Abstract
When writing about Buddhism, much attention is paid to Buddha’s Four Noble Truths: Life is suffering; Suffering is caused by craving and attachment; Suffering can be overcome by achieving non-attachment; the means to achieving non-attachment is to follow the Eight-Fold Path. Herein, the focus is on the Fourth Noble Truth, the following of Buddha’s Eight-Fold Path, which is the means to achieve the penultimate goal of Buddhism, non-attachment. Non-attachment is primarily aimed at developing non-attachment to personal cravings, to egoistic desires. The purpose of the non-attachment is to free the self to experience the feeling of compassion for all sentient beings and to take action on that universal compassion to relieve the suffering of all sentient beings. In contemporary parlance, the phrase, all sentient beings can be taken to stand for our global environment, its inhabitants and future generations. Non-attachment thus is not equivalent to detachment.
Hidden in the practice of the Eight-Fold Path is the key to Buddhist economics, the Eighth path, the path of Right livelihood. In order to fully implement compassion, the economic path must be rightly chosen. One cannot achieve the goal of universal compassion, that is, the relief of suffering throughout the world, without the proper economic path, designated by the term, Right livelihood. Right livelihood will be the subject of this chapter’s inquiry. In Mahayana Buddhism, one cannot achieve spiritual enlightenment until everyone in the world achieves spiritual enlightenment. When one takes Right livelihood into account, herein also referred to as Buddhist economics, one cannot achieve Right livelihood until everyone in the world achieves Right livelihood and the effects of Right livelihood, the elimination of suffering are universally distributed. The concept of Right livelihood is to be understood as the practice of economic activity that is directed to the elimination of suffering in its most urgent cases, that is, in the most indigent people and places in the world.
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Notes
- 1.
For another source of the Eight-Fold path, please see the Mahassatipatthana Sutra. The names of the Eight-Fold paths are sometimes translated differently, but these English translations are, for me, the most intelligible. In the Vinaya Mahakhandhaka, the order and the English translation of the Eight-Fold path is given as: right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right endeavor, right mindfulness, right concentration. Op. cit., p. 53. This sequence, however, is not the most logical.
- 2.
Blond & Briggs, Lts. London, 1973.
- 3.
Op. cit., p. 330, Payutto, 1994, p. 79.
- 4.
Thomas Weber, ‘Gandhi, Deep Ecology, Peace Research and Buddhist Economics, Journal of Peace Research, May 1999, Vol. 36, No 3, p. 357, pp. 349–361. (emphasis added)
- 5.
Ibid., p. 358.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 7.
Venerable Prayudh Payutto, 1994, Translated by Dhammavijaya and Bruce Evans, published by Buddadamma Foundation, Bangkok, Thailand.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 355. (Gandhi, 1955, p. 58)
- 9.
Ibid., p. 358. (Tendulkar, 1963, pp. 288–289) Tendulkar, D. G. 1963, Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 8 vols. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India.
- 10.
For a fuller discussion of the relationship between fear and greed, cf. Robert Elliott Allinson, Space, Time and the Ethical Foundations, Part II., ‘The Nature of Ethics and the Bio-Psychological Deduction of the Emotions, Chapter 1., ‘Toward a New Ethical Foundation: Bio-Evolutionary Social Theory’, Routledge Revivals, Routledge, Taylor & Francis, London and New York, 2019, pp. 141–162. Chinese translation, Jiangsu People’s Press Overseas (ren min chu ban she), Nanjing, China, 2015.
- 11.
(emphasis in original).
- 12.
Ibid., p. 4. (emphasis in original).
- 13.
http://hdr.undp.org/en/2020-MPI According to the 16 July 2020 Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative of the University of Oxford and the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme. Using 2018 population data from the UNDESA (2019).
- 14.
Ibid., p. 41. (emphasis added)
- 15.
(emphasis added).
- 16.
Ibid., p. 70.
- 17.
Ibid., p. 16.
- 18.
For a fuller elaboration of these points, cf., Robert Elliott Allinson, ‘The Ethical Producer’, Spirituality, Ethics & Management, László Zsolnai, (ed.), Kluwer Academic Publishers: Boston/Dordrecht/London, 2015, pp. 61–74.
- 19.
Cfr., Robert Elliott Allinson, 1995, pp. 72–75.
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Allinson, R.E. (2024). The Place of Right Livelihood in Overcoming World Inequity. In: Del Baldo, M., Baldarelli, MG., Righini, E. (eds) Place Based Approaches to Sustainability Volume I. Palgrave Studies in Sustainable Business In Association with Future Earth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41606-4_3
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