If everyone woke up Buddhist tomorrow

A note on this piece. It is a thought experiment, not a prediction, not policy and not advocacy. The actual position of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and of the Central Tibetan Administration is the Middle Way Approach: genuine autonomy for Tibetans within the People’s Republic of China, explicitly not independence. Everything factual below is sourced. Everything else is clearly marked as speculation.

Suppose it happened overnight. Eight billion people wake up on a Tuesday having taken refuge. Nothing else changes: same jobs, same borders, same debts, same weather.

About 320 million people are Buddhist today, roughly 4.1 per cent of the world, and Pew found it the only major religion to shrink between 2010 and 2020. So this is a very large jump. What actually happens on Wednesday?

First, the things that would not change

Everybody would not become vegetarian. This is the expectation that fails first and hardest. Tibetan Buddhism is not vegetarian as a rule, for the plain reason that very little grows at four thousand metres. Monasteries in exile in south India often are, because south India grows things. The precept is about killing, not about diet, and the tradition has argued about the gap between those two for a very long time.

Wars would not stop on Wednesday. Buddhist countries have fought wars, including against each other, throughout recorded history. A vow is a commitment, not a personality transplant, and eight billion new Buddhists would be eight billion people with exactly the habits they had on Monday.

There would be no Buddhist world government. There is no central authority to become one. His Holiness the Dalai Lama heads the Geluk tradition and stood down from political authority in 2011, handing it to an elected administration. There is no Buddhist pope and the structures that exist are schools, not a hierarchy.

Second, the thing that actually would change

Here is the one that does bite, and it is economic rather than spiritual. The first precept is not to kill. The fifth concerns intoxicants. Right livelihood, part of the eightfold path, explicitly rules out certain trades.

If taken seriously by everybody at once, that removes the arms industry, most of the alcohol industry, industrial slaughter at its current scale, and a good deal of speculative finance. These are not small sectors. Tens of millions of jobs, and the tax revenue of several countries, sit inside them.

So the honest answer to the question is not peace and quiet. It is the largest economic restructuring in human history, conducted by people who had all just agreed not to take anything by force. Whether that is a utopia or a catastrophe depends entirely on how the next ten years are handled, and nothing in Buddhism tells you how to handle them.

Third, what would happen to Buddhism

It would immediately get worse, and this is the part practitioners find easiest to believe.

A tradition that survives on a small number of people who chose it becomes, at eight billion, a tradition most of whose adherents inherited it and did not choose anything. That is the condition of every majority religion that has ever existed, and it produces the same result every time: enormous institutional strength, and a thinning of the thing the institution was built around.

The monasteries would fill beyond capacity with people who had not thought about why they were there. Twenty years of study for a geshe degree does not scale. The centres that do exist, a little over a hundred of them in FPMT worldwide, are staffed largely by volunteers, and there is no version of this in which that holds.

Fourth, the bit that is genuinely funny

Losar would become a global public holiday, which means the entire world economy would shut down on a date that moves by up to a month each year and is calculated from a lunar system that skips and doubles days. Airlines would hate it. The four great holy days would shift annually too.

Somebody would immediately propose fixing the dates, and that argument would last centuries.

What the experiment is actually for

Thought experiments like this are useful for one thing: they show you what you were assuming. Most people asking the question are assuming that Buddhism is mainly a set of attitudes, and that if everybody held them the world would be gentler.

The tradition's own view is less flattering and more interesting. It holds that the mind is changed by sustained practice over a long time, not by agreement, and that a mass conversion would therefore produce mostly the appearance of change. The whole graded path exists precisely because the tradition does not believe in overnight transformation. It is, in a sense, the least likely religion to want this to happen.

Which is why the realistic answer to what if everyone became Buddhist tomorrow is that the tradition would regard it as a problem to be worked through rather than a victory. Not because more people is bad. Because agreeing is not the same as understanding, and the difference between those two is more or less the entire subject.

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Terms used here are defined in the Lexicon, which links from the first mention of each in the text above.