Following up the last post -- Petteri Sulonen's comment (#2) and Nathan's post at Dangerous Harvests point out that the Buddhist path and the values of consumerist capitalism are, shall we say, incompatible. However, one can find a huge amount of cognitive dissonance about this in dharma centers.
Nathan has big concerns about the insensitivity of financially comfortable Zen students toward the struggles of poor and working-class students. My experience of Zen (and I've spent most of the past 20 years in the poor end of the pool) has been somewhat different -- it was more that childless monastics lacked sensitivity to the struggles (and time limitations) of parents.
I've also seen younger practitioners be insensitive to the physical limitations of older practitioners. There are all kinds of ways all of us are clueless about and insensitive to what other people right next to us are going through.
But the issue of money is one that comes up frequently, and I think it is true that some dharma centers have set the "dana" bar a bit too high for poorer people. It's also the case that some dharma centers are hanging on by a shoestring. We've got a lot to work on.
However, this is not an issue limited to Buddhism in the West. I have heard first-hand accounts of Asian monastics treating the poor quite shabbily -- no dana, no dharma. It happens.
Petteri says,
"I get the feeling that many convert Buddhists have a seriously conflicted relationship with the society we live in. Many are left of center politically and recognize that the system, as Robert Aitken Roshi put it, stinks, but few have done any serious thinking about how to fix it, or what to replace it with, beyond "everybody should be kind and compassionate and courageous and generous and wise at each other." Which would work, of course, if it only happened that way."
Petteri is in Finland, yes? I see from the news that the economy has been rough in Finland, too. Here in the U.S. I think there is a lot of thinking -- or something that passes for thinking -- about what to do about the economy, but there is little agreement. We're more in a phase of sorting ourselves into cheering sections -- Romans or barbarians? I can't tell who's winning.
As far as the cognitive dissonance goes -- yeah, there's a lot of that. I've written about consumerist versus Buddhist economics in the past. But isn't it all about cognitive dissonance -- who we think we are and what we think life is supposed to be, versus Buddhist teaching?
So I don't advocate some kind of vow of poverty for Buddhist laypeople. Renunciation is about perceiving how we make ourselves unhappy by clinging and greediness. When we do, renunciation naturally follows, and it is a positive and liberating act, not a penance.
The only "should" I see is that we should honor the practice of others, even though we may be in very different places on the road.
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