Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [116]
Some say, “Money is the root of all evil.” Buddhists would disagree; they say ignorance is the underlying problem. How we relate to money can either further good or further evil; it is helpful or harmful depending upon whether we use it or abuse it, and whether we possess it or it possesses us.
However even within Buddhism there are different views about the possible corrupting influences of wealth and possessions. For example, the Burmese teacher S. N. Goenka advised against taking donations from people with wrong livelihoods, saying it was tainted money with unwholesome karma attached to it that would impede your spiritual progress. Kalu Rinpoche, with whom I discussed this, said that he accepted these donations on behalf of his monastery partly to help purify and transform the bad karma connected with it into meritorious good karma.
No matter what the view of money, however, in reality, religious and spiritual institutions need money as much as the rest of us. There is an old Arab saying, “The Koran itself is free, but the binding costs a little something.” This saying is as true now in our air-conditioned temples and meditation halls as when it was first coined in a nomad tent or around a desert campfire.
It is easy to say we should be in the world, but not totally of it. But how do we do this and, among other things, find a sane and appropriate approach to money and economic reality? Without the gold standard, money seems to become whatever we believe it to be. We make it up as we go along. The family pet isn’t scheming to get into your purse to get his share of the money in your pocket; he’s trying to figure out a way to get those pungent chicken bones out of the garbage pail. The value of anything is always the value we vest in it. Both money and chicken bones are essentially neutral; their value, or lack of it, is dependent on each being’s desire system.
We get into difficulty when we imagine that we need more than we really do—when enough never seems to be enough. Think of the millionaire who strives for billions or the dissatisfied computer user who fiddles with his system long into the night, adding more and more bells and whistles. In Buddhist cosmology, there is the concept of “the hungry ghost.” The image is of a being with a huge swollen body, a needlelike neck, and a tiny open mouth. Suffering from insatiable hunger, the hungry ghost is continuously trying to accomplish an impossible task—getting enough food into its small mouth and down its thin neck to satisfy its huge gut. Doesn’t this symbol graphically represent certain familiar mental states of longing, neediness, and insatiable desire?
A workable Buddhist theory of money has to get down to essential
Dharma principles. We know that some of the things we value most have no monetary worth. How much is happiness, health, a garden, or a child’s smile worth? As we attempt to make our lives more sacred by integrating issues of money into the awakened, mindful lifestyle, don’t we need to discover new ways of striking the proper balance between legitimate need and overweening greed?
THE HAPPINESS QUOTIENT
In life there is a phenomenon that I call the “Happiness Quotient,” or “HQ.” To me the HQ is found in establishing a balance between what we have and what we want. If we want ten things and have eight, we are more or less happy and content. If we want twenty things and have eight,