Editing Radical Buddhism in the West (section)

== Early Foundations: Buddhist Economics and Buddhist Anarchism ==

The first clearly radical Buddhist currents in the West emerged during the 1950s and 1960s, as Buddhist ideas encountered the counterculture, anarchism, and increasingly systemic critiques of industrial society. Two figures dominate this early period, representing distinct trajectories: an economist who arrived at a Buddhist-inflected critique of political economy without becoming a Buddhist, and a poet-practitioner who fused Zen with an explicitly anarchist and ecological politics.

=== E. F. Schumacher and Buddhist Economics ===

Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (1911–1977) was a German-born British economist whose critique of industrial capitalism became an important intellectual precursor to Western radical Buddhism, even though he was never a Buddhist himself and converted to Catholicism late in life.<ref>Wood, Barbara (1984). ''Alias Papa: A Life of Fritz Schumacher''. Oxford University Press, chap. 12.</ref> His interest in Buddhism developed particularly during his 1955 work as a United Nations economic consultant in [[Burma]], where he grew critical of the imposition of Western development models on societies with different social and spiritual traditions.<ref>Schumacher, E. F. (1973). ''Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered''. London: Blond & Briggs, chap. 4 ("Buddhist Economics").</ref>

The resulting concept of "Buddhist economics," first articulated in an essay published in 1966 and incorporated into ''Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered'' (1973), rejected the assumption that economic activity should aim at the indefinite expansion of production and consumption. Drawing on the Buddhist concept of right livelihood, Schumacher argued that an economic system should be judged by whether it promotes human well-being rather than by the volume of goods it produces, and he advocated sufficiency, meaningful work, decentralized production, and "appropriate" or "intermediate" technology in place of unlimited growth.<ref>Schumacher (1973), ''Small Is Beautiful'', chap. 4.</ref>

Schumacher should not be classified straightforwardly as a radical Buddhist: he did not advocate a specifically socialist or anarchist transformation of society, and his thought drew as heavily on Christianity and Gandhi as on Buddhism. He is better understood as an important precursor whose work demonstrated that Buddhist ethical concepts could be used to challenge the basic assumptions of modern political economy, and whose influence subsequently extended into ecological economics, the degrowth movement, and the appropriate-technology movement well beyond explicitly Buddhist circles.

=== Gary Snyder and Buddhist Anarchism ===

Gary Snyder (1930–2025) was an American poet associated with the Beat Generation whose 1961 essay "Buddhist Anarchism," revised and republished as "Buddhism and the Coming Revolution" in his 1969 collection ''Earth House Hold'', provides the earliest explicit argument in the West that Buddhist practice requires a fundamentally different form of society rather than individual awakening alone.<ref>Snyder, Gary (1969). "Buddhism and the Coming Revolution". ''Earth House Hold: Technical Notes & Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries''. New York: New Directions.</ref> Combining Zen Buddhism with anarchism, ecological thought, and indigenous and pre-industrial models of community, Snyder argued that the ignorance, craving, and suffering analyzed by Buddhism are produced and reinforced by social institutions, so that liberation could not be confined to isolated individuals.<ref>Snyder (1969), "Buddhism and the Coming Revolution".</ref>

Snyder's political language was explicitly anarchist rather than Marxist: he rejected centralized authority in favor of decentralized communities organized around ecological limits, voluntary cooperation, and direct relationships between people and their environments, framing "the coming revolution" as a transformation of consumption, technology, and human relationships with the non-human world rather than merely a change in the ownership of industrial production.<ref>Snyder (1969), "Buddhism and the Coming Revolution".</ref> His later work developed these themes through bioregionalism and deep ecology, notably in ''The Practice of the Wild'' (1990) and ''A Place in Space'' (1995), and profoundly influenced subsequent generations of Buddhist activists, including the founders of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship.