The Market-Friendly Dharma of Buddhism

During my previous visit to Dharamshala, an amusing sight that caught my attention was a group of Buddhist monks, red-robed, sporting Nike sneakers, sipping cappuccinos and completely immersed in their i-phones. A few decades earlier, while visiting a Buddhist monastery in Sikkim, a Sikkimese colleague accompanying me, laughed off the elaborate rituals associated with Vajrayana Buddhism, arguing that the Buddha could never have prescribed such practices.  

I often return to these incidents each time I encounter Buddhism in its myriad forms. Two books that I read recently, Johan Elverskog’s The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia and Bernard Faure’s Unmasking Buddhism, explored these aspects in some detail.

Buddhism has always been a pro-market religion. All the major centers where the Dharma flourished in India – the Northwest, the Krishna Valley and the Amaravati region were serviced by a hinterland extraordinarily rich with natural resources. Monasteries were often situated in trading hubs and connected to the global trade networks. According to the Hinayana branch of Buddhism, Nirvana was reserved only for the monks. The only way for the common laity to accrue good karma was by servicing the monks and financing their monasteries. Wealth promotion thus became the architecture of Buddhism. And the only way to keep generating wealth was by natural resource extraction, trade, expansion of markets and spreading the religion to make sure the boat could never be rocked.

Indeed, the development of all the renouncing traditions at this time, such as Buddhism and Jainism, actually reflect this transformation to a market economy, since a religious system based on householders and mendicants required a market economy in which the laity could make money and in turn financially support its renouncers. Marketization became so central that even the ethical system of Axial Age India, the theory of karma, is premised on the metaphor of the bank account. Karma is like money: you earn it, save it, store it, lose it

In no time, Buddhism took root in South Asia, China and then Japan where it is still a major religion.

Each time I have to imagine Buddhism, the stock images that come to my mind are that of the Dalai Lama, Richard Gere, Ashoka, red-robed monks and of course the practice of Mindfulness. The whole multi-billion-dollar global business of Mindfulness and Zen Buddhism was an offshoot of the Western liberal interpretation of Buddhism that reduced the complex evolutionary past of the religion to a simple-to-digest narrative about Buddhism being all about renunciation, mental peace, koans, gardens and peace. The political violence that Buddhist societies have undergone in modern history– Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Vietnam – are never evoked since it would be at odds with the narrative of Buddhism being a religion of non-violence.

(I had written earlier about how Ashoka’s piety could have been a response to Brahminism. The vegetarianism of Buddhism is also often pooh-poohed by scholars who point out that the Buddha died of diarrhoea after eating contaminated pork. An additional piece on the export of Buddhism from India)

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