Abstract:
Poverty means lacking the basic material requirements for leading a decent
life free from hunger, exposure and disease.The basic needs of a monastic
provide a useful benchmark: food sufficient to alleviate hunger and maintain
one’s health, clothing sufficient to be socially decent and to protect the body,
shelter sufficient for serious engagement with cultivating the mind, and health
care sufficient to cure and prevent disease.According to Buddhism poverty is
bad because it involves dukkha, best translated as “ill-being” in this context.
It means that poverty involves suffering. As a philosophy of living which
advocatesthe elimination of suffering, Buddhism does not value poverty.
Buddhism values detachmenttowards material goods in commending having
less wants as a virtue. Poverty, as ordinarilyunderstood, consists in the nonpossession
of the basic material requirements for leading a decentlife free from
hunger, malnutrition and disease. Therefore overcoming of poverty should not
be understood as the proliferation of more and moredesires and wants which
are to be satisfied by more and more consumables produced. In thisconnection
the important distinction between people’s needs and people’s wants should
berecognized. The proliferation of wants may temporarily result in the
elimination of poverty in thematerial sense but eventually lead to a different
kind of poverty which is even more harmful tomankind than the one it has
replaced. Buddhism considers the proliferation of wants as the causeof human
misery. Therefore, from the Buddhist perspective poverty cannot be measured
purelyon the basis of the material criterion of the quantity of goods people
consume.
