Sandcastles: Buddhism & Global Finance

by Alexander Oey
First Run / Icarus Films, New York, 2003
Video, 30 minutes, color
Sales , $225; rental, $75
Distributor’s Website: http://www.frif.com.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

Undoubtedly, global capitalism and global finance have, in the eye of the uninitiated, some ephemeral aspects. How money has taken on the fleeting form of nothing but a figure in someone's computer and how huge amounts of it is zapping through the networks of the world's stock exchanges is a fascinating process. Capital has lost its solid and tangible golden character and has been transformed into seemingly metamagical incantations about options and futures. How far away are these metamorphising reifications of universal greed and useless wealth removed from the pieces of bullion or polished shells that went through the barterlike motions of the real marketplace?

It is easy to capitalise on the difficulties the lay public has in understanding how global finance and the many disguises of capital contribute to the workings of the everyday economy. And it is easier still, and very cheap for that matter, to connect a criticism of the pursuit of unlimited wealth to some hard to grasp zennish 'wisdoms' which are so multiply interpretable that you can apply them with equal success to cricket, the adventures of Peter Pan, and American politics.

This film features Saskia Sassen, Dutch economist Arnoud Boot, and Tibetan Buddhist teacher Dzongzar Khyentse Rinpoche in a three-sided story about "the volatile worlds of global financial markets and international trade". It claims that the interpretations of these thinkers "overlap quite a bit" because "one's experience of reality is subjective and based on changeable prejudices". So do my granny's recipe for pancakes and the mystical teachings of Saint Theresa of Aquila. I have no problem with Buddhism as such, nor with a critical analysis of the detrimental effects of global capitalism on the wellbeing of the world's masses, but anyone claiming that international trade is 'volatile' needs an undergraduate course in economics, and any publisher who sells this kind of pseudoscience as a serious contribution to the debate on global finance or to the building of a better world through the advancement of Buddhism is no better than the quack at Bartholomew Fair.