meditation and he has given lectures on applying principles of Buddhism in management and business.

He published and edited several articles and books, which includes Doing Business in China (in Dutch, Walburg Pers, Netherlands, 1996), Sustainable Development in Central Asia (co-editor with Dr Shirin Akiner / Curzon Press, London, 1998), Enterprise and Development in the 21st Century: Compassion or Competition?, based on a forum discussion with H.H. the Dalai Lama (Asoka, the Netherlands, 2000), and Towards Buddhist Economics (Mandala Magazine, California, 2000).



http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/uploads/doc_212200105346_Buddhist%20Economics%20-%20Sander%20(2).doc
[1] H.H. the Dalai Lama and F. Ouaki, Image all the People, A Conversation With The Dalai Lama on Money, Politics and Life as It Could Be, Wisdom Publications, Boston, 1999
[2] E. F. Schumacher used the term “Buddhist economics” as title of a far sighted essay, included in his Small is Beautiful; Economics as if People Mattered, Harper & Row, 1973, which became a landmark book for alternative economics (see also below).
[3] P.A. Payutto, Buddhist Economics; A Middle Way of the Market Place, Bangkok, 1992. For other similar work from Thailand, see Sulak Sivaraksa in Global Healing, Thai Inter-Religious Commission for Development, 1998.
[4] See Walpola Rahula, What The Buddha Taught, the Gordon Fraser Gallery, London, 1959
[5] Cited in Phra Rajavaramuni, “Foundation of Buddhist Social Ethics”, in Ethics, Wealth, and Salvation, ed. Russell F. Sizemore and Donal K. Swearer (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990).
[6] See for the Buddhist definition of happiness, e.g. the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, the Art of Happines, Coronet Books, UK, 1998
[7] Mahatma Gandhi observed that nothing in history has been so disgraceful to human intellect as the acceptance among us of the common doctrines of economics – as a science. A small group of economists including Barbara Ward, Kenneth Boulding, E.F. Schumacher, Gunnar Myrdal, always stressed, along with theologians from many faiths that economics is not a science. Interestingly, the Nobel Prize Committee acknowledges that the prize it gives for economics was, in fact, set up by the Central Bank of Sweden. Even the economist of London recently admitted that economics is not a science in spite of its pretensions.
[8] quoted in Small is Beautiful, Economics as if People Mattered – see note 2.
[9] See for an overview of the linkage between the natural and economic sciences, Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point, Flamingo, 1985.
[10] Small is Beautiful - see note 2
[11] The Economist, April 8, 2000
[12] For an excellent critique of conventional economic indicators see Taking Nature Into Account; Towards a Sustainable National Income. A Report of the Club of Rome, by Wouter van Dieren (ed.), IMSA, the Netherlands, 1995. Similar issues have been explored in the context of Central Asia by Sander Tideman in The Shortcomings of The Classical Economic Model, in Sustainable Development in Central Asia, Curzon Press, 1998.
[13] Quoted by Hazel Henderson in Beyond Globalization; Shaping a Sustainable Global Economy, New Economics Foundation, UK and Kumarion Press, USA, 1999.
[14] Hazel Henderson, Beyond Globalization, see note 13.
[15] For a view on the causes of the Asian financial crisis, see Walden Bello, The Asian Financial Crisis, The Ecologist, February, 1999.
[16] World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland report, New York, 1987.
[17] United Nations, Agenda 21 UNCED Concluding Document, New York, 1991
[18] There are many (mis)interpretations of karma. In essence, it means ‘action’, but it is also commonly understood as the ‘law of cause and effect’. All actions produce results. Good karma is regarded as those actions that produce happiness, bad karma refers to actions that cause suffering. See e.g. Pabongka Rimpoche, Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, Wisdom Publication, Boston, 1991
[19] See for example, the research of biologist Francisco Varela, in The embodied mind; Cognitive Science and Human Experiences, Cambridge, 1991. See also various exchanges with the Dalai Lama in Mind and Life conferences, such as laid down in Healing Emotions, Daniel Goleman, ed., Shambhala Publications 1997
See for an illuminating comparison between molecular genetics, the evolution of life forms and economics, David Korten, the Post Corporate World; Life After Capitalism, Kumarium Press, US, 1999.
[20] see, for example, an examination of the British and American blood banks in Richard Titmuss' classic The Gift Relationship, George, Allen & Unwin, London, 1970
[21] quoted in Enterprise and Development in the 21st Century: Compassion or Competition?, ed. Sander Tideman, Asoka, 2000.
[22] See, for example, Imagine all the People; see note 1
[23] Corri Azzi and Ronald Ehrenberg, quoted in Robert Kuttner, Everything for Sale; the Virtues and Limits of the Market, by Robert Kuttner, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1997
[24] See Everything for Sale, note 23
[25] See for a psycho-analytical study of these issues, Dr David Loy, Buddhism and Money, Paper presented at the Chung-Hwa International Conference on Buddhism, Taiwan, 1990
[26] Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, by Douglass C. North, Cambridge University Press, 1990
[27] Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman, New York, 1999.
[28] Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1999
[29] The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, by David Landes, Little Brown & Co, New York, 1998.
[30] Open Society; Reforming Global Capitalism, by George Soros, BBS Public Affairs, New York, 2000
[31] Emotional Intelligence, see note 27
[32] See for example, Lewis Richmond's Work as a Spiritual Practice; a Practical Buddhist Approach to Inner Growth and Satisfaction on the Job, Broadway Books, New York, 1999, or Geshe Michael Roach's The Diamond Cutter: The Buddha on Strategies for Managing Your Business and Your Life, Double Day, New York, 2000.
[33] See Taking Nature in Account, see note 12.
[34] Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, by Hazel Henderson, Jon Lickerman and Patrice Flynn, Calvert Group, 1999.
[35] Hans Kung, A Global Ethic For Global Politics and Economics, Oxford Univ. Press, 1999
[36] See, for example, the Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millenium, New York, 1999 and Imagine All the People, see note 1.
[37] See, for example, Ancient Futures; Learning from Ladakh, by Helena Norberg-Hodge, Rider Books, U.K. 1992.
[38] See note 37.
[39] See for convincing case studies of these conflicting tendencies, Jihad vs. McWorld, Benjamin R. Barber, Times Books, U.S., 1995, and The Lexus and the Olive Tree, by Thomas Friedman, Harper Collins, London, 1999.
[40] Buddhism considers lasting happiness to be achieved by liberation, which is defined as freedom in all meanings of the word. See e.g. Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, note 16.
[41] See Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, note 16.
[42] Economists working on the new indicators assume this can be achieved within the quantitative framework of economics. By changing relative prices, qualitative indicators can be incorporated into the information on the basis of which we make our economic choices. For example, by taxing products made by wasteful technologies, we discourage the producer from continuing to produce in this way. But quantifying the value of natural and cultural resources is much more difficult. For example, if we value a national park by estimating the amount of money and time people are willing to spend visiting the park, can this estimate ever provide the full picture? How does one estimate the benefits of the park on the overall environment of the planet and in terms of bio-diversity? Or what if a wealthy oil firm is prepared to pay a higher price for the park than its estimated value?