A Buddhist Approach to the Business Corporation as a Real, Not Artificial, Person: A Case Study of Siam Hands

Abstract

The conventional definition of the business corporation as an “artificial person” reflects the traditional Western commitment to atomistic selves absolutely separate from each other. We draw on the experience of a Buddhist company, the Thai garment manufacturer Siam Hands, to show that a corporation can be a real, not artificial, person in the Buddhist sense of selves as interdependent but also possessing sufficient coherence to act constructively in the world. The company’s owners, managers, and staff are so interdependent that they amount to a “person” in the same way that a complex of experiences amounts to an “individual” human self. We draw on the modern communication theory of the American philosopher Charles Sanders PeircePeirce, Charles Sanders (1839–1914) who argued that “we are not shut up in a box of flesh and blood.” Individuals can share with others the experiences and ideas that constitute themselves, so that part of one person can enter another person via communication. When the communication is sufficiently intense, a “greater person” or “corporation” is formed. Peirce differed from the Buddha in believing that signs or thoughts are reality. The Buddha aimed for a deeper knowledge of reality through the “signless liberation of the mind.”