[Buddha-l] Poll on Buddho-capitalism

[Blumenthal, James]

>  But, as previous and not so
> temporally remote discussions on this list indicate, many Western Buddhists
> are still anti-capitalist. Far fewer Asian Buddhists are so, we should note.
>
>

True, few Asian Buddhists are anti-capitalists, but many important Engaged Buddhist thinkers from Asia have been highly critical of capitalism including Sulak Sivaraksa and Samdong Rinpoche.  While I don't think it is impossible to be an ethical Buddhist in a capitalist society, I think a serious examination of the implications of capitalism would find it objectionable to most analyzing from a  Buddhist perspective.  For example, if we were to utilize John Rawls notion of the veil of ignorance and try to think about what form of governance and what economic system we would employ if we were creating a new society and we were absolutely ignorant about where or who we would be in that society, what sort of society would we create?  If you did not know if you would be gay, would you ban gay marriage?  If you did not know if you would be from a disenfranchised minority group, would you support affirmative action?  And to the question at hand, would you create an economic system that seems to support greed, attachment, excessive competition (I only win if someone else loses), the production, advertising (attempts to create attachment in others), and selling of unnecessary goods - often at the cost of the environment?  I doubt most Buddhist who are thinking seriously about these things would say they would create a capitalist society if starting from scratch.  I could be wrong.  And we are not starting from scratch.  We are starting where we are.

Jim Blumenthal


James Blumenthal, Associate Professor
Oregon State University
Department of Philosophy
102-A Hovland Hall
Corvallis, OR 97331
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