Journal of Global Buddhism 2019, Vol.20 19–29
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3238225
www.globalbuddhism.org
ISSN: 1527-6457 (online)
© The author(s)
Special Focus: Buddhism and Economics
Introduction: Buddhism and Economics
Elizabeth Williams-Oerberg
University of Copenhagen
Throughout this introductory article, I bring attention to the important distinction
between the field of Buddhist Economics and the field of Buddhism and Economics.
Rather than drawing up normative frameworks for how one should engage
economically, the authors in this special issue offer new theoretical frameworks for
conceptualizing how Buddhists necessarily do engage economically. First, I provide a
brief overview of the field of religion and economics, and the burgeoning field of
Buddhism and Economics more generally. I then narrow in on the innovative
theoretical frameworks presented in this special issue, including important
discussions as to the impact of Max Weber, along with considering merit and the
contingent conjunctures within which Buddhists negotiate economic contexts. The
contributing authors in this special issue emphasize not only how Buddhists
necessarily engage with the economy, but also how Buddhist economic exchanges
influence as well as are influenced by the surrounding socio-economic environment.
I conclude by emphasizing the importance of considering economic relations when
examining contemporary Buddhist contexts.
Keywords: Buddhism and Economics, Religion and Economics, Contemporary
Buddhism, Max Weber, merit economy
T
he collected articles which make up this special issue on Buddhism and Economics all offer
original theoretical frameworks for analyzing Buddhism and Economics. However, we take a
divergent approach to Buddhist economic relations promoted by the concurrent and
increasingly popular field of Buddhist Economics. The term ‘Buddhist Economics’ was coined by E.F.
Schumacher (1973) in his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Since then, a
transnational movement forwarding a Buddhist approach to economics has taken off, with advocates
ranging from Thai Buddhist leaders (e.g. Payutto, 1998, Sivaraksa, 2011) to economists who offer new
economic models based on Buddhist principles (Brown, 2017, Lennerfors, 2015, Pryor, 1990, Zsolnai,
2007, Zsolnai and Ims, 2006). Buddhist Economics offers alternative, prescriptive models for how one
should engage economically. Matthew King (2016) in his overview of Buddhist Economics points out
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
WILLIAMS-OERBERG
| 20
how Buddhist Economics has less to do with economics proper and more to do with a ‘Buddhist scale
of value’ in which efforts are made to lessen the authority of ‘Western’ economics and alter the course
of materialist development in Asia (see also Shields, 2018). In this special issue, however, we take a
different approach towards analyzing Buddhist economic engagement.
Instead of taking the normative Buddhist Economics approach, which outlines how Buddhists
and others should engage economically, we look at how Buddhists within various contexts do engage
economically—what we consider to be the field of Buddhism and Economics. Recently, a number of
large, collaborative research projects, conferences, and initiatives have taken up this approach to
Buddhism and Economics, and a lot of new work is on its way towards publication. 1 These initiatives
show that Buddhism and Economics is a burgeoning field with great potential for developing new
theoretical and conceptual frameworks for engaging with this line of research. This special issue
takes up this task and offers innovative theoretical frameworks for analyzing the contingent
conjunctures within Buddhism and Economics. While none of the authors of the articles in this
special issue are economists, we approach the field of Buddhist economic relations through our
Buddhist Studies, Religious Studies, Anthropology and/or Asian Studies backgrounds. In contrast to
Buddhist Economics, we foreground our theoretical frameworks in Buddhist emic practices and
institutional frameworks from a Lived Religion approach (see Schedneck this issue) rather than a
doctrinal or prescriptive economic model approach.
While Buddhism and Economics is a burgeoning area of research, the field of religion and
economics more generally is well established and continues to grow.2 A common trend within this
field has been to take a Rational Choice Theory (RCT) approach to religion that emphasizes the
rational-economic strategies of humans as homo economicus. Scholars within this line of research
apply microeconomic theories such as ‘supply-and-demand’, ‘cost-benefit ratio’, etc. in order to
explain the behavior of religious individuals and groups (see for example Iannaccone, 1998,
Iannaccone, 1992, Stark et al., 1996). In this model, religious institutions are often conceptualized as
businesses that must vie for religious consumers in a religious marketplace of religious goods within
a context of increasing globalization and transformation.3
1
The editors of this special issue, Trine Brox and Elizabeth Williams-Oerberg, as part of the “Buddhism, Business and
Believers” collaborative research project led by Trine Box at the University of Copenhagen, have arranged
workshops, conferences, and guest lectures on this topic. Other research initiatives include: a collaborative research
project on “Buddhist Temple Economies in Urban Asia” headed by Christoph Brumann at the Max Planck Institute
for Social Anthropology at Halle/Saale Germany, which held a workshop on "Sangha Economies: Temple Organisation
and Exchanges in Contemporary Buddhism” in September 2017; a conference on “Buddhism and Business, Market
and Merit” at the University of British Columbia in May 2017; and a workshop at the Centre national de la recherché
scientifique, the French National Center for Scientific Research on “Comparative anthropology of Buddhism
workshop: religion and economy” organized by Nicolas Sihlé and Benedicte Brac de la Perriere in April 2016.
Additionally, Fabio Rambelli and Richard Payne have been running the “Economics and Capitalism in the Study of
Buddhism” seminar at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting from 2014–2019.
2
See for example Carrette and King, 2005, Coleman, 2005, Gauthier and Martikainen, 2013, Kitiarsa, 2010b,
Martikainen and Gauthier, 2013, Obadia and Wood, 2011, Roberts, 1995, Usunier and Stolz, 2014, Wuthnow, 1994, 2005.
3
For a good overview, see Obadia and Wood, 2011, and Koning and Njoto-Feillard, 2017.
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In addition to downplaying and even disregarding the role of religious beliefs and values in
religio-economic encounters, these approaches often privilege monotheistic religions that are
founded on entirely different belief systems than Buddhism. As Wilson (this issue) succinctly
emphasizes, “beliefs—those affirmed and those rejected—have very real economic effects” (p.98).
How then, might beliefs embedded in Buddhist thought and practice impact economic relations?
Conversely, how might economic contexts affect Buddhist beliefs? Borup (this issue) insightfully
shows how counterbalancing models focused on monotheistic religions in mono-religious cultures
with models that focus on polytheistic religions in religiously pluralistic cultures can reveal new
insights regarding not only the rise of capitalism but also contemporary contexts of religion and
economic relations more generally. Accordingly, the contributors in this special issue seek to present
new theoretical and conceptual approaches to analyzing the conjunctures of Buddhism and economic
relations that are founded in Buddhist beliefs and practices.
What is striking when considering the collected works in this special issue is the influence that
Max Weber has had on theoretical and conceptual approaches to Buddhist economic relations. The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1992 [1930]) has had a long-lasting impact on the
field of religion and economy, offering an analytical approach to economic development through the
lens of religion. The legacy of Max Weber’s lesser-known writing on Buddhism, moreover, lingers
today with remnants found in common perceptions that Buddhists are, or should be, ‘concealed’ from
the economy—as somehow apart from economic as well as political and social engagements in their
pursuit of ‘salvation’ and spiritual development (Weber, 1958: 233, 343). This understanding,
especially promoted by Orientalists and early text-based scholars of Buddhism, leads to the
assumption that Asian Buddhists who engage with the economic, social and political spheres are
somehow following a degraded and inauthentic form of Buddhism (see Schedneck this issue).
Associating Buddhism with asceticism and anti-materialism is a dominant trope in these Orientalist
discourses, which at times also postulate a moral, spiritual East that could possibly rescue an immoral,
materialistic West—a view that can be detected in some of the writings on Buddhist Economics
mentioned above.
Material and economic engagement, however, has been a central aspect of Buddhist life since
at least the fifth century BCE. In contrast to the non-economic spirituality postulated by Weber,
scholars have argued that the spread of the monetary economy accompanying the shift to an agrarian
society and urbanization in India created the circumstances for the growth of Buddhism (Benavides,
2005). Flows of cash and resources have played a central role in the support of Buddhist communities
and the construction of magnificent monasteries which feed—and house—so-called ‘mendicant’
monks (Schopen, 2004, Walsh, 2010). The work that we present in these conceptual and theoretical
approaches to Buddhism and Economics draws upon the groundbreaking work of scholars who have
already embarked on this task of denouncing the myth of the renunciant Buddhist monk set apart
from monetary matters in early and pre-modern Buddhism.4 As we have previously argued,
4
See for example Amstutz, 2012, Benavides, 2005, Chakravarti, 1988, Gernet, 1995, Neelis, 2017, Schopen, 2000, 2004,
Walsh, 2007, 2010.
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“Buddhism, as with all other religions, has always necessarily been deeply embedded within not only
economic, but also political and social spheres in the various contexts in which Buddhism has taken
root” (Brox and Williams-Oerberg, 2016: 504). A number of scholars have shown how this
embeddedness has taken root in more contemporary contexts of modern and late-modern or
postmodern global capitalism.5 Hopefully the continued work being done within this burgeoning field
of Buddhism and Economics, including the articles in this special issue, will help drive more nails into
the coffin of the notion that Buddhists, especially Buddhist monastics, could somehow be noneconomic.
Although it seems obvious, it is unfortunately often overlooked that the establishment and
survival of Buddhist institutions, especially monasteries, depend on access to economic and material
resources. These resources often come into the hands of monastics through a system of exchange
based on a merit economy. The centrality of Buddhist beliefs regarding merit involves a system in
which monastic labor is exchanged for economic resources such as land, materials, etc. Especially in
historical Buddhist contexts, merit has played a crucial role almost everywhere (Amstutz 2012:153).
In this way, merit is perhaps the most important element in Buddhist economic relations and the
main Buddhist commodity (see Wilson this issue) or currency (see Borup this issue). The articles in
this special issue all address the importance placed on merit when considering wider processes of
Buddhist production, labor, commodities and exchange.
However, what happens when the surrounding economic environment alters significantly and
does not embrace a merit economy and a system of exchange which supports this particular form of
production based on monastic labor? The articles by Borup, Payne and Wilson address this issue in
their various approaches to analyzing how Buddhist institutions impact, as well as are impacted by,
the surrounding economic environment and social embeddedness. The articles by Schedneck and
Brox take the conversation further by dismissing normative judgments of what is or should be proper
considerations of Buddhism, dismissing knee-jerk reactions to Buddhist engagement with
commodification and mass-production. Instead they emphasize the importance of paying attention
to the ‘contingent conjunctures’ (see Schedneck this issue) that arise within Buddhist discourse and
practice regarding economic engagement and authenticity. Together, these articles highlight how
Buddhist economic exchanges are not only context-dependent but also dependent upon how
Buddhists interpret and act within these contingent conjunctures, including contexts of global
capitalist and post-modern development.
Special Issue article overview
The articles that make up this special issue, co-edited by Elizabeth Williams-Oerberg and Trine Brox,
draw upon work that began in Helsingør, Denmark in May 2017. As part of the Buddhism, Business and
5
See for example Asai and Williams, 1999, Borup, 2018, Caple, 2017, Carlisle, 2008, Covell, 2005, Foxeus, 2017, 2018,
Jackson, 1999, 2009, Keyes, 1983, 1993, Kitiarsa, 2010a, Obadia, 2011, de la Perriere, 2015, Rambelli, 2017, Schedneck,
2015, Scott, 2009, Wilson, 2016, Sizemore and Swearer, 1990, Swearer, 1998, Yang and Tamney, 2005.
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Believers collaborative research project6 at the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies, University
of Copenhagen, we organized a small workshop in which we urged participants to focus on theoretical
approaches to analyzing Buddhism and Economics. We had previously organized a larger,
international conference on the theme of “Buddhism, Business and Economic Relations—in Asia and
Beyond” in 2016, at which scholars shared empirical cases that highlight novel Buddhist economic
engagements.7 At this conference, we became aware of the scope for developing theoretical and
conceptual frameworks to analyze such contemporary Buddhist-economic relations. Our aim at the
workshop in Helsingør was to develop these theoretical tools to use within the field of Buddhism and
Economics, and the result of our discussions in Helsingør has resulted in the articles assembled in
this special issue.
We start with the article by Brooke Schedneck, “An Entangled Relationship: A Lived Religion
Approach to Theravāda Buddhism and Economics”. In her overview of Buddhism and Economics
within Theravada Buddhist studies, she recognizes a bias in favor of a doctrinal approach, as
advocated by scholars such as Max Weber. This approach emphasizes a Buddhism as represented in
Buddhist texts that has since been degraded through time with the influence of local, folk religious
practices. However, the emphasis on text in this doctrinal approach, she argues, has obscured the
complexity of Buddhist engagement with the economy. As she asserts, within Theravada Buddhist
Studies, the relationship between Buddhism and economics in South East Asian Studies has not yet
been directly addressed with a new paradigm or methodology for understanding Theravada Buddhist
economic realities. She redresses this absence by suggesting a methodology which, building upon the
work by Meredith McGuire (2008), adopts a ‘Lived Religion’ approach. Based on this approach,
Schedneck urges scholars of religion to avoid using the terminology of ‘transformation’ and
‘adaptation’ to describe contemporary religio-economic engagement, since this can be taken to imply
a pure form of religion normatively founded in text-based understandings of religion, which is then
altered or transformed. Instead she suggests the concept ‘contingent conjunctures’, inspired by
Ananda Abeysekara (2002), in order to fully capture how Buddhism is constructed within competing
narratives as to what can and cannot be counted as Buddhism. In this sense she emphasizes emic
perspectives among practitioners and how they determine what is and is not proper ‘Buddhism’.
Buddhist ideals, furthermore, are located within a particular cultural logic, such as the economy of
merit and merit as the commodity of exchange. When analyzed through a ‘Lived Religion’
methodology, such contingent conjunctures are paid close attention to and the complexity of
Buddhist-economic relations is maintained.
Similarly, Jørn Borup in his article “Spiritual Capital and Religious Evolution: Buddhist Values
and Transactions in Historical and Contemporary Perspective” also invokes the work of Max Weber
in his historical overview of the impact that Buddhism has had on economic and civilizational
6
We are very grateful for the generous funding we received from the Carlsberg Foundation and from the Danish
Independent Research Council (Den Frie Forskningsfond) to hold this workshop along with the other “Buddhism,
Business and Believers” research initiatives.
7
Papers from the 2016 conference are included in the forthcoming volume Brox and Williams-Oerberg (ed.), Buddhism
and Business: Merit, Material Wealth, and Morality in the Global Market Economy, University of Hawai’i Press.
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developments in Asia. He builds upon the work of Max Weber to ask whether or not there was
something similar to a ‘Protestant ethic’ among Buddhists during the establishment of capitalism in
Asia. He also draws upon the work of Robert Bellah in considering models for religious evolution in
his theoretical approach for analyzing Buddhist-economic conjunctures. Borup offers a tri-partite
theoretical framework for analyzing historical Buddhist-economic conjunctures and their
development from an institutional perspective. Borup suggests three different (Weberian ideal) types
of East Asian Buddhist responses to the hermeneutical challenges of materiality and economy: 1)
Archaic Religiosity in which ‘everything is sacred’ as a form of magic religion (Weber) or ‘apotropaic’
Buddhism (Spiro); 2) Post-axial Otherworldliness or a de-sacralizing of Buddhist ethics in which ‘nothing
is sacred’; and 3) Converting Capitals, which offers an alternative hermeneutical response to either
rejecting or accepting capitalism, instead highlighting how capital transforms and circulates into
different domains—e.g. economic capital into social, cultural, and spiritual capital; and religious
capital into secular capital, etc. He highlights the role of sangha and monastic institutions as a “preconditioning catalyst for and generator of economic development” (p.49) on the one hand, and how
economic transactions and wealth generation were a pre-conditioning context for the development
and maintenance of sangha on the other hand. Buddhist monastics were among the first
entrepreneurs in Asia because monasteries often had the leading edge in capitalist accumulation with
large land holdings and command over resources. Furthermore, Borup argues, the Buddhist economy
in turn facilitated growth in the secular economy, in which religion was a resource and merit a
commodity.
Richard Payne in his article, “Religion, Self-Help, Science: Three Economies of Western/ized
Buddhism” also takes an institutional approach in analyzing the impact that the economic
environment in places such as North America has had on the ways in which Buddhist institutions
have developed in these contexts. Like Borup, he offers a new theoretical framework in the form of a
three-fold typology for analyzing Buddhist economic relations, drawing inspiration from Fraser and
Comte and the three-fold system of religion, magic and science. In addition to the sacred as
transcendent and the secular as mundane framework forwarded by Max Weber, he suggests a third
category, that of the immanent sacred, to address the magical or metaphysical aspects of religion. All
these categories relate to how Buddhism has become institutionalized in each of these specific ways,
and how Buddhist-economic relations have impacted various forms of Buddhism in North America.
For example, the first category of the transcendent sacred correlates with what he considers ‘Church
Buddhism’, in which Buddhist institutions are supported through membership fees; in the second
category, that of the immanent sacred which he classifies as ‘Self-help Buddhism’, there is a direct
client–practitioner fee system for services rendered; and with the third category, that of science or
what he terms ‘Denatured Buddhism’, the fee structure is mediated between a service provider and
client, such as when a school or a prison offers meditation instruction. Payne’s threefold framework
helps to highlight the Buddhist-economic conjunctures that are often determined by the laws and
taxes in the surrounding environment, hence impacting the ways in which Buddhist institutions are
formed in these specific contexts.
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Jeff Wilson, in “Buddhism Without Merit: Theorizing Buddhist Religio-Economic Activity in the
Contemporary World”, continues the focus on North American contexts when he considers the
overriding impact that shifts in approaches toward merit have had on Buddhist economic survival.
He grounds his theoretical framework in various approaches to the ‘merit economy’ in which there
is “a separate but intimately intertwined division of economic and spiritual labor between monastic
sangha and a community of lay patrons” (p.89). With Buddhism, merit is a non-tangible product of
behavior in which merit labor is the “chief commodity of the merit economy” (p.90). Likewise, within
the merit economy, merit produced can be redistributed, and thus merit acts as a type of currency
that in some cases is more valuable than money. However, what happens when Buddhism shifts to
new cultural arenas and confronts a pre-existing economic system which is not as amenable to a
merit economy system, as had previously been the case in Buddhism’s spread throughout Asia? As
Wilson succinctly points out, when merit accumulation was the core practice that had united all
Buddhists, what happens when Buddhist groups in North America do not sustain the importance of
merit in Buddhist orthopraxy and orthodoxy—what he considers to be post-merit Buddhism? Wilson
compares two cases in North America that contrast widely in their economic sustainability, analyzing
the foundations of merit economy as the core reason for these Buddhist institutions’ survivability. As
he writes, “the jettisoning of the central, pervasive, and economically crucial notion of merit is
potentially the biggest and most significant transformations in certain Buddhist groups outside Asia”
(p.97). In this way, like Payne, he employs an economic lens through which to analyze the various
ways in which Buddhist institutions develop outside Asian contexts.
We move on from analyzing institutional frameworks to looking more closely at the lived
religion of Buddhism and material objects in the article by Trine Brox, “The Aura of Buddhist Material
Objects in the Age of Mass-Production”. Here, she considers the ways that aura is produced within
the mass-production of Buddhist commodities, taking a closer look at a Tibetan Buddhist marketplace
in Chengdu, China. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, she examines how aura, or the power
and capability to impact people and the environment, might be impacted by processes of massproduction. As she argues, we cannot know the value of religious objects, even those mass-produced
and displaced, unless we know how people interact with them. She argues that the status and aura of
mass-produced Buddhist commodities depend on the faith, knowledge and preference of the person
who relates to these objects and on the context within which this relationship occurs. In this sense,
there is no clear dichotomy between pure and impure, authentic or inauthentic, Buddhist objects in
that commoditization does not automatically lessen authenticity or the aura of objects. As she argues,
what matters is how people relate to Buddhist material objects and create their own spiritual object
biographies. In situations in which Buddhist commodities are mass-produced and not made by
Buddhists, the risk and ambiguity this context creates, she finds, are counterbalanced by the
processes that take place after production, including the packaging, ritual action and faith labor that
work to sacralize and transform mass-produced commodities into sacred objects.
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Conclusion
All of these articles taken together make a strong case for the importance, if not necessity, of taking
economic relations into consideration when examining contemporary Buddhist engagements. Not
only do they make obvious how Buddhists are necessarily economic actors, but also how Buddhist
economic exchanges impact and are impacted by the surrounding socio-economic environment. We
see how Buddhist-based beliefs such as merit have shaped economic conditions and possibilities for
the establishment of institutions and even the spread of capitalism. And we observe how changes in
belief impact on the formation of Buddhist institutions in newer environments (see Borup, Payne,
and Wilson). Furthermore, we also see how economic and governmental institutional frameworks
impact and are impacted by Buddhist economic activities, emphasizing the importance of keeping
this Buddhist-institutional entrenchment in mind. Moreover, we see how important it is to pay
attention to how individual beliefs, actions and relations work to negotiate these wider economic
transitions, for example in the movement towards mass-production and consumption (see Brox and
Schedneck). By taking both a macro as well as micro perspective on Buddhist-economic relations,
new possibilities arise not only for conceptualizing how these relations occur but also for theorizing
religious and economic configurations beyond Buddhist contexts. In this sense, we expand upon the
influential work of Max Weber and offer new ways to theorize the contingent conjunctures of religion
and economy. We hope that scholars in the future will continue this line of inquiry and help to expand
the conceptual frameworks we use for analyzing Buddhist-economic relations.
Corresponding author:
Elizabeth Williams-Oerberg
University of Copenhagen,
Department of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies,
Karen Blixens Plads 8, Building 10.4.28,
2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark
elizabeth.oerberg@hum.ku.dk
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