How Buddhism and Marxism Can End Our Suffering

Gibbs applies this aspect of her argument to the failure of people in the Global North to realize how their relative affluence is inseparable from widespread poverty in the Global South. She discusses, for example, how the ethics of the wealth generated by multinational corporations often headquartered in the Global North is rarely considered when some fraction of it is diverted to philanthropic purposes in the Global South. Gibbs notes the contradiction inherent in the fact that ‘we can comfortably benefit from pension plans invested in stocks that increase in value due to labour rights violations and environmental destruction in another country while at the same time attending a fundraising event for local charities that work on reforestation or child poverty.’ Says Gibbs: ‘It is akin to breaking a person’s legs and then generously donating crutches for them.’

The most interesting part of the book considers how individual contemplation might translate into structural change. This will only come about if we as a society account for, as Gibbs puts it, the bodies in the basement – in other words, if we arrive at a full understanding of the consequences of our actions, and continually take action in the present to create a new reality:

For example, we would immediately at point-of-purchase see the entanglement of our cell phone purchase with the fate of children in coltan mining in the Congo who are facing violence, the rape of their mothers, and not being able to attend school; or as we stood in line to order a Big Mac we would reflect on the fact that due to our heavily meat-based diet we are dependent upon raising livestock upon a system of raising livestock that is the single largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions globally; or we would witness the working conditions of the Bangladeshi sweatshop worker as we’re about to purchase a new shirt; or as we turned our heating system on we had a vision of the skin problems and respiratory diseases afflicting communities living on or near land owned by multinational coal mining companies; or as we pulled out or credit card to buy new cotton pants we realized that over 200,000 unsubsidized Indian farmers had committed suicide because they couldn’t compete with the heavily-subsidized cotton growers in wealthy nations; or looking at the menu in a restaurant we would witness the mental health problems of slaughterhouse workers, and so on.

While I am convinced of the need to take individual responsibility for structural violence, especially by interrogating even one’s most mundane, everyday activities, I’m not sure you have to be a Buddhist practitioner to do so. Full disclosure: I’m a (on-again and off-again) Buddhist practitioner and have been for some years now. That said, one of the core delusions that a practitioner of Buddhism must renounce, as I understand it, is the belief that there is any external source of peace – the delusion that you must rearrange external circumstances in order to be happy. If that is the case, what is a capitalist system – or any system for that matter – other than an external circumstance?

Buddhism’s end game, through meditative contemplation, is to uncover joy and peace within, then extend it to others for the benefit of ‘all’. This is likely the reason why so many articles discussing Buddhism or ‘mindfulness’ typically have a saintly, detached tone, rarely extending beyond the bounds of an already almost-enlightened consciousness unmoved by worldly tragedies and trauma. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh coined the term ‘engaged Buddhism’ to refer to a practice that contemplates social change; however, the precepts he enumerates in that vein are inward-facing, focusing on one’s own mind and actions – not the kind of line items one would find in a political manifesto, which typically sets forth the changes everyone else must make toward a just society. The gist is that if every single person adopted a zen-like approach to life, then structural reforms would be unnecessary, as we humans would carefully tend to each other and the environment without recourse to the force of law.

Full disclosure: I am also not entirely convinced that structural reform would not make me ‘happy.’ In fact, I have spent most of my adult life convinced that it absolutely would. It is this particular inside-out/outside-in conundrum that I’d hoped the book would directly address. The disconnection that I see between Buddhist practice and desiring structural change could explain Gibbs’ rather defensive stance throughout the book. For the most part, she alternates between defending Buddhist principles to godless socialists and explaining structural inequality to Buddhist practitioners supposedly untethered from material concerns.

In positioning herself as a mediator between supposedly feuding factions, Gibbs presents a primer on Buddhism and socialism without delving too deeply into either, missing an opportunity to more fully explore the limitations of integrating – and thereby hopefully working to close the gap between – the two lines of thought in service of a more just world. I’m hard-pressed to imagine why someone would read Why the Dalai Lama Is a Socialist if she were not already engaged in, or at least predisposed to, both Buddhist and socialist praxis. Gibbs did not have to frame this subject matter as a sermon in search of a choir.