“More Skilled Practitioners of Wanting”: Buddhism and Romanticism in the Market World

摘要

“The Buddha,” notes R. F. Gombrich, “was not an essentialist. [He] . . . was interested inhow things worked rather than in what they were.”(1) Buddhism, many commentators haveargued, is pragmatic.(2) It teaches us how to live better, how to see more clearly; how, inthe words of David Webster, to “become more skilled practitioners of wanting.”(3)Generative anthropologists may well hear in this last phrase the human project writlarge—certainly the project of any and all of us who seek or at least entertain the possibilityof human progress. The most consequential of all human innovations, the sign, is veryprecisely a praxis of safer and more productive wanting, a means of accommodating evermore wanting, and more having. More having and more wanting, of course, are not theterms in which Buddhist doctrines have traditionally been framed, to say the least, and touse GA to inquire into the nature of the skills Buddhism might be offering is to ask, in effect,how it co-exists with, or whether and in what ways it might contribute to, the ethicaldevelopment of our own epoch.