A look at what the Buddha actually said about acquiring and spending wealth. — It’s easy to get the impression Buddhism opposes earning much wealth beyond what’s “necessary,” or using wealth for one’s own benefit instead of giving away everything beyond the minimum needed to get by. After all, monks shave their heads, put on robes, and take up alms bowls. …

Buddhism’s parable of the two arrows of suffering helps us understand why politics seems so broken and harmful and how we can fix it. — Our politics and political culture feel pretty broken. I don’t think many of us can take in the ways we engage each other on political matters and think it’s healthy. In fact, writing a week before the presidential election, political culture looks like nothing but suffering. We don’t like the…

They can’t escape Trumpism, but they can’t win with it, either. — Donald Trump is likely to lose in a couple of weeks. Once he’s out of office, the Republican Party will need to figure out what to do next, and its options are grim. At the national level, Trumpism has never been popular. Trump’s approval ratings have stuck to the low…

The Buddha told us to interrogate our beliefs and discard those that aren’t helpful. This advice could radically change our politics. — The Buddha was a pragmatist. You can see this in the structure of the Four Noble Truths. He starts by stating the problem, then gives the cause of the problem, then notes that it can be solved, and finally offers a set of tools for succeeding in solving it. …

The parallels are strong—and troubling. — A common worry voiced by critics of our modern, market-driven economy is that capitalism leads to — and depends on — consumerism. For capitalism to sustain itself, corporations need us to always be buying whatever it is they sell. They thus work to make consumerism central to our culture, and…