MORAL IMAGINATION IN SUSTAINABLE ALTERNATIVES

Review

The Wisdom of Sustainability: Buddhist Economics for the 21st Century is the latest book from social activist, critic and spiritual visionary Sulak Sivaraksa. The title suggests this volume is intended as a conversation partner to E.F. Schumacher's Buddhist Economics, first published in 1966 and reprinted in 1973 in the influential volume Small is Beautiful. In fact the work of UK economist Schumacher is one of Sulak's primary referents and serves as one of the integrating threads to this new volume.

Photo courtesy of SANTI PRACHADHARMA

The richness of the lectures and essays collected in The Wisdom of Sustainability, however, lies in the breadth and depth of Sulak's moral referents. It is not only Schumacher's economic vision but also Gandhian non-violence that helps concretise Sulak's vision of a peaceful world. It is not only the thought-provoking critiques of global capitalism's common-sense values that Sulak brings together here, but also his confidence in indigenous (Thai, for example) aesthetics, the democracy of the early Buddhist sangha, holistic educational forms and a variety of other traditions that make this book appealing.

Sulak's grounding in the mundane work of creating activist organisations, building cooperative networks and exploring forms of spiritual practice brings in another kind of referent - that of direct experience and engagement. The referents of spiritual and activist practice often give his words a directness and punch that would be lacking in a more speculative kind of writing. For me this then is the main joy of reading this book - to be in the presence of a particularly vivid and dramatic but also well-grounded moral imagination.

It is this quality that never fails to inspire the young adults I take to meet with Sulak in his home or at lecture venues, whether Sulak is at his best or only so-so. It is this quality of genuine and imperfect engagement with the multiplicity of experience that makes Sulak a good model of how to be one of those mirror's in Indra's net that he and so many contemporary Buddhist thinkers have written about. It is this quality, I think, to which readers cannot fail to respond at some level as they read this volume.

THE WISDOM OF SUSTAINABILITY: Buddhist Economics for the 21st Century Sulak Sivaraksa Koa Books, 192 pp, $12.50 ISBN 978-0982165614

The Wisdom of Sustainability is divided into eight chapters that address various dimensions of social and ecological sustainability, including creating cultures of peace, re-envisioning education and cultivating genuine security. Many of these chapters begin with a vivid and memorable outline of the issues to be taken up.

The first chapter, for example, begins with the Buddha's retrospective insight that his encounters with an old man, a sick man and a corpse were "heavenly messengers" sent to prompt him on to the quest to end suffering. Sulak moves directly to his conversation in 1998 with James Wolfensohn, president of World Bank, who asked Sulak about the recent Asian economic collapse: "I told him I thought it had been a heavenly messenger to encourage us to seek alternatives to economic globalisation" (page 9).

The fact that the world is now awash in such heavenly messages testifies to the pressing relevance of Sulak's thought on these matters.

The first chapter goes on to explore the assumptions behind neo-liberal globalisation as well as the bases for creating sustainable alternatives. In this chapter Sulak does a particularly good job of defining his terms - structural adjustment, structural violence and others - so that a reader new to these concepts would be able to follow his train of thought.

Many of the chapters are dense with inspiring quotes and turns of phrase that include Mahatma Gandhi on the undreamt of possibilities we will likely see in the field of non-violence (page 20), Thomas Berry on universities as "the most dangerous institutions in the world" (page 42) and Sulak on the World Bank: "The World Bank sees structural adjustment as the freeing up of markets. Local people experience it as cultural clear-cutting" (page 34).

Nicholas Bennett's introduction provides delightful detail on his relationship to Sulak in the context of 1970s activism, and on the whole Bennett and Arnold Kotler have done a very good job of editing. My one suggestion is that it would have been very helpful to have references for the many quotes and statistics that Sulak brings in to his argument. This would have been a big job indeed, but I think it would have given the volume a stronger grounding in factual sources as well as concrete contexts. For example, when Sulak says that 60 percent of children in rural Thailand suffer from malnutrition I want to know where this statistic comes from and what malnutrition means exactly here. It would have made his arguments stronger. Similarly, a brief description of the first appearance or intended audience of each chapter would have provided the reader with a fuller appreciation of the style and content of each individual chapter.

In sum the breadth and drama of Sulak's moral vision, the ring of truth to many of his arguments and the thoughtful editing combine to make this a book well worth reading.