A Buddhist conversation about wealth, money, and green goo
Consider your relationship to money: how you use it, think about it, and even spend it. According to Zen Buddhist teacher and independent scholar David Loy, when asking people how much money they would need to be satisfied, it tends to be 125 percent of what they’ve already earned.
For Loy, who spoke in early May as part of the Center for Ethics in Society’s Ethics of Wealth series, Buddhist traditions offer a powerful way to think of what spending money might say about humanity. For him, wealth, money, and self-concept are interconnected.
“(Loy) did a great job of expressing that Buddhism isn’t one entity, like the way we think about religion from the Western perspective,” said Chase Ishii, a Stanford senior and religious studies major. “Even though I don’t consider myself Buddhist, I could learn and grow a lot from the values that he espoused. I thought it was a really good example of the way people of different beliefs can go up and construct together.”
Loy challenged audience members to consider recent splurges, the luxury purses or sports cars, as a symptom of a universal condition that Buddhists recognize as an emptiness, something they call shunyata.
“We have this sense of lack,” he said. “The sense of the duality where separation is haunted or shadowed by this sense of something wrong,” said Loy. “This is one of the great secrets of life. I think it’s a feeling that we all have and yet we don’t realize that everyone else has.”
Filling that emptiness is where money comes in. Loy stresses that money and wealth are not the same thing. Money itself is not wealth, but rather a “counting device.” Wealth is something to be celebrated because it is not defined as a kind of greed, according to Loy.
Wealth can first be understood as meeting one’s needs, or four basic requisites. Mendicants within the tradition, who like Buddha have taken up Buddhist teaches, or Vinaya, rely on donations to meet their four defined requisites of food, clothing, shelter, and medicines. Beyond that, for Loy, possessing true wealth is recognizing what one has and appreciating it.
In contemporary American society, people adopt an assumption that they don’t have enough money to buy consumer toys, Loy said. However, Loy pointed out that money is not something to regard negatively.
“When we’re no longer trapped playing that game, money becomes extremely valuable,” said Loy. If they’re not attached to it they can use it in valuable ways, which is precisely what the Buddhist tradition is talking about.”
The problem arises when it is valued as a primary source of happiness. “Therefore those who can’t enjoy concrete happiness, lob onto abstract happiness,” said Loy. Filling this emptiness with the happiness derived from material wealth becomes the issue. Before that, he adds, money ends up symbolizing the possibility of happiness, a symbol with tremendous power in Western culture.
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“Buddha and the Green Goo: How Much Is Too Much?” was sponsored by the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies, and the Humanities Center.