Poverty Mind & Spiritual Commodification
Bringing awareness to Capitalism in Buddhist Communities
I often write about how, in my recovery from a mental breakdown caused by years of untreated mental illness, I came to have a psychologist. Dr. Korol was a fit like no other therapist I had before (or since) and it was through our sessions together that I learned not only Shamata (mindfulness) meditation but also metta (lovingkindness) and tonglen (giving and receiving). She introduced me to Sharon Salzberg and Pema Chödrön. She supported me in my practice and, until I moved to London, she was effectively my teacher and sangha rolled into one.
In 2012, however, I developed a longing to go deeper with my practice and finally went on a retreat. During the eight days I spent at Danakosha in the rolling hills of Scotland, along with having some spiritual revelations, I discovered Buddhist communities were a thing.
When it came to the three jewels, I understood “the sangha” as other practitioners in general, not practitioners with membership in a particular “club.” But after that first retreat, I figured I’d found a specific sangha that worked for me. The two teachers who’d led it were incredible. I wanted to connect deeper with them, and so, upon returning to London, I looked up this “Triratna” community. I began going to their temple regularly to meditate, listen to talks, and take part in discussions. I was super excited to take refuge and was doing everything I could to participate regularly and find a place there. Until I learned about the sexual abuse perpetrated by the founder and total lack of accountability process in response to that.
And here is when we encounter the first time I can explicitly point out the impact of capitalism on a Buddhist community. Before they were Triratna, they were The Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO). When the sexual abuse scandal spread beyond the community’s boundaries, making headlines in major newspapers, FWBO changed their name.
The story they put out in the book about their history was that changing the name was part of the growth they went through post-revelation that their founder was a sexual predator — although they didn’t use those words, of course. They used words about “maturing” and “seeing the teacher as human” and “letting go of old attachments.” They talked about the importance of students being aware of the relationship they were entering before they took a teacher, and other familiar and classic victim-blaming deflections.
As someone who worked in a not-for-profit as a Brand Manager, it’s obvious that what they did was a rebrand. Search for “Friends of the Western Buddhist Order” and the top hits are about the scandal, the community fallout, and the exposure of a Cult of Personality. Search for “Triratna” and mostly you get definitions of the term, links to community land centres around the globe, and white community members with long Pali or Sanskrit names — no shady history, just some cultural appropriation.
Needless to say, I stopped going to their temple and reckoned with the feelings of betrayal that came out of the entire experience. Here I’d been, ready to take refuge with this community, giddy at finding a place where I could connect with others as a practitioner, only to find secrecy, silencing, and classic rebranding techniques to cover up an issue rather than truly addressing it.
This was all back in 2012, before the #MeToo movement tipping point that led to revelations of abuse, manipulation and corruption in Rigpa, Dharma Ocean, Against the Stream, Shambhala etc. There was yet to be the now significant number of practitioners finding themselves at ethical and moral odds with the sangha they had committed to. Spiritual refugees set adrift and seeking new ways of being in a community that doesn’t replicate the harm that often leads us to a spiritual path in the first place.
I felt alone in how I’d been manipulated. Besides being lied to through a general lack of transparency, I was bitter about the £5 I’d paid every time I’d gone to a talk or open meditation. It had seemed so little, but over months of attendance I’d contributed a couple of hundred quid. Until recently, a couple hundred in any currency was A Lot Of Money for me. I wished I could demand it back. I wanted a refund, but knowing I wouldn’t get one, I promised myself to be more discerning. This time, I would do my research.
Ominous foreshadowing music goes here…
Since Pema Chödrön was the biggest influence on my practice, I looked into the community she was connected with. I was aware of the name “Shambhala,” but hadn’t realised they had land centres all over, including one in Clapham, just a few stops up on the Northern line from where I lived.
I remembered my psychologist telling me that the founder, Chögyam Trungpa, had been involved in some kind of scandal, so I looked him up + scandal. The top hits took me to webpages from the 90s that described a lot about Trungpa’s outrageous and often questionable behaviour. Some stories I was familiar with, as Pema had shared them in her talks. But what was notable was that it looked to me* like the community had truly addressed it. Unlike the secrecy of Triratna, this community wasn’t obscuring the behaviour of their founder.
Still, I was cautious.
I signed up for Level I training despite the cost, but curious to see what this community offered. At this point, I was longing to find others I could connect with through spiritual practice in a way I never had before, so I was hopeful, because of Pema, that this would be a good fit.
* Oh hindsight, you SCAMP!
Earnestly looking for a Buddhist sangha…
I have long equated my reluctance to claim to belong in any Buddhist community to my general reluctance to join clubs. It didn’t take long for me to see that Shambhala, while a place I could find familiar teachings, given my devotion to Ani Pema, would never be a community where I would belong.
I made it all the way to the Rigden weekend, receiving my first Shambhala pin and a Shambhala name. The teacher who gave me my Shambhala name, who I had never met before, made a comment about himself as a Buddhist that implied I wasn’t one. There was also confusion that weekend when several participants who had taken Buddhist refuge vows wanted to know if Shambhala vows conflicted with them or were the same thing. The teacher responded in a way that implied Shambhala was its very own “ism”, entirely separate from Buddhism — a belief I would continue to encounter as I connected with Shambhala centres in Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland.
Until recently, as I’ve been examining the way capitalism feeds poverty-mind in white-dominated Buddhist communities, I had not seen how this was yet another example of brand image. Now I can see so clearly that a big factor in why I am reluctant to call myself a member of any Buddhist community is it feels too much like becoming a Brand Ambassador. There’s the swag, the gatekeeping system for ̶c̶l̶i̶m̶b̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶r̶p̶o̶r̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶l̶a̶d̶d̶e̶r̶ moving through the levels, the ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶l̶a̶n̶g̶u̶a̶g̶e̶ spiritual terminology that gets memorized and repeated without meaning. Examples being the use of “groundlessness” or “not knowing” as buzzwords, as if they have a single, decipherable meaning. Or being said so often that the practice they are pointing to is rendered meaningless eg. “We are at the time of increased groundlessness.”
The hand-to-mouth fearfulness of almost every community I’ve practiced with is palpable. It treats members and participant as consumer/income streams to be exploited, rather than human beings held in spiritual community. Just as yoga has been commodified by white supremacist colonial capitalism, so too have Buddhist practices throughout North America and Europe.
It’s not mindfulness, it’s Mindfulness™. It’s not about providing a community of practice to support collective liberation, it’s about making rent and paying bills and staying afloat. It’s not about growing collectively and learning from all the wisdom in the room, it’s about establishing a teacher as an “expert” and then selling their teachings to the highest paying clientele. It’s recruitment and upselling, promotion and positive reviews, and if you’re extra lucky, you might even get the chance to meet a Dharmalebrity!
Trying to work a system not built to serve me (or you)…
Nepotism is as prevalent in Buddhist communities I’ve practiced in as it has been in the places I’ve worked. In my attempts to participate in Shambhala, I tried to use this system to my advantage. I would totally name-drop that Pema was my teacher. I feel gross name dropping, because who my teacher is shouldn’t matter, but I thought it just might get me past the gatekeepers.* Pema was a community darling, right? Everyone could quote her and she was how a lot of folks had come to Shambhala too. Yet, any time I tried this little tactic (usually in response to someone who wanted to know, if the Sakyong wasn’t my teacher and I was too young to have met Trungpa, how Shambhala could I really be? Which is to say, what place did I have critiquing the Shambhala monarchy or pointing out racism or ableism?) I’d be told, “Pema’s not really Shambhala any more, she practices with a different community now.”
So, okay, Pema Chödrön is not Shambhala…and yet her picture graces the template of every single Shambhala website. She’s not Shambhala when I speak out about discrimination in the community, but she is Shambhala for facing the general public, who may recognize her as that sweet old nun Oprah interviewed once and come spend their money at our centre! The irony of this attitude from a community founded by a teacher who wrote a whole book on Spiritual Materialism is not lost on me.
* This was long before Pema officially stepped down from her role with Shambhala in response to the ongoing lack of any kind of accountability process or culture change in response to the abuses of power throughout leadership (and no, I don’t give her a free pass for her part in it, but that’s a whole other piece.)
Looking at the fearful poverty mind…
Roshi Joan Halifax, founder of the Upaya Zen Center, often says that to be in the Upaya Zendo, is to have a certain level of privilege. There was a time when I would have agreed and left it at that. “What are you going to do?” I’d think. “This is the world we live in.”
Since I began to cultivate an intentional anti-racist, anti-capitalist, abolitionist practice, I’ve found it impossible not to see how “the world we live in” informs us as much as we inform it. Roshi Joan acknowledges the prohibitive cost of the center she established but does not acknowledge the role she has played in it being that way.
None of this is to say that I don’t have empathy for struggling to survive under capitalism. I am not the owning class but the exploited class and I know the pressure of living paycheque to paycheque. Most of my life I’ve been working poor — employed and employable, but barely scraping by, not because I’m bad with money but because no amount of budgeting in the world can make poverty wages livable wages.
I see how damaging and hard the system is, and I know the fear that feeds poverty mind. Heck, that anxiety disorder that led me to my psychologist was in part fed by the money anxiety of my dad and years of thinking I was failing to adult for not being able to make ends meet on an income of less than $30k a year.
So I get it — bills need to be paid and surviving under capitalism when you don’t own the means of production is definitely a source of suffering. But this is true for a majority of us: founders, teachers, and community members alike. As Buddhists, as people who have taken vows to not cause harm, shouldn’t we be working to dismantle a system that causes so much suffering, not contributing to it?
This may seem like a digression, but I swear it’s not…
I worked in the not-for-profit sector for thirteen years. From the outside, your average donor thinks charity is charity and all about altruism, but on the inside? The competition is intense. The amount big charities pay in advertising is obscene if you look into it, and it’s not that the charities are to blame. It’s capitalism. Capitalism encourages competition in every sector, even the charitable sector, a sector that arguably exists in order to address problems created by capitalism, eg. Criminalization of poverty, privatization of health care, political corruption, the existence of ̶g̶o̶l̶d̶ ̶h̶o̶a̶r̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶d̶r̶a̶g̶o̶n̶s̶ billionaires.
And then I went to work for The Charity for Civil Servants, where I encountered the genius of Judith Smith, one of the Directors. Judith’s whole thing was to ask why we would invest money in developing a new service that another charity was already offering or had established. Why not collaborate? Find ways to work together for the benefit of everyone involved!
It wasn’t always easy, but doing something new to challenge the status quo never is.
Cutting through ignorance…
Capitalists will tell you that the system encourages innovation despite ample proof that it does anything but.* Creativity and capitalism are not companions. We don’t have Thriving Artists under capitalism, we have starving ones. And just as capitalism doesn’t value creativity, it doesn’t value spirituality.
Capitalism worships things and profit only. Capitalism values property and money over human lives.
To have a spiritual connection is to see the value inherent in the existence of any living thing. Deep spirituality connects us with the preciousness of life itself and the opportunity we have as human beings to hold life as sacred. Spirituality is about finding deeper meaning to our existence and connecting with our shared, diverse, interconnected humanity.
If you need proof of how devoid of humanity capitalism is, simply look at the small number of billionaires with the money to solve serious environmental, social, and political problems who choose not to.
If I had a billion dollars, well…I wouldn’t. I’d spend it all to ensure free access to health care, guaranteed housing, free education, and clean water. As it is, I’m not a billionaire and not about to be one because my ethics mean I am incapable of the exploitative behaviour required to amass that kind of wealth. This is why Buddhist communities struggle: They are not run by Capitalists. They are run by aspiring Bodhisattvas who are trapped by the scarcity mindset encouraged by capitalism, which crushes creativity and fosters fear.
The antidote to fear, as I have learned it from my teachers, is curiosity. When we get curious about fear it doesn’t necessarily go away, but it’s a lot less potent and we are less inclined to act mindlessly from it. Capitalism discourages curiosity because consumerism thrives on mindlessness. Do not question if you really need to buy that thing to be happy. Do not question if it is ethical for a handful of people to hold more wealth than the rest of the population combined. Do not question the production line that made it possible for you to buy that shirt for only $10 or get that avocado in the middle of winter.
Using my practice, bringing a pause to the sense of urgency I get about wanting to buy something, invites me to not only look at the fear, but look at what is served when I act from fear. Who benefits when I act out of poverty mind, ignorantly and repeatedly? Who benefits when, instead of acting out of that fear, I make a different choice that’s grounded in community, in connection, and in the recognition that liberation is a collective project?
*The only innovation that happens under capitalism is in marketing. Marketing a basic need like water. Marketing something old as something new. Marketing something frivolous as something Necessary To Your Happiness.
Time to get intersectional, because complex problems are never created by just one thing…
White-dominated Buddhist communities have been reckoning with the reality that both sexism and racism are as baked into their communities as they are into the rest of the society. Capitalism serves both of these, just as they serve it.
We cannot address ableism, paternalism, and whiteness without also addressing capitalism. Prohibitive prices communicate that an offering is only for those with a higher income, which, due to racial discrimination, often means wealthy white people. Strict adherence to particular forms communicates that only certain body types are welcome, which often means abled people who don’t use mobility devices, live with chronic pain, or have chemical and scent sensitivities. Not offering captions, ASL interpreters, or translations communicates that English speakers and hearing people are preferred. Saying that such accommodations are outside of the budget communicates that accessibility is only available for those who can pay for it. Combined, this creates a neon sign that says this is a space for wealthy white abled English speaking people*.
In short, prohibitive costs, inaccessible shrine rooms, and viewing other communities as the competition does not serve our collective awakening but it certainly serves every system put in place to divide us.
*And that’s not even touching on the awkwardness I’ve encountered as a gender non-conforming queermo
First steps aren’t actually that hard — in fact, we already have models we can learn from…
Let’s go back to the first retreat I attended. The journey to Danakosha was a pilgrimage. It took several trains, busses, and a taxi from London to get me there. Upon my arrival, the only cost had been my travel. I’d booked a spot on the retreat, but they didn’t ask for a payment. I figured, as soon as I got there, I’d be asked to pay. They had three different price points according to your income. It was the first time I encountered a sliding scale payment option, and I was grateful for it as I was between jobs at the time. My savings were low but the lowest price point was one I could afford.
Still, they didn’t take payment that first day, nor the second. It wasn’t until the third day, when I was feeling incredible about being held in community, sharing practice, and the daily talks, that they invited us to pay, if we wanted to pay at all. They were clear that while they had costs, they didn’t want anyone to be turned away because of a price tag—payment was optional.
I could have chosen not to pay anything and I wouldn’t have felt any guilt about it — my finances were tight, after all. But I wanted it to be possible for those who really couldn’t afford it, to come for free. I could have chosen to pay the lowest price point, but I didn’t choose that either. I didn’t pay as much as the second price point, but I paid a few hundred extra. It was a little strain, but the strain felt personal, chosen, not coerced. A true practice of dana (generosity), of letting go for the sake of our collective liberation, so that someone I might never meet could still attend a spiritual retreat.
While I have many critiques about Triratna, I can genuinely say I didn’t feel any sense of poverty mind from the staff or teachers at that retreat centre. They were transparent about the costs and equally genuine in their wish for the dharma to be accessible.
A sliding scale model is something Reverend angel Kyodo williams uses with their community offerings. If money is a resource you have, they ask you to determine how much you want to contribute, knowing that the contribution isn’t about exchanging money for a product, but about building community. There are no bonuses for giving more, as there is an understanding that money is relative. To some, $25 is hardly anything at all, while to another, it’s all the cash they have left over once the bills are paid and groceries are purchased.
Buddhism has all the tools we need to be anti-capitalists…
To move beyond poverty mind is to see our fear of poverty for what it is — something in service to a system that benefits the very few at the expense of the vast majority. Capitalism, white supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy are all systems that divide us, that enforce ego-clinging and fearful poverty mind. White supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy set up the ideal and capitalism puts a price tag on that ideal and works to sell it to us. Buddhist communities struggle to survive by turning practices into products under a system that does not value the spiritual growth of those participating in it.
The price, value and cost of something are different but related. When we only think of these from a small, ego-clinging space, we see others as competition and we see human beings seeking spiritual support as cash cows. The cost of this to our humanity, and the diminished value of having a precious human birth, is too high of a price to pay.
The Buddha did not encounter old age, sickness, and death and then stay in the lap of luxury and meditate where it was cozy and comfortable with servants waiting on him and all his worldly desires met. He left behind the wealth and ventured forth, seeking something he couldn’t name but trusted was possible. He didn’t know what liberation would look like or how to get there, but he could imagine it as a possibility.
He tried a lot of things, and failed again and again, but he didn’t let it discourage him. He was offered the opportunity to be a leader again and again, but he turned it down each time, knowing he hadn’t yet found the thing he was seeking — an understanding of how to be fully human and present with reality in a way that was liberatory. He also lived in abject poverty, going so far as to nearly starving himself to death, and recognized that total renunciation wasn’t the way either.
After enlightenment, he didn’t seek accolades or return to the lap of luxury, nor did he deprive himself of food, water, and basic comforts. He kept learning, kept adjusting, and kept meeting others where they were at. Core to his message was that everyone, every single being, is capable of waking up. The Buddha lived his life committed to doing everything he could to create the causes and conditions for that possibility.
I want us to get better at living into liberation together…
“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
— Copyright © 2014 Ursula K. Le Guin
She gave this speech in response to the commodification of literature that leads to the publication of that which sells, more than that which challenges the status quo. She is scathing in her critique of the price gouging that happens out of “ignorance and greed” (two of the three poisons) and the need for writers to resist the temptation to censor or soften their own work under the promise of profits.
My practice and commitment is to liberation, not profitable models of Buddhism. As Buddhists, we trace our practice lineage back to a brown man who challenged the caste system in India.* My question is: What are we doing to challenge the current caste system as it is in North America?
If we’re going to address these problems, we need to be clear in naming them and naming when we see commodification happening. I chose to name communities and teachers explicitly in this piece not to shame, but because accountability doesn’t work without agency. Living under a system and acknowledging how it functions does not absolve anyone of responsibility. We must work together, and we must see the part we play in upholding systems that feed suffering in order for us to build together systems that instead foster joy, abundance, and care.
The commodification of Buddhism serves white supremacy, serves cisheteropatriarchy, and serves the messages of capitalism that greatly limit what has value. Alternative ways of being in community require the kind of imagination and innovation capitalism denies us when we are trapped in the fear of poverty mind. Le Guin also states, “Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.”
Right now, we need Buddhists who know the difference between production of a market commodity, and the practice of liberation.
*I do not state this as an assertion that the caste system is not still operating in India, and within the Indian diaspora in North America and Europe. It is very much still operating.