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Why Buddhism and the Modern World Need Each Other: A Buddhist Perspective David R. Loy Independent Scholar and Zen Teacher The mercy of the West has been social revolution. The mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both. —Gary Snyder 1 Another way to make Snyder’s point would be: The highest ideal of the Western tradition has been the concern to restructure our societies so that they are more socially just. The most important goal for Buddhism is to awaken and (to use the Zen phrase) realize one’s true nature, which puts an end to dukkha—especially that associated with the delusion of a separate self. Today it has become more obvious that we need both, not just because these ideals complement each other, but because each project needs the other. As far as I have been able to determine, the Western conception of justice largely originates with the Abrahamic traditions, particularly the Hebrew prophets, who fulminated against oppressive rulers for afflicting the poor and powerless. Describing Old Testament prophecy, Walter Kaufmann writes that “no other sacred scripture contains books that speak out against social injustice as eloquently, unequivocally, and sensitively as the books of Moses and some of the prophets.”2 Is there a Buddhist equivalent? The doctrine of karma understands something like justice as an impersonal moral law built into the fabric of the cosmos, but historically karma has functioned differently. Combined with the doctrine of rebirth (a necessary corollary, since evil people sometimes prosper in this life) and the belief that each of us is now experiencing the consequences of actions in previous lifetimes, the implication seems to be that we do not need to be concerned about pursuing justice, because sooner or later everyone gets what they deserve. In practice, this has often encouraged passivity and acceptance of one’s situation, rather than a commitment to promote social justice. Does the Buddhist emphasis on dukkha (suffering in the broad sense) provide a better parallel with the Western conception of justice? Dukkha is arguably its most important concept: According to the Pali Canon, Sakyamuni Buddha said that what Buddhist-Christian Studies 34 (2014) 39–50. © by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved. 40 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES he had to teach was dukkha and how to end it. Historically, Asian Buddhism has focused on individual dukkha and personal karma, a limitation that may have been necessary in autocratic polities that could and sometimes did repress Buddhist institutions. Today, however, the globalization of democracy, human rights, and freedom of speech opens the door to new ways of responding to social and institutional causes of dukkha. On the other side, the Abrahamic emphasis on justice, in combination with the Greek realization that society can be restructured, has resulted in our modern concern to pursue social justice by reforming political and economic institutions. This has involved, most obviously, various human rights movements (the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, feminism, LGBT liberation, etc.), which have not been an important concern of traditional Asian Buddhism. As valuable as these reforms have been, the limitations of such a institutional approach, by itself, are becoming evident. Even the best possible economic and political system cannot be expected to function well if the people within that system are motivated by greed, aggression, and delusion—the “three fires” or “three poisons” that Buddhism identifies as unwholesome motivations that need to be transformed into their more positive counterparts: generosity, loving-kindness, and wisdom. Today, in our globalizing world, the traditional Western focus on social transformation encounters the traditional Buddhist focus on individual awakening. This essay addresses why they need each other in order to actualize their own ideals and uses the example of our present economic situation to explore some of the implications of this interdependence. good versus evil The difference in focus can be traced back to different paradigms. One way to draw the contrast between the Abrahamic and Buddhist traditions is to consider their dissimilar attitudes toward morality. The Abrahamic religions are (the primary) examples of “ethical monotheism” because they emphasize most of all ethical behavior. God’s main way of relating to us, his creatures, is instructing us how to live by giving us moral commandments. To be a good Jew, Christian, or Muslim is to follow his rules. The fundamental axis is good versus evil: doing what God wants us to do (in which case we will be rewarded) and not doing what he does not want us to do (to avoid punishment). For many, perhaps most, of its adherents, this world is a battleground between God and Satan, and the most important issue is whose side we are on. Even the origins of human history in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve—which seems to me a myth about the development of self-consciousness—is understood as an act of disobedience against God: We suffer now because of an original sin by our ancestors. Later God sends a great flood that destroys everyone except those in Noah’s ark, because people are not living in the way that he wants them to. Later God formalizes his instructions by giving the Decalogue to Moses. Jesus (with some help from Paul) adds an emphasis on loving one another, yet this does not abrogate A BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVE the emphasis on living according to God’s commands, on the importance of our will according with his will. Although many people no longer believe in an Abrahamic God, the duality between good and evil arguably remains our favorite story, the main theme in most popular novels, films, and television shows (think of James Bond, Star Wars, and Harry Potter, not to mention every detective novel and TV crime series). From a Buddhist perspective, however, our preoccupation with that theme is . . . well, both good and evil. The duality between good and evil is a good example of the problem that often occurs with dualistic thinking—that is, conceptualizing with bipolar opposites such as high and low, big and small, light and dark, and so on. Those particular examples are usually innocuous, but some other instances are more problematical because we want one pole and not the other—yet we cannot have one without the other, because the meaning of each is the opposite of the other (you do not really know what “high” means unless you know what “low” means). This is important not only logically but also psychologically. If it is really important for you to live a pure life (however you understand purity), you will inevitably be preoccupied with (avoiding) impurity. That is why Chan master Hui Hai describes true purity of mind as “a state beyond purity and impurity.”3 The relationship between good and evil is perhaps the most problematical example of dualistic thinking, because their interdependence means that we do not know what good is until we determine what evil is (good requires avoiding evil), and we feel that we are good when we are struggling against that evil—preferably an evil outside us. Hence inquisitions, witchcraft and heresy trials, and, most recently, the War on Terror. What was the difference between Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush? They were not only polar opposites but mirror images of each other: both fighting the same holy war of good against evil, each leading the forces of goodness in a struggle against the forces of evil, because that is what the forces of good are supposed to do. Once something has been identified as evil, there is no need to understand it or accommodate it, only to destroy it. The War on Terror illustrates the tragic paradox: Historically, one of the main causes of evil has been our attempts to destroy (what we understand as) evil. What was Hitler trying to do? Eliminate the evil elements that pollute the world: Jews, homosexuals, Roma gypsies, and so on. Stalin attempted to do the same with the kulaks, and Mao Zedong with Chinese landlords. Although their struggles were apparently “secular” in the sense that they were not motivated by what we normally consider to be religious belief, they were nonetheless identifying with the same basic duality, resulting in incalculable dukkha for many millions of people. (We shall return to the fact that traditional Buddhism explains such dukkha as the consequence of individual karma.) That is the problematic aspect of the duality between good and evil, but there is also a beneficial side, which brings us back to the Hebrew prophets. Amos castigates those who “trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth” and “crush the needy” (Amos 2:7, 4:1). Isaiah complains about those “who write oppressive laws, 41 42 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey” (Isa. 10:2). Both speak on behalf of God, and both address themselves primarily to rulers who abuse their power. Of course, many more examples could be cited from the Bible: Speaking truth to power, the prophets call for social justice for the oppressed, who suffer from what might be called social dukkha. I am not aware of anything comparable in the history of Buddhism. There may have been a few counterexamples, but if so they did not influence the tradition in the way that the example of the prophets has influenced the West. According to the Pali Canon, the Buddha was consulted by kings and gave them advice, yet apparently he did not castigate or challenge them. Nor did the sangha do so after he died. The other source of Western civilization is classical Greece, which discovered the momentous distinction between physis (the natural world) and nomos (social convention). Pre–Axial Age cultures such as the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and Aztecs generally assumed that their social structures were as “natural” (and therefore to be accepted) as the ecosystems they were embedded within. Realizing that human institutions are not predetermined in the way that nature is—which means that we can restructure our society to make it better—the Greeks created a democracy that, although woefully inadequate by modern criteria, opened the door to new possibilities that modernity has developed. Bringing together the Hebrew concern for social justice with the Greek realization that society can be restructured has resulted in what seems to me the highest ideal of the West, actualized in revolutions, reform movements, the development and spread of democracy, human rights, and so on—in short, social progress. We are all too aware of the shortcomings of this progress, but our concern with those shortcomings itself testifies to our social justice principles, which we understand to be universal but are nonetheless historically conditioned and not be taken for granted. So, with such lofty ideals, everything is fine now, right? Well, not exactly—and I assume that I do not need to waste much time trying to persuade you of that. Even with the best ideals (what might be called our “collective intentions”), our societies have not become as socially just as most of us would like, and in some ways they are becoming more unjust. An obvious economic example is the gap between rich and poor in the United States, which today is not only obscenely large but also increasing. How shall we understand this disparity between ideal and reality? One obvious reply is that our economic system, as it presently operates, is still unjust because wealthy people and powerful corporations manipulate our political systems for their own self-centered and short-sighted benefit. So we need to keep working for a more equitable economic system and for a democratic process free of such distortions. I would not want to challenge that explanation, but is it sufficient? Is the basic difficulty that our economic and political institutions are not structured well enough to avoid such manipulations, or is it also the case that they cannot be structured well enough—in other words, that we cannot rely only on an institutional solution to structural injustice? Can we create a social order so perfect that it will function well A BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVE regardless of the personal motivations of the people within it, or do we also need to find ways to address those motivations? In short, can the social transformations that our ideals seek be successful enough without also considering the challenge of personal transformation? Perhaps this helps us to understand why so many political revolutions have ended up replacing one gang of thugs with another gang. Suppose, for example, that I am a revolutionary leader who successfully overthrows an oppressive regime. If I have not also worked on my own motivations—my own greed, aggression, and delusion—I will be sorely tempted to take personal advantage of my new situation, inclined to see those who disagree with me as enemies to be eliminated, and (the number one ego problem?) disposed to see the solution to social issues in my superior judgment and the imposition of my will. Unsurprisingly, the results of such motivations are unlikely to bring about a society that is truly just. And of course these distortions are not restricted only to authoritarian rulers: Beginning with the earliest Greek experience, and certainly supported by the contemporary US experience, there is plenty of evidence that democracy does not work very well if it simply becomes a different system for certain individuals and groups to manipulate and exploit—again, usually motivated by the three poisons. If we can never have a social structure so good that it obviates the need for people to be good (in Buddhist terms, to make efforts not be motivated by greed, aggression, and delusion), then our modern emphasis on social transformation—restructuring institutions to make them more just—is necessary but not sufficient. That brings us to the Buddhist focus on personal transformation. ignorance versus awakening Of course, moral behavior is also important in Buddhism, most obviously the Five Precepts (for laypeople) and the hundreds of additional rules prescribed for monastics. But if we view them in an Abrahamic fashion we are liable to miss the main point: Since there is no God telling us that we must live this way, they are important because living in accordance with them means that the circumstances and quality of our own lives will naturally improve. They can be understood as exercises in mindfulness, to train ourselves in a certain way. The precepts can also be compared to the training wheels on the bicycle of a young child, which eventually can be removed because they are necessary only until the child knows how to ride a bike. In the Brahmajala Sutta—one of the most important Pali suttas, in fact the first sutta in the Digha Nikaya—the Buddha distinguishes between what he calls “elementary, inferior matters of moral practice” and “other matters, profound, hard to see, hard to understand . . . experienced by the wise” that he has realized (1.27–28). He speaks thus because for Buddhism the fundamental axis is not between good and evil, but between ignorance/delusion and awakening/wisdom. The primary challenge is not ethical but cognitive in the broad sense: becoming more aware. In principle, someone who has awakened to the true nature of the world (including the true nature of oneself ) no longer needs to follow an external moral code 43 44 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES because he or she naturally wants to behave in a way that does not violate the spirit of the precepts. (If only it worked so well in practice . . .) The Buddha emphasized that he taught dukkha suffering and how to end it. Did he have in mind only individual dukkha—that resulting from our own thoughts and actions—or did he possibly have a wider social vision that encompassed structural dukkha: the suffering caused by oppressive rulers and unjust institutions? A few scholars such as Trevor Ling and Nalin Swaris have argued for the latter, that the Buddha may have intended to start a movement that would transform society rather than merely establish a monastic order with alternative values to the mainstream.4 This possibility reminds us not to anachronistically project our enervated contemporary understanding of religion back onto his life and times. Certainly his attitudes toward women and castes were extraordinarily progressive for his day. Regardless of what Shakyamuni Buddha may or may not have intended, what apparently happened after his parinibbana is that within a few generations much of the sangha settled down in monasteries and became relatively comfortable. Early Buddhism as an institution came to an accommodation with the state, relying to some extent on the support of kings and emperors, a development that may have been necessary for it to survive. And if you want to be supported by the powers that be, you’d better support the powers that be. Because no Asian Buddhist society was democratic, that placed limits on what types of dukkha Buddhist teachers could emphasize. The tradition as it developed could not address structural dukkha—for example, the exploitative policies of many rulers—that ultimately could only be resolved by some institutional transformation. On the contrary, the karma-and-rebirth teaching could easily be used, and was used, to legitimate the power of kings and princes, who must be reaping the fruits of their benevolent actions in past lifetimes, and to rationalize the disempowerment of those born poor or disabled, who must also be experiencing the consequences of (unskillful) actions in previous lifetimes. The result was that Buddhism survived and thrived, spreading throughout most of Asia and developing its extraordinary collection of contemplative practices that can help us transform ourselves. The emphasis, obviously, has been on the spiritual development of the individual. Whether or not that was completely faithful to the ideals of its founder, today globalizing Buddhism finds itself in a new situation, in most locales no longer subject to oppressive polities, and we also have a much better understanding of the structural causes of dukkha. This opens the door to expanded possibilities for the tradition, which can now develop more freely the social implications of its basic perspective. Admittedly, the implications of such a broader understanding of dukkha, and of a broader responsibility for addressing structural dukkha, are quite radical. They imply rethinking some cherished Buddhist teachings, beginning with karma itself. The conventional Buddhist understanding of one’s own karmic stream as individual and discrete is normally taken to mean that I myself am ultimately responsible for what happens to me: it is the result (vipaka) of my earlier (volitional) actions. So, what terrible personal karma each of those European Jews must have had, to have been born into Nazi Germany! Or the dalit untouchables, who are still oppressed in India today. A BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVE If we are now dubious about this way of blaming the victim, we may find ourselves on a slippery slope that leads to questioning some other basic principles. The influence of Axial traditions will continue to decline as it becomes ever more apparent that their resources are incommensurate with the moral ­challenges of the global problematique. In particular, to the extent that these traditions have stressed cosmological dualism and individual salvation, we may say they have encouraged an attitude of indifference toward the integrity of natural and social systems.5 —Loyal Rue Buddhism is an Axial Age tradition, and both cosmological dualism and individual salvation have been important aspects of its Asian message. Yet in order for Buddhism to remain a living tradition relevant to the challenges we face now, it is necessary to interrogate how those teachings are to be understood today. Does nirvana refer to another reality, or to the sunya nature of this world, where nothing has svabhava self-existence? If the latter, does awakening involve escaping samsara—this world of suffering, craving, and ignorance—or experiencing one’s nonduality with it? According to the Heart Sutra, liberation is not only realizing that form is emptiness (sunyata), but that emptiness is form. Insofar as sunyata is not some thing that exists apart from form, all of us are interdependent, part of each other, and therefore responsible to each other. Needless to say, such reflections take us beyond the bounds of this essay, yet such issues are becoming crucial for the fate of contemporary Buddhism in a world very different from the premodern cultures of Asia. Another way to express the interrelationship between the Western ideal of social transformation (social justice that addresses social dukkha) and the Buddhist goal of personal transformation (an awakening that addresses individual dukkha) is in terms of different types of freedom. The emphasis of the modern West has been on individual freedom from oppressive institutions, a prime example being the Bill of Rights appended to the US Constitution. The emphasis of Buddhism (and many other Indian traditions) has been on what might be called psychospiritual freedom. Freedom for the self, or freedom from the (ego)self? Today we can see more clearly the limitations of each freedom by itself. What have I gained if I am free from external control but still at the mercy of my own greed, aggression, and delusions? And awakening from the delusion of a separate self will not by itself free me, or all those with whom I remain interdependent in so many ways, from the dukkha perpetuated by an exploitative economic system and an oppressive government. Again, we need to actualize both ideals to be truly free. the suffering of economic injustice From the above, one might conclude that contemporary Buddhism simply needs to incorporate a Western concern for social justice. Yet that would overlook the distinctive social consequences of the Buddhist understanding of dukkha. To draw out some of those implications, let us consider our economic situation today. 45 46 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES Until the modern era, economic theory was understood to be part of social philosophy, and in principle (at least) subordinate to religious authority (e.g., Church prohibitions of usury). Today the academic profession of economics is concerned to model itself on the authority of the hard sciences and become a “social science” by discovering the fundamental laws of economic exchange and development, which are objectively true in the way that Newton’s laws of motion are. What this has meant, in practice, is that such a focus tends to rationalize the kind of system we have today, including the increasing gap between rich and poor. Despite many optimistic new reports about economic recovery—for banks and investors, at least—in the United States that disparity is now the greatest it has been since the Great Depression of the 1930s. We have become familiar with claims that, for example, the wealthiest four hundred families in America now have the same total wealth as the poorest half of Americans—more than 150 million people. If, however, this is happening in accordance with the basic laws of economic science (which curiously echo pre-Axial understandings of social relations as “natural”)—well, we may not like this development and may try to limit it in some way, but fundamentally we need to adapt to big disproportions. In this way such a disparity is “normalized,” with the implication that it should be accepted. “But it’s not fair!” In opposition to such efforts to justify the present economic order, there are movements that call for social justice—in this case, for distributive justice. Why should the wealthy have so much, and the poor so little? It is not difficult to imagine what the Hebrew prophets might say about this situation. For an economic system to be just, its benefits should be distributed much more equitably. And I would not disagree with that. But can the Buddhist emphasis on delusion versus awakening provide an alternative perspective to supplement such a concern for social justice? I conclude by offering what I believe to be two implications of Buddhist teachings. One of them focuses on our individual predicament—one’s personal role in our economic system—and the other implication considers the structural or institutional aspect of that system. What I have to say about our personal economic predicament follows from what is perhaps the most important teaching of the Buddha: the relationship between dukkha and anatta “not-self” or “nonself.” Anatta challenges our usual but delusive sense of being a separate self; it is the strange, counterintuitive claim that there is no such self. One way to understand this teaching is that there is a basic problem with the sense of a “me” inside that is separate from other people, and from the rest of the world, outside. In contemporary terms, this sense of self is a psychological and social construction. Although the development of a sense of self seems necessary in order to function in the world, Buddhism emphasizes the dukkha associated with it. Why? Because the self is a construct, it does not have any svabhava “self-existence,” any reality of its own. The sense of self is composed of mostly habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, intending, remembering, and so forth; the ways these processes interact are what create and sustain it. The important point is that such a construct is inevitably shadowed by dukkha. Because all those processes are impermanent and A BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVE insubstantial, the self is not only ungrounded but ungroundable, thus inherently insecure. One way to express this is to say that the sense of self is usually haunted by a sense of lack: the feeling that something is wrong with me, that something is missing or not quite right about my life. Normally, however, we misunderstand the source of our discomfort, and believe that what we are lacking is something outside ourselves. And this brings us back to our individual economic predicament, because in the “developed” world we often grow up conditioned to understand ourselves as consumers, and to understand the basic problematic of our lives as getting more money in order to acquire more things, because this is what will eventually fill up our sense of lack. Thus there is an almost perfect fit between this fundamental sense of lack that unenlightened beings have, according to Buddhism, and our present economic system, which uses advertising and other devices to condition us into believing that the next thing we buy will make us happy—which it never does, at least not for long. In other words, a consumerist economy exploits our sense of lack, and often aggravates it, rather than helping us resolve the root problem. The system generates profits by perpetuating our discontent in a way that leaves us always wanting more. Such a critique of consumerism is consistent with some recent studies by psychologists, sociologists, and even economists who have established that once one attains a certain minimum income—enough food and shelter at a pretty basic level—happiness does not increase in step with increasing wealth or consumerism. Rather, the most important determinate of how happy people are seems to be the quality of one’s relationships with other people.6 Notice that this Buddhist perspective does not mention distributive justice or any other type of social justice, nor does it offer an ethical evaluation. The basic problem is delusion rather than injustice or immorality. Yet this approach does not deny the inequities of our economic system, nor is it inconsistent with an Abrahamic ethical critique. Although an alternative viewpoint has been added, the ideal of social justice remains very important, necessary but not sufficient. What does this imply about our economic institutions, the structural aspect? The Buddha had little to say about evil per se, but he had a lot to say about the three “roots of evil,” also known as the (previously mentioned) three poisons: greed, aggression, and delusion. When what we do is motivated by any of these three (and they tend to overlap), we create problems for ourselves (and often for others too, of course). Given the Buddha’s emphasis on cetana “volition” as the most important factor in generating karma, this may be the key to understanding karma: If you want to transform the quality of your life—how you experience other people, and how they relate to you—transform your motivations. We not only have individual senses of self; we also have collective selves: I am a man, not a woman; an American, not a Chinese; and so forth. Do the problems with the three poisons apply to collective selves as well? To further complicate the issue, we also have much more powerful institutions than in the time of the Buddha, in which collective selves often assume a life of their own, in the sense that such institutions 47 48 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES have their own motivations built into them. Elsewhere I have argued that our present economic system can be understood as institutionalized greed, that our militarism institutionalizes aggression, and that our (corporate) media institutionalize delusion, because their primary focus is profiting from advertising and consumerism, rather than educating or informing us about what is really happening.7 If greed, aggression and delusion are the main sources of evil, and if today they have been institutionalized in this fashion . . . well, you can draw your own conclusions. I finish with a few words on how our economic system promotes structural dukkha by institutionalizing greed. What is greed? One definition is “never enough.” On the individual level, it is the next thing one buys that will fill up one’s sense of lack. But greed works just as well to describe what happens on an institutional level: corporations are never large enough or profitable enough, the value of their shares is never high enough, our national GDP is never big enough. In fact, we cannot imagine what “big enough” might be. It is built into these systems that they must keep growing, or else they tend to collapse. But why is more always better if it can never be enough? Consider the stock market, high temple of the economic process. On the one side are many millions of investors, most anonymous and unconcerned about the details of the corporations they invest in, except for their profitability and its effects on share prices—that is, the return on their investments. In many cases investors do not know where their money is invested, thanks to mutual funds. Such people are not evil, of course; on the contrary, investment is a highly respectable endeavor, something to do if you have some extra money, and successful investors are highly respected, even idolized (“the sage of Omaha”). On the other side of the market, however, the desires and expectations of those millions of investors become transformed into an impersonal and unremitting pressure for growth and increased profitability that every CEO must respond to, and preferably in the short run. If a CEO does not maximize profitability, he or she is likely to get into trouble. Consider, for example, the CEO of a large transnational corporation who one morning suddenly wakes up to the imminent dangers of ­climate change and wants to do everything he (it is usually a he) can to address this challenge. But if what he tries to do threatens corporate profits, he is likely to lose his job. And if that is true for the CEO, how much more true it is for everyone else further down the corporate hierarchy? Corporations are legally chartered so that their first responsibility is not to their employees or customers, nor to the members of the societies they operate within, nor to the ecosystems of the earth, but to the individuals who own them, who with few exceptions are concerned only about return on investment—a preoccupation, again, that is not only socially acceptable but socially encouraged. Who is responsible for this situation—our collective fixation on growth? The important point is that the system has attained not only a life of its own but its own cetana volitions, quite apart from the motivations of the individuals who work for it and who will be replaced if they do not serve that institutional motivation. And all of us participate in this process in one way or another, as workers, consumers, investors, A BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVE pensioners, and so forth, although with very little if any sense of personal responsibility for the collective result. Any awareness of what is actually happening tends to be diffused in the impersonal anonymity of this economic process. Everyone is just doing their job, playing their role. In short, any genuine solution to the economic crisis will not simply involve better redistribution of wealth, necessary as that is. We must also find ways to address the personal dukkha built into the delusions of consumerism, and the structural dukkha built into institutions that have attained a life of their own. It has become obvious that what is beneficial for those institutions (in the short run) is very different from what is beneficial for the rest of us and for the biosphere. concluding remarks The Western (now worldwide) ideal of a social transformation that institutionalizes social justice has achieved much, yet, I have argued, is limited because a truly good society cannot be realized without the correlative realization that personal transformation is also necessary. In the present generation—thanks to globalization, widespread transportation and digital communications—these two worldviews, with different but not conflicting ideals, are in conversation with each other. If I am correct, they need each other. Or more precisely, we need both. This does not mean merely adding a concern for social justice to Buddhist teachings. Applying a Buddhist perspective to structural dukkha implies an alternative evaluation of our economic situation. Instead of appealing for distributive justice, this approach focuses on the consequences of individual and institutionalized delusion: the dukkha of a sense of a self that feels separate from others, whose sense-of-lack consumerism exploits and institutionalizes into economic structures that assume a life (and motivations) of their own. Although fairness remains important, in terms of equal opportunity and more equitable distribution, Buddhist emphasis on greed as a motivation—“never enough”—implies that, when institutionalized, greed ends up subverting the purpose of any economic system, which is to promote widespread and sustainable human flourishing. Here the traditional Western concern for social justice is complemented by the Buddhist focus on ending dukkha. In sum, the role of greed must be addressed not only individually, in our personal lives, but also structurally. notes 1.  Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold (New York: New Directions, 1969). 2.  Walter Kaufmann, Faith of a Heretic (New York: Doubleday, 2000), p. 186. 3.  In John Blofeld, trans. and ed., The Zen Teaching of Hui Hai on Sudden Illumination ­( London: Rider, 1969), p. 81. 4.  Trevor Ling, The Buddha (London: Gower, 1985); Nalin Swaris, The Buddha’s Way to Human Liberation: A Socio-Historical Approach (New Delhi: Navayana, 2011). 5.  Loyal Rue, Everybody’s Story: Wising up to the Epic of Evolution (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 37. 49 50 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES 6.  See, for example, Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Knopf, 2007); Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want (New York: Penguin, 2008); and Matthieu Ricard and Daniel Goleman, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007). 7.  David R. Loy, The Great Awakening (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003); David R. Loy, Money Sex War Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2008). Copyright of Buddhist-Christian Studies is the property of University of Hawaii Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Buddhist-Christian Dialogue: Looking Back, Looking Ahead, and Listening Ever More Deeply Sallie B. King James Madison University I was asked to give a brief overview of the subject of the Buddhist-Christian dialogue, looking back over its history and looking ahead to its future. I begin with two caveats. First, of necessity, this account will be very general and I will paint with a very broad brush. I cannot speak to the many variations and exceptions to many, if not all, of the general statements that I make. Second, inevitably, this account will also be very subjective. It will especially be colored by my visits in recent years to Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Taiwan. the dialogue on religious thought Looking back over the history of the Buddhist-Christian dialogue, one notices a pattern that is regularly remarked upon: Christians show a lot more interest in dialogue with Buddhists than Buddhists show in dialogue with Christians. This is especially the case with respect to dialogue regarding each other’s religious thought.1 Sometimes Christians observe this fact with dismay, or with the implication that there is something wrong with the Buddhist side because of this lack of interest. There is a sense among some Christians that Buddhists should be more interested in learning from Christianity on the level of religious thought. I would like to address this idea that Buddhists should be more interested in learning from Christianity on the level of religious thought. First, several people have noted that the place and function of religious thought in Buddhism are rather different than their place and function in Christianity. For example, as Rita Gross has pointed out, some forms of Buddhist meditation have no reference to Buddhist thought at all—especially some Theravada practices such as mindfulness and choiceless awareness—whereas neither she (at least, at that time) nor I can think of any Christian meditation that doesn’t reference God or Jesus.2 Again, Rita Gross has stated that for Christians to take at least some Buddhist thoughts and practices seriously, they needn’t give up necessarily any of their own fundamental doctrinal commitments, whereas the reverse is not the case.3 That is, a Buddhist-Christian Studies 34 (2014) 7–23. © by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved. 8 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES Buddhist who wanted to take Christian thought seriously would almost immediately come face-to-face with Christianity’s theism. They likely would be unable to proceed, since accepting theism would require them to forego the whole edifice of Buddhist thought. Here I must demur. It is true that Christianity’s theism and Buddhism’s nontheism give fundamentally different foundations to their respective worldviews. But surely there are some elements of Christian thought and practice that Buddhists could absorb from Christianity without a fundamental reorientation. Some examples of ideas in Christianity that seem unthreatening to the foundations of Buddhism, yet potentially growth-inspiring for Buddhism in dialogue, come readily to mind. For example, as the relative place of laypeople shifts within modernizing Buddhism, a great deal might be learned from Christian thought on church and community. Again, Christian thought that contemplates realization of the Kingdom of God here and now might be of interest to those Taiwanese Buddhists who speak of a “Pure Land on Earth.” Even in the (semi-)ontological area, Christian thought on Spirit or pneuma might make for a potentially enriching dialogical partner for Buddhists, with their ideas on Buddha nature, Tathagatagarbha and Dharmakaya. The two sets of thinking on Natural Law could be a place of mutual learning. And many of the parables of Jesus have the power to cause people to see things in a new way, regardless of worldview. There is much that Buddhists could absorb from Christians while maintaining their basic worldview. Yet it remains true that it is hard to see much evidence of ­Buddhists absorbing anything substantial from Christian religious thought. I think that at this point in the Buddhist-Christian dialogue, we can say that the Buddhists have voted with their feet. Buddhist dialoguers are not ignorant of Christian religious thought. There have been some rather deep Buddhist studies, for example, of Jesus and of Christian mystics.4 However, it seems clear that they haven’t, as a rule, found anything there that has compelled them to add to Buddhism something from Christian thought. Buddhists have voted with their feet and walked away from Christian theology, without taking much of any of it home as a souvenir. The situation reminds me of a recent American film titled He’s Just Not That into You; here, the situation is addressed to the Christians: “Buddhists Just Aren’t That into Your Theology.” If Christians insist that they should be, are they perhaps not hearing a message that the Buddhists are giving them as part of the dialogue? Rather than expecting, then, that the other side “should” find something useful in some aspect of one’s religion, it might be helpful to think instead in terms of needs. I think we can see in the overall pattern of the Buddhist-Christian dialogue that members of each religion have been voting with their feet. Not all messages are transmitted with words. I think we can say at this point in the Buddhist-Christian dialogue that some results are in. What each religion has taken from the other is something that they have found useful. They have left alone or walked away from what they have not found useful—for them, in their own particular historical and cultural situatedness. The Christian side, among other things, has found quite useful Buddhist religious thought or Dharma teachings. Prime examples of this are books by John Keenan, BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE such as his The Meaning of Christ: A Mahayana Theology, and Paul Knitter’s Without Buddha, I Could Not Be a Christian.5 In his work, Keenan consciously names and puts aside the Hellenic philosophy through which Christianity has traditionally been expressed as something that just doesn’t work anymore for many people. Yet one needs to frame one’s thought and speak in some way. So Keenan has experimentally expressed Christian thought using Buddhist concepts and terminology, finding these concepts, and indeed the entire conceptual stance of Mahayana Buddhism, much more useful. In Paul Knitter’s case, he focuses his conceptual struggles upon traditional Christian theology, formulated in Latin and ultimately rooted in Greek philosophy.6 With disarming openness, he first recounts his difficulties with traditional Christian theological ideas, then his “passing over” to Buddhism, where he recounts finding ideas that do work for him, serving as what he calls “a guide and a light,”7 and finally his “passing back,” where, using that light, he is able to “rediscover,” “retrieve,” and “recreate” Christian tradition.8 These are two of the more dramatic examples, but there are many, many cases of Christians finding things of value in Buddhist thought. In another area, and as is well known, Western Christians have voted with their feet also in embracing Buddhist meditation, particularly those Buddhist meditations that are light on specifically Buddhist elements such as Buddhas, bodhisattvas, Tantric deities, Buddha lands, and so on. Buddhist meditations devoted to the cultivation of such things as mindfulness, concentration, and loving-kindness have been taken up by countless Christians, as well as many Jews (notably in the Jewish Renewal movement) and secular Western people (in mindfulness-based stress reduction and the whole field of counseling and psychological therapy). The role of Buddhist meditation in helping to inspire the revival of interest in Christian meditation practices, such as the Jesus Prayer, is also substantial. what buddhists have learned from the dialogue and want from the dialogue As mentioned above, there have been no important works by Buddhists that somehow incorporate Christian religious thought into Buddhist religious thought. Much less is there anything comparable to the works of Keenan and Knitter, which fundamentally rethink the religious thought of their own traditions by using the ideas of the other tradition. The closest thing from the Buddhist side might be appreciations of Jesus, notably those written by the Dalai Lama (The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus) and Thich Nhat Hanh (Living Buddha, Living Christ and Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers).9 However, though these works do express appreciation of the person of Jesus and his teachings, they are in no way comparable to the works by Keenan and Knitter. In fact, they are the opposite insofar as they view Christ and his teachings very much through a Buddhist lens, perceiving Jesus as a bodhisattva or as embodying Buddhist values. However, if we ask how the Buddhist side has voted with their feet, we quickly see that they also have absorbed transformative learning from their partner in the dialogue. Before discussing this, though, it is important for us to recall the situat- 9 10 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES edness of Asian Buddhists, which is hugely influential in the Buddhist response to Christianity: Asia is globalizing, Westernizing, and modernizing, and a great deal of it is postcolonial. The world is shrinking; our interconnectedness is more and more pronounced every day; ideas, products, labor, capital, disease, pollution, and everything else flow rapidly in every direction. But these things have different meanings in different parts of the world. In Asia, Western culture and civilization seem to be an endless, unstemmable, irresistible flood. In many respects, they have already “won.” The traditional Asian ways of life continue mainly in the countryside, an ever-shrinking portion of the overall culture. The future is in the ever-expanding cities, where students learn fluent English and a rational way of thinking. Religions, including Buddhism, must adapt to the times or become ever more irrelevant to the younger generation and the urban, educated middle class.10 Buddhism overall is well into the process of adjusting to the conditions of modernity, though this process is much further along in some places than in others. Where Buddhism is not very modernized, there may be an awareness of a decline in the strength and influence of Buddhism, yielding a feeling of fragility, or perhaps of defensiveness about Buddhism’s future prospects. Where the process of modernization is well advanced, such as in Taiwan, there may be a sense of pride in the rediscovered value of Buddhism and a touch of defiance of the West and its Christianity. (Tai­wanese Chan master Venerable Sheng Yen was fond of saying, “When people maintain what they believe in is the best religion in the world, they should not forget that others also have the right to say that their faith is the best.”11) In addition, let us not forget that the twentieth century was devastating for Asian Buddhism. In some cases, political events wreaked devastation upon Buddhism— such as in the People’s Republic of China, Tibet, and Cambodia—or resulted in government controls of varying severity—such as in Laos and Vietnam. In China and Cambodia, Buddhism is literally rebuilding from the rubble. In the other cases, governmental control has seriously reduced Buddhism’s flexibility and ability to be creative. We must add to this picture of the Asian context of Buddhist-Christian dialogue the ongoing resentment of Christianity felt to this day in much of Asia over its linkage with past Western powers’ colonizing of their countries. As is well known, those colonizers brought heavy-handed Christian missionaries along with them in such a way that Western colonial power and Christianity were inseparable in the minds of the Asians who were on the receiving end of those Western presences. These things are not forgotten.12 As I traveled in Taiwan in the fall of 2012, the Buddhist nuns who were my primary hosts could not have been more kind, gentle, gracious, and eager to hear what I had to say about engaged Buddhism. But I could not say a positive word about Christianity without someone saying, “All they want to do is convert you!” As I prepared this paper, I was often moved to think: Given this history, what would it take to make Asian Buddhists really want to listen to Christians? I think it’s a really important question, and one not easy to answer. To begin now to name what Buddhists have absorbed from Christianity, they have embraced and adopted the example of Christian charitable work. A well-documented BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE example of this kind of direct influence upon Buddhism can be seen in the story of the origins of Tzu Chi (Buddhist Compassion Relief), one of the great manifestations of the contemporary Taiwanese Buddhist renaissance, founded by the Buddhist nun Master Cheng Yen. The story is told that Venerable Cheng Yen saw a “pool of blood” on the floor of a hospital in Taiwan and was told that it was from an aborigine woman who was miscarrying but turned away from the hospital since she could not pay for medical services. Shortly after that, as a Tzu Chi spokesperson tells it, “three Catholic nuns came to our hut to pay our Master a visit. . . . There was a long discussion. The Catholic nuns mentioned that there are all sort of Catholic hospitals and schools and charity organizations, but never any Buddhist ones. They told the Master that in the eyes of the world, the Buddhists are but a passive group of people contributing nothing to society.”13 Master Cheng Yen herself commented, “While other religions such as Christianity and Catholicism have acted to improve public welfare, I felt ashamed about being a nun who could not implement the Buddhist teachings of compassion and wisdom in society.”14 From the combination of her Buddhist faith and the Christian example and challenge, Venerable Cheng Yen developed the massive program of Tzu Chi charitable, environmental, cultural, and emergency-relief works. Tzu Chi is the largest charity in the Buddhist world and the largest NGO in the Chinesespeaking world. This is partially an outcome of Buddhist-Christian dialogue. And of course Tzu Chi is by no means alone in being inspired by the example of Christian charitable works. Simply put, Buddhists have found it beneficial to talk with Christians and observe Christian actions in the area of social engagement. This is the kind of thing they want to focus on. This is how they have voted with their feet. In this vein, Venerable Sheng Yen said to an interreligious dialogue, “my first proposition is to urge everyone to focus not so much on the discussion of one’s own religious background, of one’s own religious doctrine, of the similarities and differences between different religious faiths, but to focus more on the shared needs of humankind as a whole.”15 It is also worth mentioning that Buddhists have been influenced by and sometimes adopted some Christian institutional ideas. This is part of the modernization process and very important for Buddhism’s future viability. As Asia becomes more urban and more modern, Buddhism must adapt and develop new institutions. Some of these are inspired directly by Christianity. Thus in Sri Lanka, during the time of the British colonial presence, a group of young men including Anagarika Dharmapala developed the Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA), based upon the model of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA); this institution then spread from Sri Lanka to other Buddhist countries. Dharmapala actually developed the YMBA as part of his effort to combat the encroachment of Christianity on Buddhism in Sri Lanka, but he still borrowed the idea from the Christians. Another, less combative, example has to do with rethinking the Buddhist education of laypeople. Lay education traditionally has not been Buddhism’s strong suit, and certainly the old way of education based upon the village temple no longer applies in urbanized settings. As an example of new institutions, one finds in Taiwan formalized and very systematic educational programs for laypeople, including children, using a host of 11 12 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES graduated, age-appropriate textbooks and materials. I can’t say how direct the influence has been here, but the programs have a lot in common with Christian Sunday schools and adult education programs, in a Buddhist form—the lessons for children incorporate Buddhist history and doctrine, meditation instruction, and the practice of giving charitable service. looking forward As I contemplated the future of the Buddhist-Christian dialogue, I was moved by the words of Sri Lankan (Christian) bishop Kenneth Fernando. He spoke of the debate over the past several decades regarding the relative merits of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, naming the very weighty theorists who had engaged in these debates, such as Karl Barth, Hans Kung, and John Hick. He then went on to say, “It is my contention that all these are attempts to build up a grand theory that covers all religions from a Christian perspective and is therefore triumphalistic. It is still a form of Christian imperialism, which inhibits and is an obstacle to building up true inter-faith relations. In our multi-faith world we have to resent all tendencies to be judgemental and become the dominant partner. If we really need a model in which all religions can have a place we must work out such a model in dialogue with people of other faiths.”16 I was struck by these words not because I necessarily agree with them—I have engaged in some constructing of dialogue theory myself—but because I find them helpful. In them I hear a voice from the non-Western world that suggests to me a way forward on the question I mentioned earlier that kept haunting me as I was writing this paper. To restate it, the question that I kept asking myself was this: What would it take to overcome the legacy of Christianity in Asia, where to many if not most people, as soon as you say the word “Christian,” the first thing they think of—justified or not—is aggressive Christian missionary work caring only to maximize conversions while playing handmaiden to Western power and empire and looking down upon local culture? It is both important and disconcerting to note that Fernando draws no distinctions in his statement between an exclusivist like Karl Barth and committed dialogue promoters and pluralists like Hans Kung and John Hick, but lumps them all in the same category as triumphalists and imperialists. Surely the last thing either Kung or Hick intended or wanted was triumphalism or any kind of imperialism. Yet this is what Bishop Fernando of Sri Lanka heard even in their work as he listened. In their efforts to build a theory of interreligious dialogue—what most of us probably think of us a commendable effort to understand—he perceived a move to judge and to dominate. Why? He does not elaborate, but in the last sentence quoted he states, “If we really need a model in which all religions can have a place we must work out such a model in dialogue with people of other faiths.” In other words, the mere fact that these Western Christians seemed to look down from on high, making judgments and creating theories about all religions and all religious people, is the problem. It doesn’t matter what the theory is. The stance itself is imperialistic, I surmise. I take Fernando’s words as a sign pointing the way to overcome the legacy of BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE Figure 1.  (Credit: Sallie B. King) Christian behavior in Asia and as a way forward in the Buddhist-Christian dialogue. That way forward is listening—listening and being led by what we hear. What would it look like if Asian Buddhists took the lead in the Buddhist-Christian dialogue and relationship, if Asian Buddhists set the standards, out of their cultural norms and their ways of being religious?17 I can’t entirely say, of course; nor should I. However, some images seen among Asian engaged Buddhists do come immediately to mind, pointing out things that I for one have heard from Asian Buddhists. The first image that comes to mind is an altar I saw in Sri Lanka at the school for deaf children run by the engaged Buddhist group Sarvodaya Shramadana (Fig. 1). On this altar are images of Buddha, Jesus, and Vishnu. No one even pointed it out to me as we were toured through the school. We were just moving from one place to another and walked through a room that had this altar in it. It was not remarkable to them. When I asked about it, the response was: “We have Buddhist, Christian, and Hindu children at this school. We don’t want anyone to feel left out.” They made it sound entirely natural, easy, and unremarkable. 13 14 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES This is similar to a practice of Thich Nhat Hanh. He speaks of having met profound and holy Christians such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who not only inspired him deeply but also transmitted to him something of the living Christ that resided in them. Having met such people and through them having “touched” the living Christ, he came to regard Christ as one of his own spiritual ancestors and consequently added an image of Jesus to the altar in his hermitage alongside the image of Buddha.18 Again, he makes it look so easy, so natural and unremarkable: If you have been deeply touched by the spirituality you encounter in another tradition and you want to express your devotion and admiration for that spirituality, you put an image that represents that spiritual tradition in the place that you reserve for spiritual images, and in that way you are reminded of that spirituality and put in touch with it every time you see the image; perhaps you touch your palms together and bow with devotion. This kind of openness to multiple devotion is not a new thing in Asia. China centuries ago developed the Three Teachings (三教 sanjiao) syncretism of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism; it became eminently “normal” there. In Japan most traditional people venerated Buddhas, bodhisattvas, Shinto kami, and their ancestors. It was just normal. In the Sri Lankan case, I had previously heard Ariyaratne saying that the war in Sri Lanka was not a religious war between Hindus and Buddhists, that Hindus and Buddhists got along well in Sri Lanka, and that the war and ethnic conflict was some- Figure 2.  (Credit: Sallie B. King) BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE thing constructed and hyped up by politicians for their own purposes. I hadn’t known what to make of that statement until I visited a Sri Lankan village where an annual ceremony was going on. This was a 100 percent Buddhist village that we visited in 2008, while the war was still going on. In the Buddhist village on the day we visited was a visiting Hindu priest who was performing a puja before an image of Ganesha drawn on a rock (Fig. 2) while the entirely Buddhist villagers gathered around and watched. Afterward, everyone shared a feast. When I asked about it, I was told that this ceremony was to ensure the village’s prosperity in the coming year and that they had been performing this ceremony annually for centuries. Again, they made it look easy and perfectly natural: Everyone wants prosperity; why would we not do this? Meanwhile, the war continued in the north.19 I call this kind of thing “interreligious friendliness.” I hope it is not an imperialistic term! And I’m not saying that all Asian Buddhists feel this way. I’m just saying that it happens. And I think this is an example of something that many in the West have listened to in Buddhism, have heard, and have put into practice in their own way. I say this because many Western people who draw upon Buddhist practices and ideas and make them a part of their own religious life evidently do not feel the need to give up their religious identity as Christian (or Jewish), or if they’re secular, they may not feel the need to take up a Buddhist identity. Buddhism in the West doesn’t draw nearly as many conversions as it does people who treat Buddhism as supplemental to their own, more formally acknowledged, religion. Many Westerners read Buddhist books or practice Buddhist meditation simply because they expect to get some benefit from it. They hope to find inner peace, find happiness, and find a way to think about and experience their lives that works for them. But they don’t necessarily feel any need to stop being Christian (or Jewish) to do so. Probably many Christians would not be comfortable with an altar with images on it from several religions. But as measured by voting with their feet, many Christians have taken Buddhism into their spiritual lives just because it works for them, and without making a dilemma of religious identity out of it. They seem to have imbibed the frequent pattern of Buddhist relaxation around this issue. Or maybe they’re just sick and tired of religious exclusivism, perceive Buddhism as non-exclusivist, and find that refreshing. Some religious authorities and even scholars have tried to control this phenomenon. Pope John Paul II, in his Crossing the Threshold of Hope, infamously (to Buddhists) warned Christians away from Buddhism and Buddhist meditation practices.20 Much less well known is an event in 1979, when the Catholic Academy in Bavaria, Germany, held a congress of Buddhist-Christian dialogue. Attenders of the congress took up the question of non-Buddhists practicing Zen and considered whether or not this is right and proper religious behavior. The congress decided that it was not proper, stating that “Buddhist meditation methods ought not be adopted unless the practitioners accept Buddhism’s spiritual claim and its otherness, because the practice of Zen is not separable from Buddhism.”21 Much could be said about this. On the one hand, this is exactly what many West- 15 16 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES ern scholars typically think and what I also think, on a purely intellectual, theoretical level: A religion’s various parts draw upon all the other parts; the part is distorted without the whole. It’s an almost unarguable theory. However, on the other hand, this declaration seems to me the very epitome of the imperialism that Bishop Fernando was talking about. Regardless of what theory says should be the case, in practice, on the ground, religious borrowing is absolutely normal, more the rule than the exception. You can’t practice Buddhist meditation without being Buddhist? People do it anyway. Lots of people. What assumptions lie behind the “should” in the view that people “should not” practice Buddhist meditation without being Buddhist? Is there an assumption that Abrahamic notions of religious identity are normative? Yes. Is there an assumption that rationality and doctrinal clarity outweigh practical benefits embraced by people at the grass-roots level? Yes again. Moreover, this is another place where the concept of voting with our feet comes in handy: No matter what authorities or scholars may say, people are doing otherwise. It is one of the characteristics of our time that religious authorities can no longer so fully control people’s religious beliefs and sometimes behavior, first, because of modernism, which teaches us to think for ourselves, and, second, because of the Internet, which gives us endless information and resources. Here indeed the words of Bishop Fernando resonate: To attempt to control these processes with our scholarly judgments does indeed seem worthy of his charges of dominance and imperialism. It’s also hopeless. In thinking about these issues, there is another, and quite contrary, reality on the ground in Buddhist Asia that we should consider: what Robert Bellah called Buddhist “overtolerance.” Bellah defines overtolerance this way: “An overtolerant religion is one that fails to communicate its message to important groups in the society and passively assents in their adherence to heterogeneous and often less developed orientations.” He goes on, “Buddhism, through passive acceptance of pre-existing religious orientations, frequently found itself overwhelmed by them in time.”22 It has not been the typical Buddhist habit (though there are important exceptions) to draw a strict line between themselves and other religions in their area. While they debated and disagreed, Hindus and Buddhists in India also borrowed enormously from each other. When Buddhism moved into Tibet, it took on Tibetan characteristics, and when it moved into China, it took on Chinese characteristics, in each case radically transforming itself. However, this Buddhist propensity to leave a very porous line between itself and other religions and occasionally to be open to outright syncretism has a downside: overtolerance. When you’re not strict about what is Buddhist and what is not Buddhist, you risk losing some of your Buddhist identity, some of what makes you Buddhist. The instance of this with the most serious consequences was in World War II–era Japan. At that time, Japanese Buddhism had accepted as part of itself so much Shinto and Confucian ethics that it had lost sight of an ethics that Shakyamuni Buddha would have recognized. The result was that not only could Japanese Buddhist leaders by and large not resist their government’s imperialism, but many of them also enthusiastically participated in justifying and encouraging the war effort, using words that BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE were Buddhist but with meanings that were alien to Buddhism, though congruent with at least one reading of Buddhist and Shinto ethics.23 The Japanese Buddhist leadership, by and large, had lost sight of Buddhism’s fundamental values and at least part of the reason why was because their tradition was overtolerant—that is, it had failed to sufficiently differentiate itself from what it was not but let alien values enter and be regarded as Buddhist. These Buddhist leaders clearly thought themselves to be eminently moral people as they urged people to be “one with” the emperor and to sacrifice themselves for the glorious war effort of the country.24 The only problem was that the morality that they advocated was not Buddhist. Interestingly, one of the exceptions to this pattern was the leadership of the Soka Gakkai, which, precisely because they were exclusivistic and drew strict lines between themselves and all other religions, including other forms of Buddhism, refused to submit to Japanese government demands that they endorse and teach the government-approved religious ideology. (They, of course, were sent to prison.) Another instance of Buddhist overtolerance and its aftermath can be seen in contemporary Taiwan. In China, not only did the three great religions syncretize, but Chinese folk religion also was a typical part of the mix of religious ideas and practices that many, if not most, people accepted. Taiwan today is in the midst of a hugely popular, energetic, and creative Buddhist Renaissance. This Renaissance manifests in the movement called renjian fojiao (人間佛教, “Buddhism entering the human world”), known in English as Humanistic Buddhism. Among other things, this movement is a modernizing movement for Buddhism, and one of the necessities of this modernization process is to distinguish Buddhism from what is not Buddhism, especially many folk religious practices that many Taiwanese people think are Buddhist but are not.25 For Taiwanese Buddhists to draw this line between what is Buddhism and what is not is somewhat difficult, because they do have a great deal of tolerance, in the form of interreligious friendliness; nonetheless, they do feel the need to draw this line. At present, it seems that they let some things go and other things not; typically folk religion fares rather poorly in this pruning process. Thus, for example, all the modern Buddhist groups that I visited in Taiwan encourage their followers to continue to practice the Confucian virtue of filial piety—indeed, they insist upon it—but they also insist that their followers stop engaging in the folk practice of burning paper money (so-called hell money) for their deceased family members in the underworld, teaching that this is superstition and, moreover, harmful to the environment.26 Let us return to the theme of dialogue being driven by needs. In the circumstances just described, with Buddhists who have recently come to feel a real need to carefully discern how to differentiate themselves from what they are not, it would indeed be inappropriate for Christians to persistently encourage these Buddhists to come up with Buddhist-based theories encouraging closer relations and sharing among religions. Such behavior might indeed feel dominating and imperialistic to those Buddhists on the receiving side of it, though its intention is very much the opposite. Such a request just doesn’t fit the situation, the needs and interests, of those to whom it is addressed. We need to remember that the Buddhist-Christian dialogue is inseparable from civilizational and cultural dialogue. Despite globalization, there remains a 17 18 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES cultural and civilizational gulf between Asia and the West. In this kind of situation, the only thing I can think is that we in the West, whether we consider ourselves Christian, Buddhist, or both, need to do a lot more deep listening. Ideally, when possible, we would go to Buddhist countries; see what Buddhism is on its own turf; look, listen, and learn; and ask questions, but change those questions as the responses come in and the observations shift the assumptions. If we cannot go to Asia, we need to read, listen, and visit local temples and practice centers with the same attitude. We need to be prepared again and again, often with chagrin, to see what our assumptions have been, to put them aside and begin again with renewed modesty. interreligious dialogue necessitates intrareligious dialogue Speaking of deep listening, and of dialogue being driven by needs, one more very important subject remains. In reading through papers from the recent years of Buddhist-Christian dialogue, one theme comes up repeatedly from the Buddhist side, often with considerable urgency: Buddhists are asking those Christians who talk with Buddhists to rein in some of the behavior of the most extreme and aggressive ­Christian fundamentalists. The most egregious case in recent years is those Korean Christians who in recent years have attacked, vandalized, and burned Buddhist temples in Korea. This request to Christians to rein in this kind of behavior from among their fundamentalists is one of the fruits of Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and if we take this dialogue seriously, it seems to me that we need to act upon its findings. So let me put on my Christian hat and talk about we Christians speaking to our own fundamentalists—or better: listening to our own fundamentalists. Some may be surprised to see me speak of listening to our fundamentalists. As a rule, mainstream and liberal Christians, including myself, just want to tell Christian fundamentalists that they’re wrong and they should change. But the problem with that approach is simple: It doesn’t work. We should not be surprised. We know from interreligious dialogue that you can’t go into dialogue with a feeling of superiority and expect your dialogue to go anywhere. The same rule applies in intrareligious dialogue. That attitude will be sniffed out immediately, and the dialogue will degenerate into position defending at best. I have as much trouble with Christian fundamentalism as anyone. Fortunately, I found myself in a position in which I was forced to listen to Christian fundamentalists. I teach a course on interreligious dialogue, and a significant number of Christian fundamentalists typically take the course. The students in that class are required to speak up and express their views, and, of course, everyone else must listen, including me. Very gradually, by listening, I developed a sincere respect for my fundamentalist students and a good deal of what they were saying. I discovered that many of them made their way to Christian fundamentalism as a reaction against mainstream American culture and what they perceived as its materialistic, self-indulgent values. They were looking for an ideal to which they could wholeheartedly devote themselves. They found that ideal in fundamentalist Christianity because that was the religion that presented itself to them on campus most enthusiastically and effectively. It gave BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE them an ideal to believe in, a community that shared this ideal, and a disciplined life in service of this ideal. This life required sacrifices; they had to give up some things—other ideals, some scientific findings—in order to embrace the Christian ideal, but they just saw this as part of their self-discipline. They looked down upon liberal Christianity for being weak and compromising its own truth in order to “give in” to science, academia, and other religions. As I listened to these students, I disagreed about many particulars. But because of the classroom setting, I was in a position where I needed just to listen nonjudgmentally, entirely without any agenda. It was quite a revelation to me to realize how much I held in common with them. Most importantly, I came to sincerely respect them in the way that they take their lives so seriously, in their rejection of materialism and self-indulgence, in their desire to find an ideal and to live for the sake of that ideal. It is not difficult to respect them without having to share their views. This story reminds me of chang bu qing pusa (常不輕菩薩 Never-Disparaging or Ever-Respectful Bodhisattva) (Fig. 3). He appears in the twentieth chapter of the Lotus Sutra as a monk who bowed to everyone he met, saying that they were all certain to attain Buddhahood. When I was in Taiwan, I was deeply moved when I approached the Kaohsiung temple of the Xiang Guang (Luminary Nuns) order and saw a statue of Ever-Respectful Bodhisattva in the doorway, bowing respectfully to each person who approached with no consideration of their place in society, their gender, their age, or, we might add, the amount of delusion they might or might not have in their mind. Can liberal Christians emulate Ever-Respectful Bodhisattva and bow to Christian fundamentalists? To say the same thing in other words: Can we show our respect by open-minded, nonjudgmental deep listening? In all fairness, there is a parallel request that I think many Christians would like to put to Buddhists. Just as Buddhists would like to see Christians rein in their own fundamentalists, I feel sure that many Christians would like to see Buddhists rein in their own nationalists. I am thinking of Buddhist nationalists in Sri Lanka, including many monks, who regard Sri Lankan Tamils as second-class citizens at best and who have advocated and supported very strong measures not only against the Tamil Tigers but sometimes against the Tamil people as well, notably during the closing phase of the war when uncounted numbers of Tamil noncombatants died or were injured or displaced. Certainly A. T. Ariyaratne has devoted decades to working on this cause in all its dimensions, and Sulak Sivaraksa has spoken out strongly and clearly against Sri Lankan war crimes.27 There have been others who have spoken out. However, I think it is fair to say that there was a great deal of silence from the Buddhist world as Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalism developed, intensified, and came to its bloody climax. I am thinking also of Buddhist nationalism in Burma, which recently has manifested in the form of terrible attacks and atrocities against the Rohingya Muslim minority living in the west of Burma and other Burmese Muslims. Brutal attacks on Burmese Muslims have been going on for years and accelerating of late. Where is the Buddhist response? It seems not to be a normal practice for Buddhists, across national lines, to call each other to task for violating the most fundamental moral values and behavioral norms of the religion. This is difficult for Christians to understand or 19 20 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES accept. This is a subject on which both inter- and intrareligious dialogue would be welcome. A fruit of the Buddhist-Christian dialogue is the hope that each of us will engage our own fundamentalists or nationalists, certainly with respect to any violent behavior, but also by engaging ordinary intolerance and unthinking feelings of superiority. Engage, certainly, but how? Does this mean that we need to confront them, or denounce them? This is exactly the kind of point upon which Buddhist-Christian dialogue would be welcome and helpful. What is morally incumbent upon us? And Figure 3.  (Credit: Zizhu Linjingshe [紫竹林精舍 Purple Bamboo Monastery]) BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE what works? Venerable Sheng Yen had some good advice on this. In speaking of the problem of religiously motivated terrorism, he said that the “most thoroughly effective means” for combating terrorism is to “Call upon all people of love and wisdom, to employ all means and approaches to constantly extend, whenever it is appropriate, our friendship towards every ethnic group, region and individual who is prone to terrorism. Let them know that they are not alone or helpless and let them feel the warmth of care, respect and acceptance.”28 Fine words, and words that could be applied to Christian fundamentalists and Buddhist nationalists as well as terrorists of any kind. conclusion It seems that my conclusion on both interreligious dialogue and intrareligious dialogue is the same: We need more listening—deep, respectful, open-minded, extensive listening. The more we are in a position of power or dominance, the more it is true that we need to speak less and listen more. We in the West in particular need to stop talking so much and listen a lot more. In that spirit, I draw my comments to a close. Perhaps Never-Disparaging Bodhisattva can have the last word (Fig. 4). Figure 4.  (Credit: Zizhu Linjingshe [紫竹林精舍 Purple Bamboo Monastery]) 21 22 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES notes 1.  See Rita M. Gross, “Introduction,” in Rita M. Gross and Terry C. Muck, Buddhists Talk about Jesus, Christians Talk about the Buddha (New York: Continuum, 2000), pp. 11–12; and Grace Burford, “Asymmetry, Essentialism, and Covert Cultural Imperialism: Should Buddhists and Christians Do Theoretical Work Together?” Buddhist-Christian Studies 31 (2011). 2.  Rita M. Gross, “Conclusion,” in Rita M. Gross and Terry C. Muck, Christians Talk about Buddhist Meditation, Buddhists Talk about Christian Prayer (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), p. 150ff. 3.  See Rita M. Gross, “Introduction,” in Gross and Muck, Buddhists Talk About Jesus, p. 12. 4.  For example, Dalai Lama, The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus (Somerville, MA: Wisdom, 1998); D. T. Suzuki, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002). 5.  John P. Keenan, The Meaning of Christ: A Mahayana Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989); Paul F. Knitter, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2009). 6.  See Knitter, Without Buddha, pp. 3–4. 7.  Ibid., p. 14. 8.  Ibid. 9.  Dalai Lama, The Good Heart; and Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), and Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers (New York: ­Riverhead Books, 2000). 10.  See David L. McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 11.  Venerable Sheng Yen, “Eliminating Barriers, Enhancing Mutual Respect and Love,” in Establishing Global Ethics (Taipei: Sheng Yen Education Foundation, 2008), p. 7. 12.  Christianity was itself violently suppressed in Japan, with the Japanese government using torture to try to force the Japanese Christians to renounce their faith and executing those who refused. In contrast to widespread Asian Buddhist resentment of Christian missionary behavior, awareness of Japanese Christian martyrdoms is quite limited. 13.  Venerable Tze Sheh Fu, quoted in Yu-ing Ching, Master of Love and Mercy: Cheng Yen (Nevada City, CA: Blue Dolphin Publishing, 1995), p. 66. 14.  Cheng Yen, “Performing Good Deeds Is More Important Than Shunning Evil Ones,” Inspirational Extracts, May 1, 2001. http://www.tzuchi.net/MindMap.nsf/836a9f1c801ca09f 48256b7a00296f5a/e53c3e67be962d2648256bb10004f60e?OpenDocument; accessed February 27, 2013. 15.  Venerable Sheng Yen, “A Common Path,” in Establishing Global Ethics (Taipei: Sheng Yen Education Foundation, 2008), p. 94. 16.  Kenneth Fernando, “Buddhism, Christianity and Their Potential for Peace: A Christian Perspective,” in Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Buddhism and Christianity in Dialogue: The Gerald Weisfeld Lectures 2004 (Norwich, Norfolk, UK: SCM Press, 2005), p. 223. 17.  Admittedly, for years many Western Christians have been beseeching people of other religions and nationalities to take the lead in the dialogue, to very little avail. 18.  Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ, p. 6. 19.  Kenneth Fernando also noted that “it has not been a conflict between the Sinhala and Tamil people because in all parts of the country, except the north, the two communities still live in harmony and there is no persecution by either of the two communities. The conflict is between the militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the government forces of Sri Lanka.” Fernando, “Buddhism, Christianity,” pp. 216–217. 20.  His Holiness John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), pp. 89–90. 21.  Whalen Lai and Michael von Bruck, Christianity and Buddhism: A Multicultural History of Their Dialogue, translated by Phyllis Jestice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), p. 180. BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE The authors added parenthetically that in their opinion this was the right position to take. For their information on the congress, the authors drew upon H. Waldenfels, ed., Begegnung mit dem Zen-Buddhismus (Dusseldorf: Patmos, 1980). 22.  Robert N. Bellah, “Epilogue: Religion and Progress in Modern Asia,” in Robert N. Bellah, ed., Religion and Progress in Modern Asia (New York: Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1965), pp. 191–192. 23.  See Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen at War, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); and Sallie B. King, “The Genesis and Decay of Responsibility in Buddhism” in Taking Responsibility: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Winston Davis (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), pp. 173–195. 24.  See Victoria, Zen at War. 25.  This is the intention behind Venerable Sheng Yen’s extremely popular book Orthodox Chinese Buddhism (Elmhurst, NY: Dharma Drum Publications, 2007). See pp. 9, 19–20. 26.  See, for example, ibid., pp. 74–76, 84–86. 27.  See http://www.sulak-sivaraksa.org/en/index.php?option=com_content&task=view& id=292&Itemid=67; accessed February 27, 2013. 28.  Venerable Sheng Yen, “Violence and Terrorism in Religion,” in Establishing Global Ethics, p. 68. 23 Copyright of Buddhist-Christian Studies is the property of University of Hawaii Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. The Suffering of Economic Injustice: A Christian Perspective Ulrich Duchrow University of Heidelberg Together we are facing a global kairos of humanity because these years are decisive for whether our civilization will irreversibly continue to produce death or whether we find a way out toward a life-enhancing new culture. So let me try to make a humble contribution to our common search for liberation from suffering toward life through justice. suffering caused by economic injustice in the axial age and in the capitalist civilization of modernity We do not need to spend much time on describing the sufferings caused by economic injustice. They cry to high heaven every day. Jean Ziegler, the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, speaks of more than 60 million people dying of hunger and its consequences every year, especially children, although there is more than enough to feed them. That is an annual World War II against the poor. He continues to say: “A child that dies of hunger is murdered.” He calls this a daily crime against humanity.1 Others call it structural genocide.2 All these victims are human beings with a human face, according to biblical tradition created in the image of God. So we are talking about murdering living images of God, about blasphemy. Also, the blue planet Earth’s suffering is growing dramatically. The extinction of species is accelerating, desertification is expanding, the poisoning of water and soil is increasing, and climate change is producing irreversible effects like lifting the sea level, devouring islands in the Pacific and growing parts of Bangladesh, creating weather disasters everywhere, and possibly increasing temperature in parts of Africa by ten degrees. We all know this, but so far we have not been able to make the necessary changes in global economics and politics to stop or at least slow it. Often forgotten are the psychological and spiritual sufferings and diseases of a growing number of people. In India an average of more than fifty farmers, driven into debt beyond their means, commit suicide daily out of despair.3 Workers suffer increasing stress and anxiety, and middle-class people fall into depression, projected to be the second most common illness in 2020, according the World Health Organization. So what are the roots of all of this? Buddhist-Christian Studies 34 (2014) 27–37. © by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved. 28 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES My thesis is that what we are experiencing now started nearly three thousand years ago within what is called the Axial Age, beginning in the eighth century bce, in the whole of Eurasia from Greece to China. At that time a new economy started to appear in daily life, built on money and private property. It had tremendous social as well as psychological and spiritual effects. To analyze what happened then helps us understand what is happening today. Looking at the responses to this development by the different faiths and philosophies in Israel/Judah, India, China, and Greece may also help us to better understand the tasks and possibilities of engaged Buddhists and liberation theologians in our age. The philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term “Axial Age.”4 According to him, the experience of violent crises between 800 and 200 bce might have prompted the ­parallel efforts of the prophets, the Buddha, Confucius, Daoism, and Greek philosophy to find new foundations for living together. He characterized the new approach as intellectual and spiritual (geistig), looking only marginally at the economic and political context. Recently Karen Armstrong and, based on her findings, Jeremy Rifkin took up this theory, looking particularly at war and violence as causes for the responses within the different cultures.5 Also José María Vigil, who is present here, has just published a chapter in his book on Theology of Axiality and Axial Theology.6 As far as the sociohistoric context of the Axial Age is concerned my thesis comes nearest to what David Graeber has worked out in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years,7 although he is not very interested in the religious responses. Combining his insights with my own research,8 let me summarize how the new economy affects ancient societies. Money as unit of account was used in the palaces and temples of Mesopotamia as early as around 3000 bce, but the ordinary economy of people in daily life functioned via a system of mutual credit. This changed when soldiers and mercenaries became professionals and war making was raised to previously unknown levels. They had to be paid. The most important wages were the spoils. Because precious metal could easily be transported, it started circulating in little pieces as a kind of money. Around 600 bce authorities in Lydia, India, and China started at nearly the same time to coin the metal in order to pay the mercenaries and soldiers. With these practical currencies local markets also developed for daily transactions of the normal people. This means that cash and unified markets are the children of war. At the same time slaves, usually prisoners of war, now increasingly also debt slaves, were turned into a negotiable commodity. This is why Graeber calls this new system the “military-coinage-slavery-complex.” There was a kind of circle: New professional armies loot precious metals from temple or palace treasuries, jewelry of women, and so on, and slaves. The slaves have to work in the mines to produce more metal for the coinage. The coins are paid to the soldiers and stimulate the local markets, and so on. The whole system functions only as long as it expands through further conquest. So it is no surprise that this system is easily wedded to imperialism. Increasingly empires also request tribute payment in the form of money. This development finds its first climax in the Hellenistic-Roman empires. On this basis the logic of calculated exchange in markets emerged. Goods for daily A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE needs were exchanged with money as unit of account. Money became the “one” in the variety of commodities—however, not as a “thing,” detached from the social process, in which people recognize its value, as the Buddhist economist Karl-Heinz Brodbeck points out.9 This means that the daily use of money also changed the soul and the thinking of people. Besides communicating by speech—that is, using words (logos)— they communicate by calculating in money (ratio). In so doing, the individual ego gains precedence over relations in community. This is furthered by the fact that, in the process of exchange in the market, the money owner has more power than the producer of goods. Money as such offers access to the market while the product has first to be in demand. Coping with this risk is only possible by having as much money as possible. One of the “sages of antiquity,” Pittakos of Mytilene, underlined this, saying: “Profit is insatiable.” He does not say: “The one who makes profit is insatiably greedy.” An economy in which money is made a commodity is inherently greedy. This is why in our new book Franz Hinkelammert and I speak of “greedy money.”10 There is an “objective” base for greed to accumulate money without limits. The other implication of this is that money gives the right to private property beyond personal use. Money gives access to the market, cushions the risks, measures the exchange value, and gives access to property rights. Combined with the development of hierarchies and classes in larger societies, money and private property start to determine the economic, social, and political power of people within societies. In any case, the new economy led to greed and the desire to accumulate limitless money. The institutionalization of this greed was interest. A debtor had to pay back more than he had borrowed, for example, to purchase seed. He also had to put up his own land as security. If he could not pay back his debt plus interest, he lost his land and his family had to work as debt slaves for the creditor. Thus private property and money came into existence at the same time and led to debt slavery and loss of land. On the other hand, the creditors could collect more and more land, money, and debt slaves. This is what scholars have called the emergence of a class society in antiquity.11 Private property and money also reinforced the male domination of patriarchy since only men could own property, which was a way of giving them political power, too. The house father (Gr: despotes; L: dominus) was seen as the owner of the land, women, children, slaves, and cattle. In Roman law private property even got the status of an absolute. The men were legally allowed to use, misuse, or destroy it. So the result of introducing money as commodity and private property as an absolute, combined with imperial conquest, was increased division in societies between masters and slaves and between men and women, a more and more precarious situation of small farmers, and in general a dire impoverishment and suffering for the majority of people. This was not just a structural problem, because money also changed people’s souls. Besides communicating through speech and cooperation they start calculating, including calculating each other’s performance in competition. So the problem was not just structural, but also took on a psychological and spiritual dimension. 29 30 BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN STUDIES Before looking at the religions and philosophies resisting these developments in the Axial Age, let us briefly analyze how modern capitalist civilization has built on the early money/private property economy, giving it a new dynamics. In early capitalism from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ce, the market set out to conquer one sphere of life after the other. The basic step was the privatization of land as commons through enclosures, subjecting agriculture to the mercantile coordination of labor. Another new element was the introduction of compound interest. However, the most decisive new element was the invention of double-entry bookkeeping in the upper Italian trade and banking cities. Here everything was calculated according to debit and credit, costs and return, input and output—with the one goal to gain maximum profit. This was not just a social technique but the decisive characteristic of a new worldview. The world became looked at as a functional mechanism to produce profit for oneself. The calculation of utility followed the means-end rationality, which is the typical way of thinking in European modernity, which meanwhile dominates the whole world. As the economy serves the one purpose of maximizing profits, ­normal people judge everything according to a single yardstick: “What’s in it for me?” So structural, cultural, and personal greed starts to be seen as something positive. Finally Jeremy Bentham and Adam Smith define greed and egoism as a virtue and the decisive motor of the economy. The mechanism of continuously reinvesting the profit in new projects in order to gain higher profits created an obsessive accumulation machine. Money that is constantly reinvested for accumulation purposes is called capital. Capital is not simply money but money or assets in monetary terms invested for getting more money. It can also be frozen to capital in the form of machines serving accumulation. So greedy money is the exact description of the nature of capital, of profit, thirsty for more profit. This is why capitalism is the precise term for the economic system and the form of society of Western modernity. “Market economy” is a euphemism used in order to avoid touching the taboo. If you want to use this term in a capitalist context, you need to say “capitalist market economy” because in the past there were and in the future there will be other kinds of market economies. For example, there can be exchange markets without money and also markets with money, however not with money in the form of a commodity geared at accumulation. We shall come back to this. Industrial capitalism deepened the division of labor and increased the split between the classes. But the key new feature of it is the increased throughput of energy and resources for profit’s sake, aggravated by the fact that consumerism has to be stimulated for the sake of maximum capital accumulation. The result of this shift is visible only now as we face energy and ecological crises. Karl Marx was prophetic when he stated: “Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the laborer.”12 He also analyzed the obsession for accumulation by the commodity-money mechanisms as fetishism driving people and societies even against reason. This is exactly what we experience today as growth fetishism destroying Earth. A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE Today this fetishism has taken the form of financial capitalism after it turned out that infinite growth is not possible in a finite world. Within the financial sector the growth obsession has turned to speculation with ballooning financial assets in all kinds of forms. But it is not without a link to the real economy, because when the balloons burst, as we experienced in the years following 2007, neoliberal governments take real money from the working taxpayers and throw it into the voracious jaws of the money owners and their agents, the banks. As this increases the debt of the public budgets, big capital is blackmailing the governments to even pay higher interest rates and curb social benefits. It seems certain that the whole system will one day collapse, thereby increasing the suffering of people even more. Financial capitalism is the ultimate climax of a development starting in the Axial Age. For me the conclusion is that we are not dealing with this or that crisis, but that this whole civilization is death-bound, not just the economy. It is only because the majority of the people and to some extent all of us are imprisoned in the same kind of logic, spirit, and practice that the system is still able to operate. Are there possibilities of structural and personal transformation to find a new culture of life? the response of the axial age faiths and philosophies and of today’s liberation theologies and spiritualities My key thesis is that all religions and philosophies of the Axial Age can and must be understood as a response to the emergence of that kind of civilization—including its political economy, psychology, and spirituality—that now, at its climax, is leading humanity and earth not only into increasing suffering but into death. This means that it is of crucial importance to unleash the original power of these...
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