Poverty and its Measurement Buddhism Perspective

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.