Abstract

Even though the subject of sustainability has received much broader attention in public policy and scholarly research, it remains an evolving and multifaceted topic as evident in the rapid expansion of the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals declared in 2000 to the 17 United Nations Global Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. Fundamentally, sustainability research concerns with the well-being of humans individually, socially, and in relation to the environment. It declares that humans should be able to meet their basic materialistic and non-materialistic needs, develop their full capacities, while maintaining balance with the entire ecosystem. A globalized and profit-driven economy thrives under the market mechanism but it also introduces new sustainability challenges to human culture, traditions, and spirituality. It also creates new tensions to community and environment—threatening sustainability at many levels.Recent place-based sustainability research studies lead us to rethink sustainability and development from a bottom-up and fundamental level. They suggest that sustainability requires a deep reflection on the underlying building blocks contributing to human well-being and prosperity. While globalization addresses sustainability top-down by connecting places and reducing places to simply homogenous parts of the sum, place-based sustainability research is a counterforce which demands human development to analyze, respect, and cherish the unique challenges and contributions of a place to the local and global sustainability solutions. This research attempts to offer the Buddhist perspective. In addition to highlighting the relevance of Buddhist Economics to the theoretical and philosophical framework of place-based sustainability in a new economy, specifically through a discussion on the relationship between its community of spiritual practitioners, saṅgha, and its local place. It illustrates some practical models of place-based sustainability from the Buddhist traditions: an ancient model of agricultural Chán Buddhism and a contemporary spiritual community of Plum Village in France, and its global network. Through these case studies, this chapter further illustrates how economic, social, and spiritual life could organized in response to the prevailing mode of economy. It concludes by proposing some implications of their challenges and successes to the contemporary place-based sustainability research.