ABSTRACT
Mitch Kapor, who founded Lotus Development Corporation in 1982, is the sort of individual that people in my parents’ generation would inevitably refer to as “a man of parts,” and those in my little brother’s as “a cool dude.” As someone who shares the same generation as Kapor, he is an activist, an innovator, and a perennial seeker with a brilliant but “homeless mind” (Berger 1974). My interest in Kapor forms part of a more general research project on Buddhist economics: How Buddhism stimulates, inhibits, or is unrelated to economic development in Asian countries. Since the mid-1970s, proponents of Buddhist economics in Japan, Thailand, and Sri Lanka have tried to promote an alternative to a dominant Western model of economic development through articulating novel ways in which a Buddhist might live a moral life in an increasingly commodified society. Although some responses to this imperative have represented a nostalgic return to a “small is beautiful” ideology, others have engaged more fully in employing Buddhism as a positive incentive to economic activity within a competitive market economy.
