“Our economic system promotes and requires greed in at least two ways: desire for profit is necessary to fuel the engine of economic growth and consumers must be insatiable in order to maintain markets for what can be produced.”

from A Buddhist History of the West

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“Why has sex become so important to us?... the myth of salvation through romance arose just as the prevalent Christian myth began to decline”

from A Buddhist History of the West

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“In Western secular societies such a craving for fame and the approval of posterity has largely replaced the afterlife as the way to fill up our lack.”

from A Buddhist History of the West

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“If there is no self-being there can be no dependent being either... Yet we strive to become real through the eyes of others who strive to become real through the eyes of others who strive...”

from A Buddhist History of the West

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“Francis Bacon kept the famine imagery but turned it to rather different ends. He described nature as a 'common harlot' who needed to be 'tortured' in order to make her yield her secrets.”

from A Buddhist History of the West

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“The first writer to use the term 'laws of Nature' consistently was René Descartes [who] became the foremost exponent of the new mechanical philosophy... the scientific consequence of his radical dualism”

from A Buddhist History of the West

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“Market capitalism has already become the most successful religion of all time, winning more converts more quickly than any previous belief or value system in human history.”

from A Buddhist History of the West

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“The percentage of Americans who considered themselves happy peaked in 1957, although consumption has more than doubled since then... The fact that we in the developed world are now consuming so much more does not seem to be having much effect on our level of contentment.”

from A Buddhist History of the West

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“Modern political philosophy is often understood to begin with Thomas Hobbes's social contract theory in the Leviathan.”

from A Buddhist History of the West

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“The market itself makes no distinction between genuine needs and the most questionable manufactured desires—a set of habits as manufactured as the goods supplied to satisfy it... the greatest effort in mental manipulation that humanity has ever experienced”

from A Buddhist History of the West (2002)

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“Death is linked with love because death, like love, symbolizes our fear of letting go of ourselves as well as our desire to let go of ourselves—which is the only way to overcome lack”

from A Buddhist History of the West (2002)

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“By accepting and yielding to that groundlessness, I can discover that I have always been grounded in Indra's Net, not as a self-enclosed being but as one manifestation of a web of relationships which encompasses everything.”

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