Buddhism and Consumerism: Craving, Advertising and Status

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 21 October 2026

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Is consumerism against Buddhism? The early texts predate consumer culture. Where Buddhism and consumerism meet is craving: “The world is wanting, insatiable, the slave of craving,” a monk tells a king in MN 82. Turning that into a critique of advertising and status is the work of modern readers: P. A. Payutto, Sulak Sivaraksa, David Loy and Stephanie Kaza. They agree that multiplying wants does harm and disagree about why; a Buddhist free-market writer rejects the critique.

This page is about consumer culture itself. Simple living is on Buddhist minimalism, a household’s earning and spending on Buddhism and money, the ecological cost on Buddhism and the environment; all sit under Buddhism in everyday life. The economist E. F. Schumacher, who became a Catholic, gets a section of his own below: “Buddhist economics” was his name for principles he developed in Burma.

What the early texts say about wanting more

The texts’ word for the problem is craving, taṇhā, which the second of the four noble truths names as the origin of suffering (see craving); greed, lobha, is the first of the three poisons. In MN 82 the monk Raṭṭhapāla gives King Koravya four summaries of the teaching, which he attributes to the Buddha; the fourth is the line above. Asked what it means, he tests the king:

The offer comes again from the west, the north, the south and over the ocean, and the king’s answer never changes. That, says Raṭṭhapāla, is what the Buddha meant; his verses add that people die still wanting, “for in this world sensual pleasures never satisfy.” The Dhammapada says the same of money:

Buddhist cosmology has its own figure for wanting that nothing fills, the hungry ghost (peta); its literal and psychological readings are on hungry ghosts.

Two cautions. Both passages concern sensual pleasures (kāma), not consumer goods; the link to shopping is a modern reader’s. And MN 82 explains why a monk left lay life; it is not advice on household spending. The discourses to householders praise wealth honestly earned and well used: see Use It Well, The Balanced Purse, and the six drains on wealth in the Sigalovada Sutta.

Contentment without the status game

The opposite of craving is contentment, santuṭṭhi. Dhp 204, “contentment, the ultimate wealth” in Bhikkhu Sujato’s rendering, has a page of its own, and Buddhist minimalism covers contentment with the monastic requisites. One discourse goes further. In AN 8.30 the monk Anuruddha reflects that the teaching is “for those of few wishes, not those of many wishes,” and for the contented. The Buddha confirms it, then explains to the mendicants:

In the discourse the same holds for all eight qualities, from few wishes through seclusion and wisdom: a mendicant does not seek a reputation for any of them. Reading it as a check on the status display a pared-back life can become, the trap Buddhist minimalism calls craving in a tidier costume, is this page’s application, not the text’s. The discourse speaks to monastics about their robes, almsfood, lodgings and medicine, as does AN 4.27 on contentment with “trifles that are easy to find”.

Contentment is also misread as wanting nothing (the general point, that craving is not all desire, has its own page). The Thai scholar-monk P. A. Payutto (his monastery, Wat Nyanavesakavan, gives his current title as Somdet Phra Buddhaghosacariya) rejects that reading in Buddhist Economics, a talk at Thammasat University on 9 March 1988, published in English in 1992 in J. B. Dhammavijaya’s translation. “A contented person comes to be seen as one who wants nothing at all. Here lies our mistake.” Contentment “implies only the absence of artificial want, i.e. the desire for pleasure. The desire for true well-being remains.” And: “In Buddhism, contentment is always paired with effort.”

He was answering a charge he reports, that Thai contentment made people “lazy and apathetic”. His reply: Thais, by his account, had become keen consumers who disliked producing, and contentment rightly understood would free energy for production.

Advertising, status and the making of wants

Payutto: two kinds of desire. Payutto grants that wants are unlimited, then splits them into two kinds, of which only the first is unlimited. Taṇhā is craving for pleasant experience and for “the things that feed the sense of self”; chanda is “the desire for true well-being or quality of life”. Each creates its own value: “The true value of something is decided by its ability to meet the desire for well-being, artificial value by its capacity to gratify the desire for pleasure.” Wanting “trendy things to serve as status symbols” inflates the artificial kind. In a later appendix (Thai edition 2000, English translation 2015) he turns to producers, who “whip up desires in consumers and generate new popular trends”; the trouble is “a form of production that views consumers as prey”. His answer is wise consumption, eating for health rather than “to show off one’s status, to appear trendy, or for amusement”, which he calls “the essence of right livelihood” (see right livelihood).

Kaza: identity, harm and desire. Stephanie Kaza, writing as a professor of environmental studies at the University of Vermont and as “a Zen student committed to environmentalism”, gives three critiques in “Penetrating the Tangle”, her chapter in Hooked! Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume (2005), which she edited. First, goods have become symbols of status and group, so that “I am what I have” is the operative slogan, and advertising plays on people’s needs for security and happiness. Second, consumerism “promotes, rationalizes, and condones harming”. Third, it promotes desire and dissatisfaction, the source of suffering in the Four Noble Truths; this, she judges, “may be the most penetrating critique”.

Loy: the sense of lack. David R. Loy, a Zen teacher and scholar, starts from not-self. In “The Deep Hunger” (Inquiring Mind, Fall 2014) he argues that a constructed self, with nothing solid beneath it, is felt as a sense of lack, which we project onto money, fame and things. He sees an almost perfect fit between that lack and consumerism, with advertising “incessantly persuading us that the next thing we buy will make us happy—which it can never do, at least not for long.” His verdict: “consumerism exploits our spiritual hunger instead of helping us understand and address the root problem.” “Lack” is Loy’s interpretive term, not a canonical one.

Comparing ourselves with others online is on Buddhism and social media; attention and devices on Buddhism and technology.

”Buddhist economics”: what Schumacher was, and was not

E. F. Schumacher (1911–1977), an economist born in Germany who made his career in Britain, was chief economic adviser to Britain’s National Coal Board from 1950 to 1970. According to the Schumacher Center, he went to Burma as an economic consultant in 1955 and there developed the principles of what he called “Buddhist economics”. His essay, first published in 1966 and collected in Small Is Beautiful (1973), argues that “since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.” It also holds that “It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth”.

Schumacher was not a Buddhist. Interviewed by Charles Fager for the Christian Century (6 April 1977), he “readily owned up to being a Catholic”, a convert of five years by Fager’s account. Asked whether the chapter was really informed by Catholic thinkers, he grinned: “Of course. But if I had called the chapter ‘Christian Economics,’ nobody would have paid any attention!” Fager adds that the Buddhist framing was not a sham: Schumacher held that the major religions share a common outlook, and said a book about Buddhism, read around 1950, had first opened his eyes. Colin D. Butler (2018) notes that in the English-speaking world he is often thought of as the leading “Buddhist” economist, although he died a Catholic.

So the essay is an economist’s reading of Buddhism, not a statement of Buddhist teaching. It says every follower of the Buddha ought to plant a tree every few years, a rule we could not find in the canon (SN 1.47 praises “planters of parks or groves” as making merit, but sets no such rule), and that women, “on the whole”, do not need an outside job. For a Buddhist economics argued from inside a tradition, Payutto’s 1988 talk is the nearer source.

The market as a religion

Loy’s earlier essay, “The Religion of the Market” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 1997), widens the argument to the system. The English abstract printed with its Spanish translation in Cuadernos de Economía (1997) says that “more than an economic system, the market is a religion, and that economics is its theology, even though it claims to be a science.” The secular obsessions it creates, he argues, “are symptoms of a spiritual need that it cannot satisfy.” We could not reach the English full text, so this rests on the abstract.

Thailand: a critique aimed at institutions

A different critique, aimed at institutions rather than at the market as a whole, came from a Thai lay activist writing about his own country. Sulak Sivaraksa, born in 1933, founded the International Network of Engaged Buddhists in 1989 and received the Right Livelihood Award in 1995 (see engaged Buddhism). In a paper given in Kyoto in 1997 and published in Inter-Religio in 1998 (edited, with additions, by Pipob Udomittipong), he wrote that consumerism had become “the main value, cherished and pursued at any cost by people who, though they have received a modern kind of education, are brainwashed by the media.” He turned it on the Sangha too: a famous abbot owed his fame, he said, to mass media that earned “quite a lot of money through advertisement and news coverage on his costly amulets.”

Sulak also wrote that soon after Thailand’s First National Economic Development Plan, the government, with the Sangha authority’s sanction, forbade monks to preach santuṭṭhi, holding it opposed to economic growth, and that Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu argued against the ruling. We have found no second source for that ban, so it stands here only as Sulak’s account. Payutto, nine years before Sulak’s paper, reported the milder charge that Thai contentment held the country back. See also Buddhism in Thailand.

Practising inside a consumer culture

None of the writings quoted here sets a shopping rule; some offer practices.

• Plum Village. Thich Nhat Hanh’s community recasts the traditional fifth precept, which concerns intoxicants (see the five precepts), as “Nourishment and Healing”, a training in mindful consumption, in wording revised on 15 June 2022. It includes the vow: “I am determined not to try to cover up loneliness, anxiety, or other suffering by losing myself in consumption.” It is a modern reformulation, not the canonical precept.
• Kaza’s methods, one per critique: study the “consumer-constructed self” through Dōgen’s Genjōkōan (she takes her own tea-drinking apart); join the first precept to loving-kindness; and apply the twelve links of dependent origination to the moment of craving, for instance by reducing “the points of shopping-related contact”. In a 2006 Tricycle interview she describes plainer habits from her classes: asking whether to “build any waiting period in” before buying online, and which purchases to talk over with someone first. Of all purchases, she says, “the most important places to make careful consumer decisions” are “Transportation, and housing and energy.”
• Loy’s remedy is meditation, which in his account goes to the root by “deconstructing a supposedly ‘self-existing’ self”, and with it the sense of lack (“The Deep Hunger”, 2014).
• Payutto’s wise consumption: while eating, tell the needs that are “induced and influenced by society” from the natural need “to maintain a strong and healthy body”, and let the second lead.
• A householder’s own money: see Buddhism and money, and dāna on generosity as greed’s antidote.

The honest counterpoint: Buddhism’s own economy of things

Buddhism’s own history complicates the critique.

Objects. John Kieschnick’s The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton, 2003) studies relics, prayer beads and robes in China, and Buddhist links to bridges, tea and the chair. As its publisher sums it up, some Buddhist thinkers rejected the material world while others embraced objects, and “What was a sad sign of compromise and decline for some was seen as strength and versatility by others.” That is China’s story, not every country’s.

Gifts. Merit-making moves goods from households to monasteries; see merit and making offerings.

A wealthy temple. Thailand’s Dhammakāya Temple, as the publisher of Rachelle M. Scott’s study describes it, set merit-making in a framework that encourages prosperity, and its massive monument of the late 1990s drew criticism of its wealth and fund-raising. Sulak wrote that the movement “has gone along with McWorld and globalism entirely” and that its success “is based on outstanding marketing plans.” Scott, in Nirvana for Sale? (SUNY Press, 2009), declines that kind of verdict: her reviewer Jordan Johnson (Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 2013) writes that she complicates a “simplistic and often wrong-headed view” that authentic Theravāda is inherently opposed to wealth, and that she avoids either authenticating or disproving what some call its wealth-friendly piety.

Buddhism as a market. Kaza again: “Marketers are masterful at using human grasping to create specialty niches; even green consumers and dharma practitioners are now well-established market groups.” For meditation sold as a technique, see the McMindfulness critique.

A dissent. Not every Buddhist writer accepts the critique. Aaron Ross Powell, who writes the newsletter The Free Market Buddhist, argued in 2020 that it “dramatically overstates its case”: the mindless consumers, in his experience, are “almost always other people”, and treating their tastes as “a form of false consciousness” invites using the state to override them. Drawing on the futurist Max Borders, he argues that freeing markets and innovation could let people live well with less labour, and so “make more time to set ourselves on the Eightfold Path.”

Where these voices differ

There is no single Buddhist view here, only named readers with different tools. Loy finds the root in a felt lack that comes from the constructed self. Payutto sets taṇhā against chanda, keeps effort, and wrote for Thai development. Kaza works from identity, non-harming and the twelve links, in a US Zen frame. Sulak targets institutions in 1990s Thailand: the media, the state and the Sangha. Schumacher gives an economist’s maxim, worked out in Burma by a man who became a Catholic. Powell rejects the premise, and puts his hope in markets rather than in restraint.

Kaza also maps the traditions represented in Hooked!. In the 2006 Tricycle interview she said Theravāda teachings “seem to be very useful in clarifying what is actually going on in the act of consumption”, that the book’s Zen writers cut through attachment to material goods, that its Tibetan contributors offer tools for analysing the worldviews behind consumerism, and that Pure Land teachings give “a very positive vision of a future that is truly possible.” That is one editor’s reading of her contributors, not the schools’ own account.

Under all of them runs the line between monastic and lay life. The texts quoted here on contentment and insatiable wanting (AN 4.27, AN 8.30, MN 82) speak to or from renunciants; the householder discourses praise wealth earned and enjoyed well. For the ecological side, see Buddhism and the environment; for where lasting happiness comes from, Buddhism and happiness.