Buddhist Economics

Buddhist Economics: Scales of Value in Global Exchange
Oxford Handbooks Online

Buddhist Economics: Scales of Value in Global
Exchange
Matthew King
Subject: Religion, Buddhism, Comparative Religion, Religion and Society, Social Science
Studies of Religion, Ethics
Online Publication Date: Jul 2016 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935420.013.64
Abstract and Keywords
In addition to summarizing key concerns in Theravda Buddhist Economics by scholars

such as E. F. Schumacher and the Thai monk Payutto, this essay explores how
descriptions of the West, Western development, and the science of economics serves in
that literature to construct Occidentalist versions of Southeast Asian traditionalism and
religious orthodoxy. It then introduces the previously unstudied work of Shrab Tendar, a
prominent Tibetan Buddhist scholar in the contemporary Peoples Republic of China who
has written prodigiously on what he considers to be a scripturally based Mahyna and
Tantric Buddhist Economics. Comparing these three influential iterations of Buddhist
Economics, this essay argues that this movement has less to do with economics proper
than with what I call trans-Buddhist scales of value: site-specific desires and measures
of sought after outcomes that here privilege the economy and economic behavior as a
technique for individual, social, and environmental well-being and emancipation.
Keywords: Buddhist Economics, economy, value, Theravda, Tibetan, Shrab Tendar, E. F. Schumacher, Payutto
Introduction: Economy and the Study of

Buddhism
The purpose of Buddhist Economics is to use wealth in order to accomplish the
happiness of oneself and others. In order to become wealthy, some people forfeit
their happiness and health and destroy the happiness of others. Does such wealth
have any essence whatsoever?
Shrab Tendar (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:20)
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The ramaa renunciant movement founded by Siddhrtha Gautama in the fifth century
BCE was formed by a new age of urbanization, merchant expansion, commercial relations,
and monetization. Our earliest traces of Buddhist life are full of references to trading
caravans, merchant guilds, urban development, market towns, and new modes of
production for profit (Benavides 2004). Such sources convey unambiguously that
Buddhism was linked with economic advance and commercial expansion (Bailey and
Mabbett 2003, 63). Buddhist communities have traditionally thrived when there have
been stable political conditions able to produce the economic prosperity and material
surplus necessary to sustain monastic populations. The long-term successes and failures
of Buddhist missionary advances into Central, Southeast, East, and Inner Asia attest to
this trend (e.g., Heirman and Bumbacher 2007).1
Even so, the early German social scientist Max Webers 1916 analysis of the comparative
sociology of Indian religions, which supposedly denied the early Indian Buddhist tradition
an economic life tout court, seems to have set a precedent for leaving the relationship of
Buddhism and economy largely unstudied to this day. However, this oft-repeated
characterization of Webers position by those pressing for a turn to the material and to
the economic in Buddhist Studies misses the subtlety and specificity of the formers
analysis entirely (Gellner 2011). The Buddhas heterodox proposition was, in Weberian
terms, a salvation religion that denied social responsibility and any kind of social ethic as
pernicious basic illusion. Buddhist practitioners sought release from sasra (cyclic
existence) by pursuing an arhat ideal thoroughly disconnected from the world of
rational action and any actively conceptualized social conduct (Weber 1958, 213). On
the basis of the few master texts available to him, Weber observed that the Buddhistic
type of salvation was sought in a psychic state quite removed from either inner-
worldly or even extra-worldly activity (213). In this sense, the Buddhist sagha was for
Weber a community of the homeless and thus a community of the economy-less (214).
Of Mahyna movements that seem to have developed as more inclusive, laicized

devotional traditions sometime around the turn of the Common Era, Weber argued that
the holiness attributed to monastic inactivity was never paired with a holiness attributed
to this-worldly work among the laity. In Webers comparative analysis, there was no
doctrinal room in Buddhism for the sort of methodological lay morality that could act as
the basis for developing the rational economic ethic he detected most clearly in strains
of Calvinism but also in India among the Jains (Weber 1958, 216217). This was for him
the essential peculiarity of early Buddhism: the complete elimination of any form of
inner-worldly motivation to conduct or rational purpose [goal-directed action] in
nature (222). No doctrinal movements emerged to sacralize and center in-worldly social
organization and conduct in early Buddhism, Weber determined. However, based as it
was on a limited number of master texts available in translation, Webers conclusion is no
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longer defendable even within the purview of its original argument. It should certainly
not be taken to validate a vision of early Indian Buddhist communities (or of any Buddhist
community, anywhere) that existed beyond, or even outside of, its material and economic
conditions.
That material and economic factors helped mediate Buddhist formation was in fact a
widely accepted and regularly feature of Buddhist intellectual life through most of its
history, including even in ancient India in the first centuries of its existence. As the
product of a particular moment in ancient north Indian history defined by upward
mobility and economic prosperity, Gautamas was a movement tied to merchants and
farmers which provided an useful ideology for elites wanting to retain whatever privilege
they had acquired through their wealth (Bailey and Mabbett 2003, 52). As Gregory
Schopen (2004) has shown with unparalleled clarity, breadth, and force, the
archaeological, epigraphical, and even textual evidence is quite clear: Buddhists
including monastics and including even the earliest generations of the Buddhas followers
have hardly been reluctant to engage in, or be formed by, their economic activity.
As some important scholarship of late has reminded us, the co-production of Buddhist
and economic life has continued to happen through to today. In the late and postcolonial
period, for example, scholars of Buddhism have explored icon commodification on the
global market (Lopez 1998), practices serving as bourgeois markers of class (Rocha
2006), doctrines inspiring critiques of materialism (Pardue 1971), and the transit of
Buddhism through the globalized religious marketplace (McMahan 2008; Obadia 2011).
Mindfulness and other Buddhist technologies of the self have been widely commoditized
in the self-help marketplace, circulating through corporate offices on Wall Street to Bay
Area retreats and raves. In their mediating forms, content, and routes of circulation,
Buddhist formations across the modern period have been and remain economic
formations, regardless of their national or transnational contexts and soteriological
aspirations.
This all runs against the enduring presumptions of a post-Protestant privilege usually
accorded the transcendent over the material in the study of religion (Coleman 2004;
Meyer 2008). It is quite clear that Buddhists have been active participants in the modern
capitalist integration of Asia and have not just received but also given shape to what
Weber was fond of calling the capitalist process of rationalization as a world historical
process. Even Slavov iek is lately fond of arguing that certain mainstream Buddhist
practices (like the New Age and self-help embrace of Asiatic spirituality) that aim to
accept social reality as it is are in fact paradigmatic symptoms of our late-capitalist
condition. (Such as the case of a Western Buddhist unaware that the truth of his
existence is in fact the social involvement which he tends to dismiss as a mere
game [iek 2001; Mllgaard 2008].) Were Weber alive today, iek often remarks, he
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would ignore Protestantism and would write a book called The Taoist [or Buddhist] Ethic
and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.
My point in all this is as unassuming as it is promising and underexplored: Buddhism

happens economically. This is as true of the earliest recorded years of Gautamas
community, Tang China, postcolonial Burma, imperial Japan, and Soviet Siberia as it is of
contemporary Buddhist life in Qinghai or Santa Monica. While still a marginal topic in
Buddhist Studies, matters economic have attracted sustained reflection and critical
engagement by many prominent Buddhist intellectuals in the last half-century, both in
Asia and among sympathizers in Europe and the Americas. Both economic development
models and economics as a science of economic behavior have been critically engaged by
such intellectuals in light of an overriding concern for safeguarding the substance and
continuity of the Buddhasana (the Buddhist dispensation).2 The most consistent and
deeply considered manifestation of those concernsas fascinating for their interpretative
creativity as for the breadth of their global exchangeis a trans-Buddhist movement that
self-identifies as Buddhist Economics and which will occupy the remainder of this
chapter.
Approaching Buddhist Economics as Scales of

Value
Dissenting European economists and Theravdan Buddhist intellectuals first dove into a
revisionist reading of the Pli canon and of traditional Southeast Asian folkways using the
rubric of Buddhist Economics in the 1960s. This movementwhich was less concerned
with unpacking colonial legacies than we might expectbroadly sought to define and
then resist what it considered the Western episteme guiding the (increasingly
militarized) material, social, and even ethical reorganization of Southeast Asia at that
time. Their critiques targeted models of Western development (whether capitalist or
Marxist) as well as the legitimacy and scope of the science of economics, a field of
knowledge which was routinely rejected for being Eurocentric, overly objective, hyper-
specialized, and blinded by a reductive notion of the human and of human desires.
In the decades since, Buddhist Economics has developed into a global movement that
has, among other things, inspired Asian monastic scholars to undertake sustained re-
readings of regional Buddhist canonical and exegetical literature in order to recover and
disseminate the Buddhas economic message. For their exegetical breadth and creativity
as much as for their stated purpose of bringing Buddhist scriptural traditions, ethics, and
interpretative techniques into critical conversation with visions of modernity tied
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inextricably to the West and the challenges of Westernization, Buddhist Economics

shares much with other pseudo, trans-Buddhist movements such as, but hardly limited to,
the Buddhism and Science dialogue, Dhammic Socialism, Buddhist Anarchism, and Deep
Ecology.
In ways that I think applies to these related intellectual movements, in what follows I
propose that we approach the study of Buddhist Economics as Occidentalist scales of
value.3 Buddhist Economics among Asian Buddhist monastic scholars especially has
sought to define hierarchies of desired worlds and to measure the outcomes of activities
aimed at securing human (and, in some versions, environmental) well-being. These scales
of value are always contrasted with, and formed in dialectic engagement with, currently
hegemonic Western scales of value and influence. The response of Buddhist economic
theorists has been to contrast subjective values and more robust models of human desire
rooted in the Buddhist canon with what are rejected as shallow models of consumption
and the maximizing individual underpinning normative economics. In response, certain
prominent Buddhist scholars representing various regional traditions have identified in
their classical sources full-fledged fields of knowledge about the economy that come
equipped with alternative measures for well-being via economic behavior. Let us now
explore ways that scales of value are at play in the work of two founding theorists of
Buddhist Economics in the Theravda Buddhist world of Southeast Asia (Schumacher and
Payutto) before turning to a more sustained analysis of the more recent, and previously
unstudied Mahyna and Tantric milieu of contemporary Tibetan regions of the PRC
(Shrab Tendar).
Buddhist Economics in a Theravdan Key

They said: Mr. Schumacher, economics is all very well, but what does Buddhism
have to do with it? Schumacher replied: Economics without Buddhism, i.e.
without spiritual, human, and ecological values, is like sex without love.
E. F. Schumacher (1999, 38)
What I will call Theravdan-based Buddhist Economics is widely known through the
works of Buddhadsa Bhikkhu, A. T. Ariyaratne (1999), Sulak Sivaraksa (Sivaraksa,
Kotler, and Bennett 2009), Padmasiri De Silva (1998, 2002), H. N. S. Karunatilake (1971),
and Ananda W. P. Guruge (2008). However, two authors in particular are responsible for
delineating what has become known as Buddhist Economics proper. The first is E. F.
Schumacher, who coined the term in the 1960s. The second is Venerable Payutto, a Thai
monastic scholar who infused Schumachers rather romantic reflections with the gravitas
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of scriptural citation. Because of Payutto especially, even Buddhist readers outside the
Pli-centric Theravdan fold have been inspired in recent decades to reread their own
canonical and exegetical traditions to determine if the Buddha had indeed taught on
matters economic, and then to determine what he meant (and then what he really meant)
when he did.
E. F. Schumachers Buddhist Economics
Beginning with Payutto, the labor of most exegetes of Buddhist Economics has been to
mine their Buddhist canon to glean recommendations for proper economic behavior. The
resulting collections of scriptural citations provide strategies for determining both wordly
and salvific outcomes. Interestingly, this operation was unknown to the actual founder of
Buddhist Economics, the British economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (19111977).
Schumacher was a German citizen schooled at Oxford and Columbia who, as a favored
interlocutor of no less than John Maynard Keynes, became an influential economist with
the British government in the postwar period. While serving as Chief Economic Advisor
for the powerful UK National Coal Board, in the mid-1950s Schumacher resided in Burma
as a consultant, where he was shocked by the disruptive effects of rapid development
upon traditional, rural Burmese society. At the same time, Schumacher undertook
personal explorations of Buddhism that would have a profound impact on his career after
his return to Britain in the early 1960s. Once on English soil, Schumacher began
conceiving a heterodox economics which rejected certain presumptions in the normative
development economics in which he had been trained. In the late 1960s, Schumacher
began promoting an anti-materialist position that looked to Indian social activists such as
Gandhi and J. C. Kumarappa, author of The Economy of Permanence (1946), for a
wholesale Asian alternative to Western models of economic thinking.
The most enduring result of this turn in Schumachers career was Buddhist
Economics (1966), a seminal essay that remained little known until its 1973 publication
in Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. A widely read and acclaimed
collection of Schumachers dissenting economic theories, Small is Beautiful was
dependent on caricatures of a romanticized and static traditional Asia that helped
denaturalize the faulty organizing concepts of mainstream Euro-American economic
thinking.4 The presumed universalities of the maximizing individual and of exponential
consumption are well-worn examples in this piece. Largely a critique of what he called
Western economies, Small is Beautiful and Buddhist Economics in particular invented
alternative models of development for Asia and the West that would privilege human-
scale technologies, decentralization, and sustainable uses of natural capital.
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Schumacher fervently attacked the social and environmental impacts of industrial, top-
down expansionist development tied explicitly to Western materialism.5
In a line of critique taken up by many of his later monastic readers across Asia,
Schumachers Buddhist Economics argued that Western economics, like all specialist
forms of knowledge, suffers disastrously from a kind of metaphysical blindness,
assuming that there is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any
presuppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are free from
metaphysics or values as the law of gravitation (Schumacher 1999, 16). Unburdened
by the need to provide scriptural references for the Buddhism of his Buddhist Economics
(as would be required for his Asian heirs described below), Schumacher writes
incredulously that no one seems to think that a Buddhist way of life would call for
Buddhist economics, just as the modern materialist way of life has brought forth modern
economics (16).
In his writing, Schumacher defines pervasive references to the Buddhist way of life
with rather generic summaries of the Four Noble Truths (Pli cattri ariyasaccni) and,
when there is any specificity, to the fourth of those, the Noble Eightfold Path (Pli
ariyhagikamagga). Teachings on one of those eight, Right Livelihood (Pli
sammjva), were for Schumacher the principal site of the Buddhas economic message.6
He juxtaposed the dehumanizing effects of Modern (i.e., normative, Western) Economics
with the humanizing effects of Right Livelihood and Buddhist Economics more generally
using themes such as labor, desire, mechanization, natural resources, and consumption.
For example, using the logic of the normative economic theory in which he had been
trained, labor for the employer is simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it
cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation (Schumacher 1999, 38). For the
employee, labor forfeits leisure and remains only a means for securing wages.
In contrast, Schumacher argues that for a Buddhist Economist (the never-defined and
conveniently malleable protagonist of Schumachers work on this topic), labor itself is
valued for its humanizing function and not for its potential to produce surplus capital. In
other words, labor is an end in itself. This is so in three ways: To give a man a chance to
utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centeredness by
joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services
needed for a becoming existence (38). A becoming existence, one of the basic truths of
human existence, is at the heart of Schumachers Buddhist Economics, such that work
and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated
without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure (38).
The maximizing individual and the sort of base consumption assumed in the normative
models of Modern Economics that Schumacher had earlier professed now elicited a
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special disdain in him. The Buddhist Economist, he mused, must always privilege an
optimal (not maximal) pattern of consumption that would require less effort and provide
more leisure (Schumacher 1999, 42). Since ownership and consumption in Buddhism is
supposedly a means to an end, Buddhist Economics is the systematic study of how to
attain given ends with the minimum means. Modern Economics, on the other hand,
considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity, taking the
factors of productionland, labor, and capitalas the means (42). Buddhist
consumption is here an expression of Buddhist (i.e., non-Western and traditional) scales
of value that privilege simplicity and nonviolence. They also aim to consume little, use
local trade, refrain from exploiting nature or other human communities, and thus fulfill
the primary injunction of Buddhist teaching: Cease to do evil; try to do good (42).
In ways such as these, Schumacher imagined a (unsourced and ahistorical) Buddhist

Economics that was nonmaterialistic, spiritually imbued, and as such, a non-modern and
non-Western spectrum of knowledge, behavior, and values. Whereas modern economics
considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity, taking
the factors of productionland, labor, and capitalas the means, Buddhism in
Schumachers essay was simply a cardholder for the systematic study of how to attain
given ends with the minimum means (Schumacher 1999, 42). This first iteration of
Buddhist Economics was thus simply an utopian Other to an evil lack of compassion and
a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly
existence (38). It would be up to one of his Southeast monastic readers to clearly root
Schumachers general statements about Buddhism and economy to specific Buddhist
canonical sources and to the authority of received tradition.
Venerable Payuttos Buddhist Economics
While Schumachers static contrasts between Buddhist and Western ways of life was
enough to enchant counterculture audiences in Europe and the Americas in the 1970s,
Theravda Buddhist scholars in Southeast Asia who were inspired by Schumachers
project needed to develop a more robust, canonically based iteration. This was due to the
ultimate authority attributed to the Buddhas word recorded in scripture and to the
interpretations of those words on the part of realized past masters who wrote
authoritative commentaries. Instead of waxing philosophical about the inclinations of
some abstracted Buddhist economist, they set out to know what exactly the Buddha had
said about economic behavior. In what canonical sources were those words recorded?
What Pli terms were used to convey those teachings? Where in the Buddhas body of
teachings were economic topics discussed? On the basis of extensively mapping such
scriptural citations in the Pli canon, these Theravdan scholars sought to map economic
behavior praised or criticized by the Buddha twenty five centuries ago onto contemporary
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economics. They sought to answer, for example, whether the authority and global reach
of so-called Western-based economics (and of the dominant forces of modernization more
broadly) could be subsumed into Buddhist models of human desire, behavior, and desired
routes of personal and social development?
Prayudh Aryankura Payutto (b. 1939), also known as Venerable Dhammapitaka, was the
first and still the most widely read Theravda scholar to supplement Schumachers
concept with actual canonical references and the authority of the Buddhavacana (the
Buddhas recorded words). Payutto put the Buddhism into Schumachers Buddhist
Economics, in other words. The five essays collected and translated in his 1992 Buddhist
Economics is meant to extend Schumachers Buddhist Economics, a work he notes
gestured only very broadly to the fact that the Buddha had delivered an economic
message in his teachings on the Noble Eightfold Path. Via Schumacher, Payutto agrees
that the Eightfold Path does indeed offer the kind of holistic approach desired by his
German predecessor, and that Right Livelihood especially transposes economics into a
dhammic key so that economic behavior may fully become capable of solving the
problems of life (Payutto 1998, 18). Payuttos scholarly credentials and expertize in the
Pli canon allowed him to construct a Buddhist Economics fit to travel through Buddhist
scholarly networks across Asia, often along unexpected routes, such as from Southeast
Asia to the eastern stretches of the Tibetan plateau in Qinghai (as we shall see below).
Like Schumacher before him, Payutto was preoccupied with contrasting Western and
Buddhist values and models of well-being. In that way, Payuttos theories react strongly
to the perceived failure of Western fields of knowledge, their methods, and their
predictive models to meet the challenges of our times, especially outside of the West.
Even more than for Schumacher, Modern Economics is found wanting for Payutto, since
it is too rooted in the limited episteme of a hyper-specialized and Western-centric
science. As a scientific field of knowledge prioritizing objectivity, economics is the
product of what he pejoratively labels the the age of specialization in Industrial
Revolution era Europe. As such, economics operates with too narrow a disciplinary focus.
Its constricted optic results in a stunted body of knowledge that artificially separates
certain fields of economic activity from other spheres of human life, such as moods and
motivations, social relations, environmental responsibility, and so on.
While economic thinking has been in existence since the time of Plato and
Aristotle, the study of economics has only really crystallized into a science in the
industrial era. Like other sciences in this age of specialization, economics has
become a narrow and rarefied discipline; an isolated, almost stunted, body of
knowledge, having little to do with other disciplines or human activities.
(Payutto 1998, 1516)
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In refrains that became widely repeated amongst later Buddhisct economical thinkers,
Payutto argued that normative economics cannot in the first place adequately account for
the complexity of either the human or human interaction with society and the
environment. Furthermore, as a discipline striving for objectivity, economics misses the
subjective drivers of economic activity such as fear, desire, morality, and compassion.
Also, the measures of well-being used by economic models do not differentiate, for
example, between economic surplus and growth stemming from war and charity, for
example, or alcohol sales and attending religious teachings (16). Just as egregiously,
economics (like all the social sciences, Payutto suggests) focuses exclusively on socially
constructed phenomenon (conventional truths such as wages and inflation) instead of
fixed cause and effect relationships such as the environmental impact of our material
desires. Economic solutions to ethical, social, and environmental problems thus remain
elusive, since the scales of value that are at their base remain so constricted.
His alternative, unsurprisingly, is to elaborate on Schumachers ideas and turn to the

Buddhist tradition to recover a more properly dhammic and comprehensive measure of
well-being via economic behavior. This Buddhist Economics would be not so much a self-
contained science, but one of a number of interdependent disciplines working in concert
toward the common goal of social, individual and environmental well-being (Payutto
1998, 17). Claiming to be an objective science, normative economics most egregiously
ignores what Payutto calls subjective values. These include the fear and desire that
motivate our everyday sasric human behavior, the mental and emotional factors that
actually generate harmony and well-being, and the broader question of ethics and
economics. These are component parts of natural processes of cause and effect that, in
Payuttos telling, is the exclusive purview of the Buddhist tradition. Without accounting
for cause and effect, Economists look at just one short phase of the natural causal
process and single out the part that interests them, ignoring the wider ramifications.
Thus, modern economists take no account of the ethical consequences of economic
activity (16). The economics the world needs cannot be separated from the dhamma,
that complex and dynamic process of causes-and-effects that constitute reality (20).
Even more fundamental than his concern with the causal horizon of normative economics,
however, is Payuttos effort to expose and problematize the ill-defined notion of desire
that Modern Economics uses in its predictive modeling of maximizing consumption. While
Payutto accepts that Modern and Buddhist Economics may agree that human beings have
unlimited desire, the measure of desire adopted in the former is remarkably ill-informed
and reductive from the vantage of his Thai Theravda tradition. A solution is to turn to
the Buddhas teachings on virtuous and non-virtuous mental factors in order to construct
an economics that can in the first place differentiate between tah and chanda. These
are two types of desire understood by Theravda exegetes to motivate human activity but
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with different goals and with different causal effects. Tah (craving, ambition,
restlessness, thirst) is, in Payuttos words, directed toward feeling; it leads to seeking of
objects which pander to self interests and is supported and nourished by
ignorance (Payutto 1998, 34). Chanda, a desire necessary for actual well-being founded
in wisdom (Pli paa), is directed toward benefit, it leads to effort and action, and is
founded on intelligent reflection (34). A more robust theory of desire, according to
Payuttos Buddhist Economics, can help unlock the latent subjective, ethical, social,
environmental, and even soteriological possibilities of economic behavior effaced by the
limited scale of the normative, Western-centric science of economy.
As with Schumacher, work and labor are representational of the ways Payutto constructs
or, as he would say, recoversa canonically sourced Buddhist Economics founded on
the distinctions between tah and chanda. In Modern Economics, he writes, tah-fueled
work is never done for its own sake. It is, rather, a means to satisfy our desires for sense
gratification, leisure, and pleasure outside of work; the means obstructs the ends, at least
over the short term. Work motivated by chanda, however, extracts satisfaction and well-
being from work, since it places value on performing work that is of benefit and does no
harm, or which at the very least is done with pride and to the best of our ability.
With only tah to get their salary but no chanda to do their work, people will only
go about the motions of performing their duties, doing just enough to get by. The
result is apathy, laziness and poor workmanship. When tah is the motivating
force, workers and employers are trapped in a game of one-upsmanship, with each
side trying to get as much for themselves as they can for the least possible
expense.
(Payutto 1998, 5051)
The rate of debt and corruption in developing countries is evidence enough for Payutto to
conclude that consumers cannot tolerate delay between working and consuming the
objects of their desires (4748). Payuttos Buddhist Economicswhere reducing tah
and encouraging chanda become the measure of a healthy economy, and where non-
consumption and even non-production are sometimes the best route to well-beingis
contrasted with the limited view of Modern Economics that assumes the economy would
halt if desire-based consumption could be abandoned.
Payutto, like many of the Theravdan theorists of Buddhist Economists that would later
build on his work, makes no serious claim that his ideas could act pragmatically as a
model for actual economic policies on production, circulation, and consumption. Rather,
his Buddhist Economics critiques normative by offering a more expanded view of the
desires that motivate our activity, of the web of interconnection that binds us to each
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other and to the environment, and of the non-maximizing forces that lead to human well-
being (such as non-production and non-consumption). By turning to his Pli sources,
Payuttos works also infused Schumachers original formulation with actual Buddhist
doctrine. But just where in the canon do such insights and prescriptions reside in
Payuttos telling?
To clarify his appropriation of economic terminology from the Buddhist scriptures,

Payutto notes that in the first place the Buddha never praised anything like
poverty (Pli dadiddiya) as a route to either worldly happiness or sasric release.
What he regularly praised was contentment (Pli santuhi) and limited desire (Pli
appicchat) and, on occasion, the accumulation of wealth especially among the laity
(Payutto 1998, 60). Some of the most widely recorded and helpful of the Buddhas lay
disciples, Payutto reminds us, were quite rich and did great works with their wealth (like
Anthapiika). The Buddha even occasionally praised monastic disciples such as Sivali
for the offerings they received, since this seemed to recognize the quality of their
renunciation.
The main theme in the Scriptures is that it is not wealth as such that is praised or
blamed but the way it is acquired and used. Blameworthy qualities are greed for
gain, stinginess, grasping, attachment to gain and hoarding of wealth [amongst
monastics]. Acquisition is helpful in the practice of the Noble Path, or if it benefits
fellow members of the Order.
(Payutto 1998, 61)
On that basis, Payutto praises those who have developed the wisdom to become detached
(Pli nissaraa-pa) from their possessions, since he can live cheerfully and
unconfused without being spoiled by worldly wealth (69).
That said, Payutto decides that the Buddha never specifically taught on a general field of
knowledge on anything like economics. However, he did give many teachings that contain
lessons on virtuous economic behavior from which a cumulative Buddhist Economics may
be culled. For example, although the Buddha never specifically taught about the subject
of economics, teachings about the four requisitesfood, clothing, shelter and medicine
occur throughout the Pli Canon. In essence, all of the teachings concerning the four
requisites are teachings on economics; or else a teaching on mental training, for
example, may include guidelines on economic activity (Payutto 1998, 71). A scripturally
based Buddhist Economics is available in Payuttos view, but we must extract them from
the teachings on other subjects (71).
The sum of Payuttos extensive mining of the Pli canon is what he calls a Middle Way
Economics. This is founded first in values of moderation (Pli mattaut): the
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awareness of that optimum point where the enhancement of true well-being coincides
with the experience of satisfaction. Thus, in contrast to the classical economic equation
of maximum consumption leading to maximum satisfaction, we have moderate, or wise
consumption, leading to well-being (Payutto 1998, 69). Second, Payuttos Middle Way
Economics centers the ethical injunction not to harm self or others, one of the subjective
values he alleges are excluded from the hyper-specialized and objective field of Modern
Economics:
In the classical economic model, unlimited desires are controlled by scarcity, but
in the Buddhist model they are controlled by an appreciation of moderation and
the objective of well-being. The resulting balance will naturally eliminate the
harmful effects of uncontrolled economic activity.
(Payutto 1998, 43)
And this is the crux of Payuttos elaboration on Schumachers original term, one that has
resonated with monastic readers across Asia to this day: we ought to measure the worth
of economic behavior in light of the broadest possible view of causality, that karmic scale
which is the exclusive area of specialization of the Buddhist scholar. From that vantage, a
healthy economy is measured by the sorts of desire that motivate economic behavior and
the long-term harmony and well-being that our economic lives ensure between the
individual, society, and nature.
Shrab Tendars Mahyna and Tantrayna

Buddhist Economics
Some Tibetan monks and laypeople are completely unfamiliar with this topic and
believe that Buddhist Economics was just a creation of my garbage mind. I dont
blame them; their world is like a small waterwheel.
Shrab Tendar (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:40)
Since Payutto, many Theravda scholars and Euro-American commentators have sought
to elaborate on the idea of a canonically based Buddhist Economics fit to challenge the
damaging influence of Modern Economics. Rooted in the Pli canon and postcolonial
sociopolitical and environmental concerns in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Theravda
Buddhist Economics has been the project of intellectuals who, according to some of their
critics, are as guilty as Schumacher for projecting urban, middle-class values upon a
fantasy of pre-colonial village life that never really existed (Deitrick 2007, 183). Such
Page 13 of 29

dismissive assessments, however, fail to account for the sophistication of some of their
readings of economics and of canonical literature. Still, it is true that in the hands of
monastic scholars such as Venerable Payutto in Thailand or intellectuals of the Sarvdaya
ramadna movement in Sri Lanka, Theravda Buddhist Economics has remained a
rather static juxtaposition of tradition with the West. In that way, regardless of the
sophistication of their canonical scholarship, Theravda Buddhist Economics has stayed
firmly in the Occidentalist tradition of Schumacher.
An extremely interesting and as yet unstudied contemporary formulation of Buddhist

Economics from well outside the Schumacher-Payutto Theravda fold comes to us in the
work of Shrab Tendar (Tib. Shes rab bstan dar, 1968 ). Otherwise known as Gyadrl
(Tib. Rgya grol), Shrab Tendar is a prominent and controversial Tibetan monastic
scholar from Qinghai Province in the Peoples Republic of China who publishes and
lectures on topics as diverse as the history of valid knowledge (Skt. prama; Tib. tshad
ma) to the authenticity of the mythic snow lion.
His most famous works (and infamous, if measured by the volume of discussion it has
generated in online Tibetan forums) explore Buddhist Economics (Tib. Nang bstan dpal
byor rig pa). In several Tibetan language works on the topic that have been published in
China in recent years, Shrab Tendar recalls that reading Schumacher and Payuttos
essays in (sometimes partial) Chinese translation inspired him to find currents of
economic thought in his own tradition (e.g., Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:12).7 Like
Payutto in the Theravda Buddhist world, Shrab Tendars contribution to Buddhist
Economics has been to mine the vast scriptural inheritance of his Indo-Tibetan Buddhist
tradition. Importantly, this has resulted not only in recovering what he considers to be
the Buddhas Mahyna and Tantric teachings on virtuous economic behavior but also,
much more controversially for contemporary Tibetan audiences, he promotes a
traditional field of knowledge (Tib. rig gnas) on economic behavior (Tib. dpal byor kun
byod) long lost in Indo-Tibetan scholasticism.
For the sake of brevity, in what follows I provide a summary of Shrab Tendars version
of Buddhist Economics drawing primarily primarily on a representative selection of his
many Tibetan-language essays. Two introductory essays and an interview are included in
a fairly long 2012 collection entitled Buddhist Economics (Tib. Nang bstan dpal byor rig
pa). These three pieces have circulated widely on their own in Tibetan and Chinese
journals and have been re-posted and commented upon countless times in the
blogosphere. The two essays (in their 2012 versions) are called A Brief Description of
Buddhist Economics (Nang bstan dpal byor rig pa mdo tsam gleng ba) and Another
Description of Buddhist Economics (Nang bstan dpal byor rig pa bskyar du gleng ba).
The interview I consider below is entitled, rather plainly An Interview on the Topic of
Page 14 of 29

Buddhist Economics (Nang bstan dpal byor rig pai skor gyi bcar dri). To further
illustrate the sort of Indian and Tibetan texts Shrab Tendar evokes as authoritative
sources for his Mahyna and Tantric Buddhist Economics, I will also reference a fourth
piece entitled A List of Titles Which Concern the Sources for Buddhist Economics from
the Buddhist stras (Nang bai bstan bcos las byung bai dpal byor rig pai skor gyi dpe
chai mtshan tho). Needless to say, a fuller study of Shrab Tendars work in light of
socio-religious trends in contemporary Tibet is needed but beyond the limited scope of
this essay.
Like Payutto, Shrab Tendar acknowledges that the economic teachings of the Buddha
are not recorded in any one place but are scattered throughout the Buddhist canon.
Unlike the Pli and Theravdan-centrism of all previous Buddhist Economic monastic
thinkers in Asia, however, Shrab Tendar elaborates his version of Buddhist Economics
on the basis of the Mahyna and Tantric stras, astras, vinaya, tantras, and their
authoritative Indian and Tibetan commentaries familiar to his Buddhist milieu. Like his
Theravda counterparts and unlike Schumacher, Shrab Tendars concern is to establish
the scriptural authority of Buddhist Economics; or, in emic terms, an identifiable and
unbroken scriptural tradition (Tib. gzhung lugs) of the Buddhas teachings on wealth
and the economy. As he says in the introduction to the 2012 collection of essays on the
topic. He outlines his project characteristically as follows:
The Teacher [Buddha] greatly illuminated those [topics] directly in numerous

pronouncements, which in turn make up the scriptural tradition of Buddhist
Economics. Therefore, the concept (Tib. tha snyad) of Buddhist economics is not
contained in the main body of any one text. Instead, its foundations are dispersed
across [the Buddhas] teachings.
(Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:1)
Turning to the Tibetan canon and their commentarial traditions, Shrab Tendars
recovery operations explore all or some of nine subtopics: the nature of wealth (dpal
byor gyi ngo bo); the connection between people and wealth (mi dang dpal byor bar gyi
bral ba); connections between society and wealth (dpal byor dang spyi tshogs bar gyi
bral ba); the beneficial power of wealth (dpal byor gyi phan nus); meaningful wealth
(don dang ldan pai dpal byor); meaningless wealth (don dang mi ldan pai dpal byor);
how to generate wealth (dpal byor sgrub stangs); connections between wealth and
behavior (dpal byor dang kun spyod bar gyi bral ba); and the essential meaning of
wealth (dpal byor gyi don snying).
Readers will already have noted the slip in language here between economy, economics,
and wealth. The semantic haziness which comes from translating foreign terms like
Page 15 of 29

economics into cultural spheres with already developed literary and religious fields on
closely related concepts (such as wealth generation rituals and right livelihood) produces
precisely the generative ambiguities Shrab Tendar exploits in order to find a vast
Buddhist Economics in his Mahyana and Tantric scriptural tradition. For these
reasons, I translate Shrab Tendars statements on Buddhist wealth, economy, and
economics strategically to highlight certain key differences in the Tibetan. As we shall
see, Shrab Tendars ideas actually acquire their force (and controversy) by creatively
exploiting minimal differences between, for example, the desired outcome of a Nga
offering ritual and the disciplinary focus of a contemporary social science.
An Economic Message from the Mahyna Stras and the Four

Classes of Tantra
In the first place, Shrab Tendars Buddhist Economics is rooted in an expansive karmic
causal scale familiar to us already from Payuttos work. If we set out to model the
acquisition or loss of wealth, Shrab Tendar remarks in a familiar refrain, we are remiss
to ignore karma from previous lives, the ultimate source for causes and conditions of
richness and poverty. The inner condition of wealth is generosity and morality, while
the inner condition of poverty is stinginess and non-virtuous actions such as theft (Shes
rab bstan dar 2012, 1:10). The point of mundane economic behavior is to become
prosperous, in addition to making the right kind of effort at acquiring wealth (e.g.,
running a business or participating in a wage-labor economy without harming others).
For that reason, we need also to account for the way imprints of virtuous actions from
previous lives come to fruition as wealth in this life and the potential of virtuous actions
in this life to produce wealth in future lives (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:10).
But why focus on the acquisition of wealth in the first place? Like Payutto, Shrab
Tendars reading of his canonical tradition has convinced him that the Buddha not only
accepted but also insisted that his followers engage in disciplined economic behavior as
part of their practice of self-cultivation. They must do so depending on their position in
the fourfold-sagha (as monks, nuns, laywomen, or laymen). For example, lay Buddhist
political leaders require wealth to properly assist their subjects:
Though you may be a leader who is a Dharma practitioner without [personal]

desire for wealth, you are not allowed to think that wealth may be ignored [for the
sake of others]. The reason for this is that your aim in becoming a leader is the
happiness of your followers. Wealth is the principal condition for your followers
happiness. Without wealth you cannot venerate the Triple Gem and you cannot
give [charity] to people in positions lower than yourself.
Page 16 of 29

Quoting the Buddha who said that none of his patrons would ever become poor, Shrab
Tendar argues that matters economic are foundational to Buddhist life since: first, by
definition patrons require wealth to make donations to the monastic order; second, the
Buddha himself was concerned with the wealth of patrons; and third, we are urged in the
scriptures to accumulate and use wealth according to the Buddhas underlying
intention (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:13).
To that end, in addition to discussing the karmic scales of wealth familiar to us from
Theravda Buddhist Economics, Shrab Tendar dwells extensively on the value of wealth
and its appropriate usage among householders and monastics in light of topics such as
the role of economy in government and the requirement that Buddhists make as much
wealth as possible to contribute to the broad welfare of society. Considering the fourfold-
sagha specifically, Shrab Tendar writes that the Buddhas economic message is
targeted mainly to patrons of the teachings and lay devotees. Unlike regular
householders, those who have taken on the upsaka (Tib. dge bsnyen, laymen) upsik
(Tib. dge bsnyen, laywomen) vow have a requirement to accumulate wealth for the sake
of benefiting others and for making offerings to the Triple Gem.8 This is the ultimate
value of wealth and of economic behavior.
Improvising on another major topic in Payuttos Theravda Buddhist Economics, Shrab

Tendar dwells at length on the role of wealth and of economic behavior in monastic
communities, those ordained members of the fourfold sagha whose:
Responsibility is to be satisfied with little desire and with the renunciation of

contemplative meditation. For that reason, they must abandon the wealth and
desires of householders. If they accumulate wealth then they break many rules [of
the vinaya]. For that reason, the Buddhist teachings say that wealth is like a nest
of poisonous snakes or embers in the ashes of the fire: this all pertains
[specifically] to the monastic community [and not the laity].
And what of Buddhist monastics accumulating and using wealth? Quoting the Buddhas
pronouncements from the vinaya, Shrab Tendar states that monks may do business, but
only for the sake of the Triple Gem and for the sagha and not even for the benefit of
others (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:15).
On the basis of these general observations, Shrab Tendar defines the contours of a
specifically Mahyna and Tantric Buddhist Economics by describing the position of the
so-called Lesser Vehicle (Skt. hnayna) school (to which, for Tibetan Buddhist scholars
Page 17 of 29

such as himself, Payuttos Theravda tradition belongs).9 For example, rewording the
great eighteenth-century Tibetan polymath Jamyang Shpas Decisive Analysis of the
Perfection of Wisdom,10 Shrab Tendar notes that Arhatsrealized practitioners of the
Hnayna who have followed either the rvaka or Pratyekabuddha pathhave developed
renunciation and so have no attachment to wealth, like a carnivorous animal in front of
grass (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:15).11 Still, like their differing soteriologies more
generally, this laudable but limited Hinayna negotiation of wealth pales in comparison to
the more holistic and ultimate negotiation prescribed in Mahyna and Tantric scripture.
For example, Shrab Tendar recovers the Mahyna message on wealth and economic
behavior by dividing his analysis between behavior appropriate to laity and to monastics.
Rather than just Right Livelihood (Skt. samayagjva; Tib. yang dag pai las kyi mtha)
amongst lay Buddhist devotees, as in Schumacher and Payutto, in this Mahyna
formulation the economic behavior of both sides of the Buddhist community is beholden
to the perfection of generosity (Skt. dnapramit; Tib. sbyin pai pha rol tu phyin pa),
and more specifically, to the three types of giving usually described in Tibetan
commentaries to Indic words such as ntidevas Bodhicaryvatra (Tib. Byang chub
sems dpai spyod pa la jug pa): giving material benefit, fearlessness, and Dharma
instruction. A Mahyna householder, Shrab Tendar is at pains to note, must actively
seek wealth in order to practice the generosity of giving material things for the benefit of
other beings. In this way, economic behavior becomes a requisite practice for the
accumulation of merit required to accomplish a Buddhas Form Body (Skt. rpakya; Tib.
gzugs sku).
However, Shrab Tendar decides that this sort of generosity is reserved only for the laity,
as is clearly stated in Indic canonical works such as Candrakrtis Entrance to the Middle
Way (Skt. Madhyamakvatra; Tib. Dbu ma la jug pa): most of the three perfections,
such as generosity and so forth, was advice the Tathagta [i.e., the Buddha] gave to lay
practitioners (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:16). Even though her or his mind is unsullied
by attachment to wealth for themselves, a Mahyna nun or monk must maintain
appearances and renounce accumulating wealth. Instead, they may practice other types
of generosity, such as giving Dharma teachings and giving fearlessness to other beings
(e.g., by saving the lives of animals destined to be butchered).
A Buddhist Field of Knowledge on Economy and the Place of Tantric

Methods
We will recall that one of the ways Shrab Tendar argues for the centrality of matters
economic in Buddhist life is by drawing attention to ways his Indo-Tibetan scriptures urge
Page 18 of 29

the fourfold-sagha to accumulate and use wealth according to the Buddhas underlying
intention. Unfortunately, recognition of the Buddhas intention, never mind his
underlying intention, is hardly mutual and consensual! Deciding what the Buddha meant
(and what he really meant) is the foundational problem of all Buddhist exegetical
traditions, and it is the foundation of the so-called ten fields of knowledge (Tib. rig gnas
bcu), widely recognized in Tibetan Buddhist scholastic traditions. These solidified into
five major and five minor fields on purported Indic models in the latter half of the
seventeenth century.12 While not included in the usual ten, Shrab Tendar tries to show
that alongside them there is a scripturally based field of knowledge about economics (Tib.
Dpal byor rig pa). This version of Buddhist Economics, he argues, was evident in Indian
Buddhist scholasticism but was forgotten in Tibet.
Some have said, Even Buddhism has a field of knowledge about economy? They
are surprised and stare, and may have doubt [thinking that] whoever is delivering
such a message is lying. They think that Buddhist Economics simply mimics a
modern subject and that no such subject exists in [traditional] Buddhism. Because
of that, they dislike whoever delivers such a message.
To his own mind at least, Shrab Tendars Buddhist Economics possesses a textual
tradition (Tib. gzhung lugs) in three parts: sources that describe (1) the manner of
accomplishing wealth; (2) the manner of acquiring wealth; and (3) connections between
wealth and human beings. Shrab Tendar is keen to collect these teachings together not
only to provide economic guidance for his readers but also to correct the wrong view of
his Tibetan contemporaries who reject the idea that the Buddha gave economic teachings
and, more egregiously, who allege that Buddhism is an obstacle to economic prosperity in
Tibet today (e.g., Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:5).
In his first essay on the topic, Shrab Tendar makes a very interesting argument that a
Buddhist field of knowledge on economy is most clearly articulated in texts associated
with only two of the five major fields of knowledge: craftsmanship (Skt. ilpa; Tib. bzo ba
rig pa) and medicine (Skt. cikits; Tib. gso rig pa). For example, quoting The Ornament to
Mahyna Stras (Skt. Mahyna Stra lakara; Tib. Mdo sde rgyan), Shrab Tendar
points out that by perfecting skills in arts and crafts and in medicine, his lay readers will
accumulate wealth for services rendered. Having become rich, he continues, the world
will respect you and you can then benefit others by means of wealth (Shes rab bstan dar
2012, 1:28). In other works, Shrab Tendar argues that even minor fields of knowledge,
such as tailoring, astrology, grammatology, and incense making, all represent the
Buddhas teachings on economic behavior (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:37).
Page 19 of 29

Having defined his Buddhist Economics as both a pragmatic model for action and a field
of knowledge describing the meaning and ultimate goals of economic behavior, Shrab
Tendar makes the noteworthy move to explore varieties of tantric ritual aimed at
attracting and increasing wealth. In A Brief Description of Buddhist Economics Shrab
Tendar identifies the ritual propitiation of a small cluster of wealth deities as the primary
tantric arm of Buddhist fields of knowledge on economy.13 The proper propitiation of
these buddhas manifested as wealth-granting yaka-spirits are critical, Shrab Tendar
concludes, since by their propitiation people receive wealth and longevity like
rainfall (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:25). More generally, popular tantric practices such
as making requests to the female Buddha Tr and reciting her mantra is ultimately a
particularly skillful form of economic behavior aimed at quickly growing ones collection
of excellences (T. legs tshogs) in order to create the causes of accumulating future
wealth.
For Shrab Tendar, then, Mahyna and Tantric Economics represent a pragmatic set of
instructions on generating wealth. In this way, despite the Mahyna-Hinayna polemic,
his conclusions are quite similar to those of Payutto. Responding to critics who
mistakenly claim he promotes a Buddhism only concerned with business, or worse, that
he has invented a false scriptural tradition based on foreign ideas, Shrab Tendar
routinely argues that like medicine or valid knowledge (i.e., universally recognized fields
of Buddhist knowledge in Tibet), economics is also not explicitly described in a single
Buddhist scripture. Instead, regular references to the central place of economic behavior
in Buddhist soteriology amount to a field of knowledge, and ought to be recognized as
such (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:38).14
Conclusion: Buddhist Economics, Scales of

Value, and the Enchantment of Global
Capitalism?
Neither Schumacher, Payutto, nor Shrab Tendar presume to quantify Thailands GDP
growth, predict an upcoming recession in Burma, or quantify first quarter aggregated
production in Qinghai. Curiously, this seems to be ignored by swaths of scholar-
practitioners around the world keen to help construct an alternative economic model to
late capitalism based on, say, selective quotations from the Pli canon or vague
references to Buddhist virtues (the work of Lszl Zsolnai is a much more dynamic
example of such contructivist work: 2011, 2013, 2015; Lszl Zsolnai and Ims 2006).
Page 20 of 29

In Schumachers invention of Buddhist Economics, the values of desired worlds imagined

in Buddhist scripture and society became placeholders for the basic truths of human
existence. Buddhist Economics was for him an excellent background for man to display
his scale of values and develop his personality. From the point of view of Modern
Economics, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern
amazingly small means leading to extraordinary satisfactory results (Schumacher 1999,
4041). Buddhist Economics, Schumacher suggested, ought to part of a course of study in
normative economics even for those who believe that economic growth is more
important than any spiritual or religious values. It is a question of finding the right path
to development, the Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist
immobility, in short, in finding Right Livelihood (Schumacher 1999, 45). Buddhism
became a muse that helped Schumacher imagine an alternative measure for standards of
living based on values other than maximizing consumption, a convenient Other projected
on to traditional Southeast Asian society and assumed to lie in Buddhist scriptures that
the author leaves unopened.
Payutto called for a more robust scaling of human desire in economic theory, for
centering subjective values like ethics into economic modeling, and for acknowledging
that non-consumption and even non-production are sometimes the best measure of well-
being. These all provided different scales of value for measuring a healthy economy and
healthy individual economic behavior. In Payuttos version, matters economic were
important to the Buddha, since he had rejected extreme asceticism in his own life and
forbid it for his followers.15 Here Modern Economics and Theravdan Buddhist
Economics are leveled into competing views (Pli dihi) that apply different values to
scale and describe human nature, causation, and well-being in light of different models of
desired outcomes.
While Shrab Tendars Mahyna and Tantric field of knowledge on economic behavior
treads very different doctrinal territory than his Theravda interlocutors, this recent
Tibetan iteration is also productively approached as the construction of an alternative
scale of value to that of a dominating materialism and Western-inflected models
development.16 For example, Shrab Tendar laments the deplorable effects of the
contagion of wealth (Tib. dpal byor gyi nad gzhi) in todays competitive, anger- and
desire-ridden global marketplace (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:31). Buddhist Economics,
he writes, contains very important perspectives to help correct the dominant Western
economics (Tib. nub phyogs kyi dpal byor rig pa), which leads only to producing
unhappiness for oneself and others in this life and the next (Shes rab bstan dar 2012,
1:31).17 Thus for Shrab Tendar, as for Schumacher and Payutto before him, Buddhist
Economics is a thing quite apart from economics proper. It is instead a Buddhist scale of
Page 21 of 29

value aimed not only to confront but actually to absorb the authority of normative,
Western economics and the dominant forces of materialist development in Asia.
And here we come full circle to the need for developing a robust study of Buddhism and
economy from outside of Webers long shadow, something my analysis on the economy-
lessness of Buddhist Economics now seems to negate. However, as Stanley Tambiah was
at pains to point out, Weber himself saw the unending impulse to create rational
structures as working at cross-purposes with some of the most cherished values of
individual freedom, creativity, intimacy and so on (Tambiah 1990, 145). Western
civilization was beset by irreconcilable tensions between enduring ethical values
(Wertrationalitt) and the cold instrumental logic of formal rationality
(Zweckrationalitt): Weber saw progressive disenchantment leading to a dark future in
ways that dovetailed with Marxs diagnosis of the alienation of modern industrial
capitalism (Tambiah 1990, 145). Similar concerns beset Schumacher and were taken up
by Payutto and Shrab Tendar in their own ways. In a sense, these widely read versions
of Buddhist Economics offer up measures of well-being and value systems that promise to
re-enchant not just models of production and consumption but also the cold and
Eurocentric episteme that underlies such modeling. Perhaps Weber would be heartened
by their efforts and affirmed by the other worlds they so desire?
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Harvey, Peter. 2013. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values, and Issues.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Obadia, Lionel. 2011. Is Buddhism like a Hamburger? Buddhism and the Market
Economy in a Globalized World. Research in Economic Anthropology 31: 99122.
Schopen, Gregory. 1997. Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the
Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India. Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press.
Sizemore, Russell F., and Donald K. Swearer. 1990. Ethics, Wealth, and Salvation: A
Study in Buddhist Social Ethics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Spiro, Melford E. 1970. Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and its Burmese
Vicissitudes. New York: Harper & Row.
Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. 1976. World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of
Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
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Notes:
(1) More immediate cooperating factors in Buddhist success outside India included a
command over coveted administrative skills (like writing), medicine, and later, the ritual
reproduction of political authority based on a sacralized model of feudal kingship from
post-Gupta India (Davidson 2002).
(2) Important surveys of limited scholarship on the topic of economy and Buddhism are
found in: Harvey 2000; Benavides 2004, 2005; Deitrick 2007; and Guruge 2008.
(3) I would like to thank Professors Simon Coleman, Pamela Klassen, Monique Scheer,
and all the participants at the Scales of Value workshop at Tbingen University in May
2014 for sharing their insights on the potential of this term in the study of religion.
(4) For example, Small is Beautiful received the Prix Europen de lEssai Charles Veillon
in 1977 and was cited by The Times Literary Supplement as one of the most influential
books published after World War II (The Hundred Most Influential Books since the War
1995).
(5) Schumachers ideas were not without controversy, however, especially among other
activist-scholar movements of the 1960s and 1970s. For example, in the pages of
Buddhist Economics, Schumacher extols traditional social orders that ideally have
women barred from work and confined to the household.
(6) The Eightfold Path is further divided into the three trainings (Skt. triik) or the
higher trainings (Skt. adhiik), whose culmination is considered to be the various
versions of ultimate realization and enlightenment. The first of these is training in
higher morality (Skt. adhiilaik), the second training in higher concentration (Skt.
adhisamdhiik), and the third training in higher wisdom (Skt. adhiprajik). In a
particularly popular scheme, Right Livelihood is combined with Right Speech and Right
Conduct to make up training in higher morality (for a general definition, see Buswell and
Lopez 2013, 66).
(7) Shrab Tendar also references certain unnamed tracts on Buddhist Economics by Han
Chinese Buddhist scholars as marginally inspiring his work, but as yet I have not been
able to identify them.
(8) The four roots are to refrain from killing, lying, stealing, and sexual misconduct. The
other primary commitment of an ordained lay disciple is to avoid intoxicants. Unlike
regular householders, those lay disciples may not accumulate their wealth by means of
Page 26 of 29

wrong livelihood such as selling animals, selling weapons, selling liquor, or selling poison
(something Payutto also notes in his presentation).
(9) The Lesser Vehicle, or Hinayna, is never used self-referentially by any Indian
Buddhist tradition or by any contemporary Theravdan Buddhist school in contemporary
Sri Lanka or Southeast Asia. It is a pejorative label used in Mahyna Buddhist thought
to discredit rival Buddhist schools that traditionally have not accepted the Mahyna
(and certainly not the Tantrayna) scriptures as actual records of the Buddhas teaching.
The term thus functions in Mahyna literature as a shorthand for Buddhist paths
directed only to attaining personal liberation from cyclic existence (and not the full
enlightenment of Buddhahood for the welfare of all beings, which is the stated aim of the
bodhisattva practitioner, the hero of the Mahyna path). Hinayna schools, from the
perspective of Mahyna doxography, include the paths of the rvaka and the
pratyekabuddha specifically, and the eighteen non-Mahyna schools of Indian Buddhism
generally.
(10) Tib. Phar phyin skabs brgyad pai mtha dpyod bsam phel yid bzhin nor bui phreng
mdzes skal bzang mig byed. See Jam dbyangs bzhad pai rdo rje 1974.
(11) Even so, he stresses, the motivation of such beings is still to see [wealth] as an
object of abandonment and also as a means to a temporary goal; these two are not
contradictory! In order to achieve the final goal [of liberation from cyclic existence],
the environment and wealth are very important (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:16;
emphasis added).
(12) These usually include: (1) the five major fields of knowledge (Tib. rig gnas chen po
lnga): craftsmanship (Skt. ilpa; Tib. bzo rig pa), logic (Skt. hetu; Tib. gtan tshigs),
grammar (Skt. abda; Tib. sgra), medicine (Skt. cikits; Tib. gso ba), and the inner field
of knowledge (Skt. dharma; Tib. nang don rig pa); and (2) the five minor fields of
knowledge (Tib. rig gnas chung lnga): synonyms (Skt. abhidhna; Tib. mngon brjod),
mathematics and astrology (Skt. jyotia; Tib. skar rtsis), performance and drama (Skt.
naka; Tib. zlos gar), poetry (Skt. kvya; Tib. snyan ngag), composition (Skt. chanda; Tib.
sdeb sbyor).
(13) These include, among other beings, Pongsel Drlma (Tib. Phong sel sgrol ma), Nams
(Tib. Rnam sras), the many manifestations of Dzambhala (Tib. DzaM b+Ha la; and the
collection of Norjinma (Tib. Nor sbyin ma) deities (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:25).
(14) For example, he writes: The conclusion of Buddhist Economics is to show that
through economic behavior we can engage in Buddhist practice. That is economic
Page 27 of 29

behavior that is in harmony with the Dharma. We should object to economic behavior that
is not in harmony with the Dharma (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:112).
(15) For example: In opposition to contemporary urban values, Buddhism does not
measure a persons or a nations worth by material wealth. Nor does it go to the opposite
extreme, as do Marxist thinkers, and condemn the accumulation of wealth as an evil in
and of itself. Instead, Buddhism judges the ethical value of wealth by the ways in which it
is obtained, and the uses to which it is put (Payutto 1998, 64).
(16) For example, he writes in A Brief Description of Buddhist Economics that: We

must see that behavior is a very important subject in the study of [Buddhist] economics.
The reason is that between wealth and human value (Tib. mii rin thang) we must always
hold human value as the most important. We should never believe it is lower. If we do,
humans become a slave to wealth and thus lose their freedom, lose their happiness, lose
their joy, and stop thinking about the benefit of others (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:21).
(17) Elsewhere, while once again defending his claim that there is a distinct field of
knowledge on economy in Buddhism, Shrab Tendar makes the distinction between
normative economics and Buddhist Economics quite clear: Economics is the name for
the investigation of topics such as research into the individual causes [of economic
development] (Tib. dngos pai rgyu char zhib jug), participation in production in relation
to economy (Tib. thon skyed kyi khrod du dpal byor gyi brel ba), the way to accomplish
[wealth] (Tib. sgrub stangs), making use of profit (Tib. bed spyad), and so forth
[Buddhist Economics describes] the way to accomplish wealth (Tib. dpal byor sgrub
stangs), the way to employ wealth (Tib. dpal byor spyod stangs), and the relationship
between humans and wealth (Tib. dpal byor dang mii bar gyi bral ba) (Shes rab bstan
dar 2012, 1:36).
Matthew King
Matthew King, Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Riverside
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Buddhist Economics

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Buddhist Economics: Scales of Value in Global Exchange

Oxford Handbooks Online

Abstract and Keywords

In addition to summarizing key concerns in Theravda Buddhist Economics by scholars

Introduction: Economy and the Study of

Shrab Tendar (Shes rab bstan dar 2012, 1:20)

date: 06 December 2016

Of Mahyna movements that seem to have developed as more inclusive, laicized

date: 06 December 2016

date: 06 December 2016

My point in all this is as unassuming as it is promising and underexplored: Buddhism

Approaching Buddhist Economics as Scales of

date: 06 December 2016

inextricably to the West and the challenges of Westernization, Buddhist Economics