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On being Buddhist and unemployed

This essay is based on an original version published in in 1992 in Willem Vorster's book, On being unemployed and religious.

When I was asked to write and present a paper detailing the Buddhist attitude towards unemployment, my first reaction was a proper "academic" one: I went to the library and looked for books and articles on the topic. Much to my dismay, it turned out that no existing works on the topic "Buddhism and unemployment" existed. Neither Buddhist theologians and philosophers nor academic Buddhologists, it would appear, have paid much attention to the relationship, if any, between this ancient religious tradition and the contemporary social problem of unemployment.

A number of reasons could be advanced to explain this situation, some external to Buddhist philosophy, others closely associated with it. In the first group, one could cite the fact that Buddhism has been until recently been operative in societies which, for all their undoubted sophistication, were essentially based on an economy of small-scale agriculture. In such societies, one might perhaps be under-employed, but unemployment in the modern sense of not being economically active at all is unknown in subsistence or near-subsistence farming cultures. "Unemployment" is a concept of the modern industrial age - The first use of the term "unemployed" in the currently accepted sense of "not engaged in any work or occupation" was in Milton's Paradise Lost in 1667, and it was not in common use until the 19th century. The more abstract term "unemployment" is of even more recent origin - The first recorded instance is found in 1888, and it came into common use only in 1895. In a pre-industrial society, the concept is almost completely meaningless.