Although he is highly critical of a hybrid culture in which Westernized values are on the ascendant and traditional Asian/Thai values wane, he is by no means hostile to the building of a hybrid culture of resistance where Buddhism and Christianity join hands in confronting injustice.

Care typically emerges in the context of close personal relationships, and it is not well suited to either utilitarian or Kantian accounts of morality, or to “social contract” accounts of cooperation. Markets and states both have difficulty providing and supporting care, and as a result, care is overlooked and undervalued. I sketch alternative ways of thinking about the morality and politics of care and present alternative policies that could help support carers and those they care for.

Scholars of Chinese Buddhism have given much attention to vilified foodstuffs such as meat and pungent vegetables and less attention to celebrated foods. While proscriptions are important for their role in constructing boundaries used in group identification, we should not overlook the celebration of particular foods such as congee (zhōu 粥).

This episode is about what it takes for a poor kid to get a college degree. Strange as it may sound, campus food at a place like Bowdoin College is a big part of the problem.

For part one of this miniseries, see Carlos Doesn’t Remember.

This report offers guidance about adopting subjective well-being measures in official government surveys to inform social and economic policies and considers whether research has advanced to a point which warrants the federal government collecting data that allow aspects of the population’s subjective well-being to be tracked and associated with changing conditions.

He gives what is pure and excellent…

We Buddhists must recognize the complexity of contemporary issues and call on our compatriots to resist simplistic and emotional responses to events and situations. It means we must call on our leaders to consider issues in their full context and not seek politically expedient solutions.

In 2023, only 407 people donated a kidney to a stranger. The End Kidney Deaths Act would aim to increase that number nearly thirtyfold.

Also read part two here responding to a few, common counterarguments.

In Kunming, meat has long been a sign of prosperity and status. Its accessibility marked the successes of the economic reforms. Yet Kunmingers were increasingly concerned about excessive meat consumption and about the safety and quality of the meat supply. Buddhist vegetarian restaurants provided spaces where people could share meat-free meals and discuss and develop their concerns about meat-eating.

While similar to and influenced by secular, Western vegetarianisms, the central role of Buddhism was reflected in discourses on karmic retribution for taking life and in a non-confrontational approach that sought to accommodate these discourses with the importance of meat in Chinese social life. Finally, the vegetarian restaurants spoke to middle-class projects of self-cultivation, and by doing so potentially challenged associations between meat-eating and social status.

This study gives some additional perspective on why Buddhism has always been a particularly attractive religion to traders and merchants.

The process by which money value has displaced other languages of value is one of the enormous trends over the last 200 years…

During the second World War, radar created unprecedented opportunities for defense. Nevertheless, no matter how good your radar is, if the person looking at the radar screen isn’t paying attention you’re totally screwed. So an intense set of classified experiments took place to assess this new problem: how long could people pay attention to screens and what could you do to optimize their ability to keep paying attention to screens for long periods of time. […] We see the legacy of that work to this day in the way we think about attention.

From The Twelve Theses on Attention: ‘Sanctuaries for true attention already exist. They are among us now but they are endangered and many are in hiding: operating in self-sustaining, inclusive, generous, and fugitive forms.’

The question, then, is whether we desire and are able to organize society according to higher principles or whether we will surrender to the lowest common denominator approach of capitalism.

Bhikkhus, those beings are thoroughly deprived who are deprived of noble wisdom.

The truth is
money is in war, not poetry…

This is called accomplishment in balanced finances.

Dīghajāṇu of the Koliyans asks the Buddha to teach in a way suitable for lay people who enjoy life. The Buddha teaches four practical ways to ensure success in this life, and another four ways to ensure success in the next.

… the “Axial Age” presents a puzzle: why did this emerge at the same time as distinct moralizing religions, with highly similar features in different civilizations? The puzzle may be solved by quantitative historical evidence that demonstrates an exceptional uptake in energy capture (general prosperity) just before the Axial Age in these three regions.

Statistical modeling confirms that economic development, not political complexity or population size, accounts for the timing of the Axial Age.

Mendicants, a noble disciple who grows in ten ways grows nobly, taking on what is essential and excellent in this life. What ten?

What do people accumulate to be happy and successful?

Bhikkhus, possessing three factors, a shopkeeper soon attains vast and abundant wealth…

And how does a bhikkhu have benefactors?

Shopkeepers and mendicants both have to be clever, responsible, and well supported.

… people collected it and drank it and bathed in it and used it for their own purpose. Since that water was properly utilized, it’s used, not wasted.

In which the Buddha encourages us to take advantage of the abundance we’ve received.

Seno’o Giro’s personal pilgrimage spanned tradition and modernity, and took him from the political right to the extreme left such that in the vicissitudes of this one life is somehow recapitulated the whole dilemma of Japanese Buddhism since the Meiji Restoration. It highlights well the unresolved conflicts at the heart of modern liberal Buddhism.

… the lives and thought of two rather different radical, Zen Buddhists of late Meiji Japan in order to discern whether and in what ways their progressive political ideals were influenced by Chan thought and practice.

Let the king provide funding for those who work in trade. Let the king guarantee food and wages for those in government service. Then the people, occupied with their own work, will not harass the realm. The king’s revenues will be great.

A brahmin wishes to undertake a great sacrifice and asks for the Buddha’s advice. The Buddha tells a legend of the past in which a king is persuaded to give up violent sacrifice and instead to devote his resources to supporting the needy citizens of his realm. However, even such a beneficial and non-violent sacrifice pales in comparison to the spiritual sacrifice of giving up our attachments.

… a noble disciple who has four things is said to be rich, prosperous, and wealthy.

The four factors of stream-entry are said to be true prosperity.

I recollect ninety eons back but I’m not aware of any family that’s been ruined merely by offering some cooked almsfood.

Mahāvīra asks Asibandhakaputta to refute the Buddha on behalf of the Jains. He suggests to try to trap the Buddha with a dilemma: he claims to have compassion for householders, yet visits them with a large Saṅgha in a time of scarcity. But the Buddha claims no family is harmed by this.

… what is the reason why for different people the same kind of business undertaking might fail, while another doesn’t meet expectations, another meets expectations, and another exceeds expectations?

The people I love the best
jump into work

sometimes i want to ask the earth,
was it beautiful      here
without us…

When we adopt a Buddhist perspective on the wounds that afflict our world today, we soon realize that these wounds are symptomatic: a warning signal that something is fundamentally awry with the way we lead our lives.

You can also listen to this book on Pariyatti’s website.

Watanabe did not envision a radical position for Buddhists on the issue of the ‘labour question’; rather, he imagined Buddhism as a harmonizing influence that could help avoid the pitfalls of unrestrained capitalism, on the one hand, and revolutionary socialism, on the other.

An early example of an “engaged Buddhist” reformer in early 20th century Japan.

We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.

An expansion of Graeber’s 2013 essay on the same subject, exploring the “spiritual violence” of modern employment.

A man remembering this, a person established in Nobility,
Is praised right here and now, and later rejoices in heaven.

The legitimate purposes of wealth.

Feeling comfortable with one’s balance of harmful and helpful actions is qualitatively different from reducing harm in the first place.

The blind person, the one-eyed person, and the two-eyed person.

In which the Buddha dismisses the possibility that one could be ethically wise but materially foolish.

Buddhists pray to the Laughing Buddha requesting for healthy living, good luck, wealth and prosperity; and the Laughing Buddha, as a symbol of motivation, inspires them.

A brief word on the ubiquitous “Laughing Buddha” statues which adorn Chinese establishments the world over.

… most of the Japanese companies have a high regard for their employee’s competence and do not adopt personnel retrenchment as one of the urgent countermeasures to come out of a business slump. We looked over historical documents about business disciplines and practices from the 17th century to the 19th century, and examined ideas, beliefs, and philosophy advocated in those documents to elucidate the reasons why the Japanese companies assume the human-oriented attitude toward their employees, and then extracted a conclusion that the human-oriented attitude in the Japanese management has its origin in the spirit of Ji-hi, such as the virtue of compassion of the Buddha.

I can have more economic opportunity and can therefore cultivate this generosity

The role that remittances play in international development—spiritual as well as economic.

Engaged Buddhism is a contemporary form of Buddhism that engages actively yet nonviolently with the social, economic, political, social [sic], and ecological problems of society. At its best, this engagement is not separate from Buddhist spirituality, but is very much an expression of it.

… the majority of philosophy is based on assumptions about the basic cognitive endowments of average individuals that totally disregard what is known about human development

A critique of the Western assumption of the rational citizen and a full-throated defense of education as activism.

We need to turn towards the Earth rather than think so much about abstract, higher worlds. This is the world that has made us, and it’s a creative world. It’s truly an extraordinary place, and we haven’t given it enough credit I think, or appreciation.

… we always speak about Buddhism as a religion of compassion, but then I saw the way Buddhism is developing in the US, especially (I have to say) amongst the White, upper-middle class, convert Buddhists… I don’t want to paint an overly-grim picture, but why aren’t there more Buddhist organizations acting to relieve the suffering in the world?

We must have a system of spiritual culture which is appropriate to the modern world and which can accord with the principles of every religion

A collection of talks, interviews, and booklets by Ajahn Buddhadāsa giving his view of the world and outline for the future.

… wealth and power did not seem to ease disruptive conflict

The fascinating details of monastic life in medieval Dunhuang as told by their cave-preserved legal documents.

That Buddhism became so ritualistic, excessive, and subservient to the state even along the Silk Road demonstrates how common and impactful state intervention has been to the history of Buddhism.

We’re already geo-engineering the planet, we’re just doing it accidentally and badly

Ezra Klein has a wide-ranging conversation with novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (of Mars Trilogy fame) about his “cli-fi” book, Ministry of the Future, and how strange our society is.

… this paper aims for a philosophically more nuanced discussion of the case for and against eating locally. I assess, in turn, locavore arguments based on environmental preservation, human health, community support, agrarian values and political concerns

The law of sacred centers imagines space from the inside out.

A fascinating meditation on the way modern culture thinks about space and sovereignty and what is lost, even by the state, when local communities are disrupted.

Nearly incontrovertible in its conclusion, the book inspired a revolution in charity in the West and encouraged many (me included) to donate more to charity than they ever had before.

The tenth anniversary edition is available for free online.

The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll.

A cautionary tale about how hard it is to rise from the bottom to the top–and why the American school system, despite its best efforts, continues to leave an extraordinary amount of talent on the table.

For part two of this miniseries, see Food Fight.

Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.

A classic of modern psychology, Stumbling on Happiness explains in detail the cognitive biases that prevent us from accurately predicting what will make us happy.

We call that “Progress”
But it’s just movement

An upbeat song about spiritual perspective.

The gift of fearlessness, if extended beyond its classical scope to include the challenges of xenophobia and terrorism threats, is a capacious framework through which to probe the moral contours of contemporary refugee policy and the security concerns of states.

“Possessions, honor, and popularity are brutal, bitter, and harsh. They’re an obstacle to reaching the supreme sanctuary.
So you should train like this: ‘We will give up arisen possessions, honor, and popularity, and we won’t let them occupy our minds.’

In which the Buddha compares attachment to wealth to a dung beetle proud of her dung.

Householder, there are these four kinds of happiness that may be achieved by a layperson

The happiness of ownership, using wealth, debtlessness, and blamelessness.