Post #22: My Beggar’s Buddhism, Revisited

21 May 2023

The humble shape of the ragged beggar in the old style is as familiar a sight as any in human history, and his perennial requests for donations (sometimes not as humble as his appearance) raise few questions of principle, apart from whether one wishes to give or not.

Children made to beg, and begging as an organized and sometimes outright criminal racket, raise many such questions, of course, especially in conjunction with one another, which has been depressingly common in the past and is still not unheard-of in the world, alas; but such worst-case scenarios are not really at issue here, nor the serious difficulties around alcohol and other drugs, even if giving to hardened addicts may well help with getting them fed (not just high) because the bottle and its equivalents are likely to come first in such cases whatever one does or fails to do.

Questions of worthiness more generally may be more germane here, though the judgmental angle tends to get overplayed. It is not the donor’s responsibility to answer for what is done with the help he has given; so long as he has shared something with good intentions and an open heart, he has fulfilled his end quite beautifully, at least karmically and morally speaking; the rest is up to the recipient. If that may, admittedly, result sometimes in things being well-given but poorly used, that is still a far cry from justifying the barbarous notion prevalent in some circles that to give to beggars is to become part of the problem (engraved on public signs even, as I once saw it in the U.S., though never anywhere else). Last I read the Sermon on the Mount, I heard Jesus say that if someone asks you for a buck, you should give him two (Matthew 5:41–42), not that you should only give him fifty cents if he is not worthy, or nothing at all; but maybe I am a little hard of hearing, or anyway not sufficiently qualified in the arts of Christian casuistry.

What I am mainly thinking about as I am revisiting the theme of my Beggar’s Buddhism (a follow up to Post #6) is something rather different, namely that our brave new 21st-century world seems to boast a new type of beggary as well—a “new model beggar,” one might say—who is not asking for help or support, but who, on the contrary, has something valuable to give and is begging others to take it for free. It is an astonishing and unprecedented feature of our times how many highly useful things are available either entirely for free or at a token cost—things that we would, if they were not made so freely available, value very highly indeed and buy at a corresponding price if we needed to do so. But such is the abundance of resources in these strange times, and such their interaction with certain peculiarities of the digitalizing world economy, that all manner of near-magical wizardry and precious content is in effect delivered to our digital doorsteps by courtesy of advertisers picking up the tab and all manner of other informal cross-subsidies.

A particularly odd sub-type of this new model beggar is the one who does not even rely on ads to recoup his costs—never mind reap some return on his labor and human capital—but who remains, quite voluntarily, not only completely uncompensated, thus working for free, but who in addition pays out of his own pocket to make and keep his materials available to others. Strange as this character may appear to us, however, his particular oddity is by no means unprecedented: earlier decades and centuries too have known his type, though in a somewhat different guise, namely first, that of a private publisher of books at his own expense who distributes them as a vanity project among his friends; and second, that of the enthusiast who produces his pamphlets and tracts at the copy shop and foists them upon unsuspecting passers-bye at the street-corner and other strategic locations. The first of these was long an aristocratic sort, owing to the prohibitive cost of book-making; the second has always been more of a fringe figure, usually with a bit of a maniacal glare in his eye and a precarious relationship with sanity. Not a negligible difference with today, when it has become quite common even for ordinary, more or less respectable and mentally healthy middle-class types, sometimes with sterling credentials, to give their best stuff away almost as a matter of course.

Without belaboring unduly the basic economics of this and other related oddities of human behavior, we might give a token nod here to a principle lurking in the shadows that has always given the human mind a lot of trouble, to wit, that the value of a thing in economic terms does not depend in any immediate sense either on its quality or on the labor and love that went into it (nor even on how much I spent on it myself, in cash or in effort) but exclusively on what someone else is willing to give for it (and if there should happen to be any significant demand for it, how many others are willing and able to supply something similar). Hence the obvious if melancholy difficulty with the pamphlets: no demand to speak of. Hence also the problem with any kind of writing, especially the laborious kind, in an increasingly reading-reluctant age.

Make the exercise a little demanding, with somewhat elaborately wrought prose, say, or unapologetically serious subjects, and pamphlet-like levels of disregard may not be very far off. To diagnose no demand at all may be a little too harsh; there may be a devoted niche readership, to be sure, a noble band of a few dozen fellow dinosaurs awaiting extinction in one of the remaining little libraries that have not been pulped or turned into restaurant decorations yet (the kinds of books that don’t pull out and whose spines are an embarrassment to anyone who dares scrutinize them even in passing). It is not strictly true that quality and effort become completely irrelevant in the face of the mass market; they still matter in the niches, where a little demand can sometimes go a long way. But it is not here that one should come looking for revenue or turnover, that is for sure.

The seemingly bizarre inversion from asking to be paid for one’s labors to asking others to do no more than accept gratuitous goodies freely offered, is not quite as antithetical to basic economics as one might think at first. There can be method to the madness in an increasingly celebrity-driven global economy—the latest developmental stage, it seems, after the agricultural, manufacturing, and service phases—because in such a publicity-obsessed environment it can make sense to give things away initially, hoping to become known, and then to capitalize on one’s heightened profile afterwards. As any writer of a stand-alone book today will discover to his chagrin, it is nearly irrelevant how good the writing or the concept or anything else is about the book—what any agent will want to talk about, anticipating what any publisher will ask him, is what the writer’s “platform” might be. In other words, you cannot sell a book, whether as a writer or an agent; you can only sell a name, that is to say, an already recognized name.

If that all sounds like a bit of a Catch-22 to you, congratulations: you got it. Except that there may be ways of building such a “platform,” if the very notion does not give you the heebie-jeebies, by doing what otherwise seems to counter-intuitive—you guessed it—namely giving things away for free. Thus musicians may give away their music, or very nearly so, in hopes of one fine day charging hundreds of dollars for concert tickets by the tens of thousands; or someone maybe upload oodles of free advice on some issue of pressing concern (if he can still find a corner that is not hopelessly over-sated already) and then offer consultations, once he’s made a reputation for himself, at brain-surgeon rates. It is amazing to what stratospheric heights demand can rise in such cases—defying the laws gravity, almost—and how willing a world awash in riches is to part with its gold, provided there is a big or biggish name to lavish it on.

Aha, you may think, the sneaky chameleon has shown his true colors at last! That is what all the silly talk of Beggar’s Buddhism really comes down to in the end: the bottom line here is the bid for a platform, bingo! An understandable suspicion, but a premature conclusion. For despite the apparent resemblances to real beggary, I must insist that the roundabout business strategies I just outlined are nowhere close to the genuine article—for the simple reason that the initial giving away, however generous it may seem, is strictly instrumental, a mere means to the anticipated later benefit (realistic or not). I remember being accosted once, as a teenager in Berlin, by a bunch of Hare Krishnas who thrust their garish literature into my hands (essentially preying on my reluctance to be impolite with them), then urged a counter-gift (not in my own literature but in cash) in such a manner that it amounted in effect to demanding payment and differed only in being more awkward to extricate myself from. Presented in this spirit, a “gift” is nothing of the sort, just a variant of hard-selling under false pretenses. There are other times and places too, albeit of a very different texture, where the request for “un petit cadeau” has been traditionally used to soften the harshness of cash transactions, but nobody is fooled in such settings, and humanizing otherwise more heartless exchanges at least points in the right direction.

Forgoing any return now in expectation of a sufficiently lucrative future is not charity but investment with a high tolerance for risk and a long time-horizon; to be a fully-certified 21st-century Buddhist Beggar, some other key conditions need to be met first. Donations are permissible in principle, but they must not be solicited, and what is more tricky, they must not be expected, which is a matter of intention that cannot be easily checked from the outside, but that has quite a definite meaning in terms of the view from within. Second, while an ad-based strategy would not be against any of the precepts for a householder, and might even be sufficiently beneficial for consumers to qualify as karmically positive on the whole, it clearly falls short of bona fide beggary—as does, third of all, giving things away initially only in hopes of thereby building a flashy brand-name for oneself eventually.

This last possibility is admittedly very difficult to assess, even from within. Perhaps we are none of us quite immune to temptations of this sort. Who can be sure that he has really given up on being a somebody someday, even if he is entirely sure of being a nobody today? But what I, or anyone else in my position, might perhaps welcome by way of miraculous developments in the future, is surely no adequate measure of intention, which must be more robustly anchored and gauged by the scale of one’s genuine expectations, whatever they may be, great or small. And though it saddens me a little to say so, I am afraid that my great expectations passed away after a long and agonizing struggle quite a while ago. That they rest in peace would be saying too much; but that I still expect to see them rise again from the dead, even more so.