The Ethics of Money

A talk given in Bury St. Edmunds in May and in Nottingham in June 2018

The first question that comes to mind is what is money? There are many conventional answers to this question. Money is a medium of exchange, is the most common and obvious answer. But since we’re Buddhists we want to go a bit deeper than that. In the 1990’s I had quite a bit of contact with Triodos Bank for a while. They are an ethical bank whose ethos is based on the philosphy of Rudolf Steiner, known as anthroposophy. A big part of their practice was to make banking as transparent as possible. Triodos Bank had an interesting way of seeing money and talking about money. Their answer to the question? Money is energy.

When you put money into a bank account it doesn’t just sit there labelled with your name. The bank uses it. They invest it by lending it to institutions or individuals and those institutions and individuals use it to do something; build a house, buy a car, fund a war, manufacture teddy bears, a myriad of uses. Your money is working away doing something somewhere and for most part you have no idea what or where.

You generate an income by expending your energy. You sell your time, skills and abilities and in return some individual or institution pays you. The money you receive represents an expenditure of energy by you and is then spent by you to buy the goods and services that represent the energy expended by other people. Whatever you don’t spend, your savings, is lent to other people and buys the energy and skills of others to do something. Money never stops, it is always moving like a flow of energy around the world.

If you try to stop it, if you put your money in a box and bury it in the garden, then it gradually loses value. The energy drains out of it. The value of money rests on it’s constant converting of time, energy and skills into goods and services and it also rests on the confidence of all the people using it. Their confidence that it can be converted into goods and services. When people lose confidence in money or any particular currency, then it quite quickly becomes valueless. This happened in the Weimar Republic after the first world war, it happened in Zimbabwe more recently and it is happening in Venezuela now.

Money is energy. Money is also a symbol. It symbolises security. If we have adequate savings, an adequate nest egg, then we feel secure. Without that we may feel anxious and insecure. However it is a symbol of security and so even if we have savings and an income we may still feel anxious and insecure, because in the end it is not what security is or the sort of security we seek may be impossible to achieve. For instance, no amount of savings or possessions protects us against old age, sickness and death.

For the purposes of this talk I am going to reflect on money under five headings:

Non-violence

Generosity

Contentment

Honesty

Awareness

Most of you will notice that these are the principles behind the five ethical precepts of Buddhism. In terms of the first principle – nonviolence – the main point is that our money should not cause harm and where possible money should do some good. That means we need to give some consideration to things like: how we earn our money, how we spend our money, where we spend our money and how and where we save money. In the eightfold path there is the stage of Samyak Ajiva, which is usually translated as right livelihood. But Ajiva is a word that also has a wider meaning. It means livelihood, but it also means way of life. We could think of this stage of the eightfold path as right way of life. That means it encompasses how we gain a livelihood and also how we use our resources.

Most people gain a livelihood by expending their energy in one way or other. That energy is then converted into money, which we then proceeded to spend, converting it into goods and services that we use. Those goods and services are produced by the expenditure of energy by other people. What we need to consider as Buddhists is whether the way we gain a livelihood causes any harm and also whether the way we spend what we have gained causes any harm.

This is not a simple matter because as I’ve hinted, our economic life is intimately and intricately bound up with, intertwined with, the economic lives of others. And of course our economic life affects every aspect of our lives. But insofar as it is possible we can ask ourselves whether any harm is caused by our work. Traditionally the Buddha said trade in living beings, entertainment that lowers people’s mental states, divination, gambling, armaments, meat, intoxicants and poisons were all forms of wrong livelihood. Bhante Sangharakshita has suggested that these days there may be other careers that are harmful such as, for example, the advertising industry when it’s in the business of promoting craving.

Similarly when it comes to spending our money we could reflect whether our money is flowing in the direction of our values of whether it may be causing harm. Is causing actual harm to living beings? Or indirect harm via the environment. Are we supporting or promoting something that harms others; alcohol or gambling, for instance. And likewise with our savings and pensions; are they in an ethical bank or an ethical fund. The choice is usually available. We could say that this principle of non-violence or non-harm is about using energy appropriately and in this case using the energy of our money appropriately and skilfully.

The second principle of the precepts to apply to our economic life is the principle of generosity or open-handed generosity as the precept says. In his memoirs Bhante Sangharakshita talks about the Kham people of eastern Tibet who each year took stock of the wealth they had generated, their surplus for the year, and then put one third aside for business, spent one third on themselves and gave one third to the local monastery. In some Christian churches there is a system of tithing where a certain percentage of their income goes to the support of the church. In traditional Theravadin Buddhist countries the monks are completely supported by the laypeople. This is a practice that has its disadvantages. The laypeople may assume that that is all they need to do. That is their Buddhist practice . And for the monks it can mean an unhealthy lifestyle without any exertion. Also since the monks depend on the laypeople they often have to do what the laypeople want. He who pays the piper calls the tune. It can also lead to the hypocrisy of keeping up appearances.

We don’t have any system like that in the Triratna Community. Money is freely given, usually when requested by a centre or other Triratna charity. There are a few people who give spontaneously, but most often people give when requested to. Of course, many people involved with Triratna will be donating to other charities like Oxfam, Amnesty, Greenpeace and so on. The principle of generosity is supported by the mental state of non-attachment or you might even say abundance.

What holds us back from giving often is that we somehow feel that we are going to lose something or be diminished in some way when we give. Contemplating giving away money brings up fears and anxieties. Will I have enough? Is it a worthwhile cause? Am I being stupid?Basically it touches a deep sense of insecurity in us. Why do we feel insecure? After all from a historical perspective we live very well indeed. We don’t live like kings. We live far better lives that the Kings of old! We are healthier, wealthier and in many ways wiser. But we still suffer from insecurity. At bottom it’s existential; we fear death. But why do we fear death? After all it’s inevitable.

From the Buddhist perspective it is because we have the notion of a fixed self that seems to continue through time and be separated in space from all other selves. This according to the Buddha is a delusion; the fundamental delusion that causes our suffering. Having a notion of a fixed self, we have to protect and enhance it, promote it, shore it up. That leads to craving and the flip-side of the coin of craving, which is aversion. This is the second of the four noble truths. Craving is the opposite of contentment. It is unsatisfactoriness. Craving is wanting what adds to and protects our sense of identity as a fixed and separate self and wanting to avoid or destroy anything that seems to threaten or diminish our sense of self.

That is why we become attached to people and possessions. We are attached to the extent that they are included in and support and add to our self-identity. Our money, which we expend our energy to gain and which has the quality of being convertible into all sorts of products and services is therefore something that has the potential to really protect and defend our self-identity. That is why we can so easily get attached to it and be so reluctant to give it away. And often it will be those who have the most money who are most scared of parting company with it, whereas poorer people can often be quite easy-going about giving. I guess the more of anything you possess, the bigger a part of your identity it becomes. If for instance you have very little power you are less likely to be bothered about losing power, whereas if you have a lot of power you may live in constant fear of losing it.

That may be at the bottom of why it is sometimes difficult to be generous. That is also why it is good to act on a generous impulse when you have it and don’t wait for second thoughts. We want to train ourselves to be generous and second thoughts will often be less generous. It is good to be generous because it is an orientation of our energy towards being more selfless and that is the whole point of spiritual practice. Not being generous orientates our energy into a protective shield around our self-identity and that leads us in the opposite direction to where we are trying to go with spiritual practice. Being generous, as we make it more habitual, unblocks energy and can lead to us having a greater sense of abundance and expansiveness and joy.

The third principle is contentment. The precepts talks about stillness, simplicity and contentment. How do we apply that to our relationship with money? Contentment is the opposite end of the spectrum from craving and greed. When we are content we don’t want anything. Everything is okay and as it should be. We’ve all experience contentment I’m sure, even if only for a few moments; a walk in the hills, on holiday, on retreat, reading a book on a wet afternoon. Whatever the situation, we probably all have had at least a glimpse of that state of contentment when we are not yearning for anything and everything is fine as it is. The situation is sufficient. How do we move from our more ordinary state of restlessness and wanting something or other to this state of contentment? There are many answers to this question and different things will work for different people but broadly speaking it is via the path of simplicity. By gradually learning to live a simple life, by gradually learning to get enjoyment from simple things, by gradually learning to be content with less, we move from restless wanting towards contentment.

Simple enjoyment is about learning to enjoy what is already around you in the world, the ordinary beauty of the clouds and the trees and children playing. The key to this kind of pleasure is mindfulness. The more mindful or aware we are of the world around us and the people around, the more we notice and the more we notice the more enjoyment and pleasure we can find. As the old poem says: “what is this life if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.” (Leisure, WH Davies)

These days we are more likely to be engaged with our technology than our surroundings. I was in Rome last year and noticed one man going around the Vatican looking at all the artworks through the screen of his phone. This is just a parody of what is going on for a lot of people a lot of the time. And when we are not engaged with our technology, we are likely to be fully caught up in the tumble dryer of our own minds; thoughts, fantasies, little stories tumbling around and we can walk through life seeing and hearing very little. We have to make an effort to notice. We have to take time to stop and stare, to see the beauty of light reflected on a wet Street or hear the sound of frying onions.

If we can begin to enjoy the simple things through awareness that can enable us to simplify our lives. We need less things around us. In fact too many things can start to feel like a weight pressing down on us. If we can happily simplify our lives, we will be less concerned about money and more engaged with the quality of our lives. This means we become more contented and there are less worries about money and what money we have we use in a more considered way. We will be refining our energy including the energy of our money. Basically this is all about moving from a life that is based around what we want for ourselves to a deeper reflection on what we really need to have a fulfilling life.

The fourth principle is honesty. As with all of these principles we need to apply this principle of honesty to our relationship with ourselves as well as to our relationship with others. In this case we need to be honest with ourselves about money. We need to be honest about our conditioning around money, we need to be honest about our attitudes around money. This has nothing to do with condemning yourself or giving yourself a hard time. There is no point in that. This is about knowing yourself more deeply and more thoroughly, so that you can have more choice in your life.

We were all exposed to some kind of conditioning around money and that can be affecting our attitudes very strongly, even if it no longer makes any rational sense. We may have grown up in a family where there was a sense of abundance or in a family where there was a sense of scarcity. We may have been given the lesson that saving is a good thing or that saving was laughable. We may have been conditioned to take risks with money or to avoid risk at all cost. There will be all sorts of conditioning around money that we have been exposed to. It’s worth taking the time, perhaps with some close friends in the Sangha, to explore this conditioning and by doing that to become a bit more free, and able to develop our own attitude based on our current circumstances, current values and life experience.

It is very easy to rationalise about our relationship to money and to never delve deeper into what it really means to us, what it represents for us, what it symbolises for us. Money is almost a taboo subject and people rarely discuss with friends how much they earn, how much they have in the bank, what their hopes and fears are around money. Other countries may have very different attitudes, I think it’s in Norway where everyone’s income is public knowledge. I have been in various groups in the Sangha where we have told our money life story and discussed our money in detail; what we have, what legacies we expect, our attitudes and so on. It’s very liberating. But as I said we need to be honest with ourselves first.

Then obviously we need to be honest in our dealings with others and with institutions, scrupulously honest. It is easy to think that cutting a corner here or there, a little massaging of the truth won’t hurt anyone, especially if it’s bringing us some financial advantage. Evading a little bit of tax, getting a bit extra from an insurance claim, dodging a fair, paying a concession rate when we’re not entitled to it. There are probably lots of little temptations that come our way. But of course these things affect other people. Our financial lives are completely interdependent. Perhaps worse than that though is that compromising our values tends to blunt our own ethical sensitivity; a little bit of dishonesty leads to some untruthfulness, some untruthfulness may require a little more untruthfulness and all the time we may be concealing from ourselves a sense of uneasiness, which leads to worry and stress etc. Honesty is indeed the best policy and especially when it comes to money. It’s a way of keeping our energy clean and clear.

The fifth principle is awareness and mindfulness. Awareness is the beginnings of wisdom. The first precept of non-harming is definitely about Metta, loving-kindness, which is the beginnings of compassion and the other precepts are about bringing that kindness into relationship with others. Awareness is the wisdom aspect. How do we apply wisdom to money. But in a way a lot of what I have already been talking about is about applying awareness to money:

knowing about the skilfulness of how you obtain money

knowing about the skilfulness of how you spend money

knowing what you really need

knowing what you can give away

knowing about your own conditioning around money

knowing about your own attitudes to money.

This is all about awareness and even wisdom. Perhaps a way of going deeper into our relationship with money could be to look at it in terms of the five hindrances. You will all be aware of the hindrances to meditation that prevent us from concentrating. You could think of these hindrances as states of mind that block energy from flowing freely. It may be that the energy of our money could flow more freely if some of these mental states were not getting in the way.

Restlessness and anxiety in relation to money will prevent us from being clear and objective about what we have and what we need. The antidote here would be to take the time to become clear and get more objective – perhaps with help from someone else.

Sense desire in relation to money will mean that we feel we never have enough and definitely none to spare for anyone else or for any charitable cause. The antidote here is a refining of our pleasures and simplifying so that our happiness is not too tied up with how much money we have.

Sloth and torpor in relation to money could lead us into debt or confused financial problems, because we don’t put the energy into sorting things out when they need to be sorted. We let things slide and end up with a big credit card balance or paying for some service we no longer use or being fined by the Revenue and Customs for a late tax return. The antidote here is planning. Some people are just not good at organising and planning but it’s a skill that can be learned.

Doubt and indecision in relation to money seems to me to be very like anxiety. Anxiety could lead to impulsive behaviour. But the sort of fear behind doubt and indecision just leaves us stuck, frozen, unable to act, unable to commit to any course of action. The antidote to this will be clarity. We need to find a way to become clear about what we really want. This probably needs the help of someone with no interest in the outcome. It may involve learning to take risks and even learning to act impulsively. What seems like a risk to someone prone to doubt and indecision probably isn’t a risk.

Ill will in relation to money probably indicates what might be called a curmudgeonly attitude. A miserly attitude. Mr Scrooge in Charles Dickens story a Christmas Carol is probably the prime example in literature. In some ways this is like the attitude of a small child that doesn’t want to share its toys with the other children. Usually at the bottom of illwill or miserliness will be some fear or anxiety or insecurity. This is a psychological issue rather than something specifically to do with money and the antidote if it’s a serious case would be therapy of one kind or other. Interestingly, Scrooge is cured by a more spiritual process, he gets to have a vision of the consequences of his actions, if he doesn’t change. If it’s a more mild case of grumpiness in relation to money then the Metta Bhavana meditation practice would probably help. If you are a Buddhist and you find yourself with this grumpiness, then you could decide to practice generosity as a discipline. That would mean giving generously whether you feel like it or not. The practice, the action, can change the attitude.

I’ve talked about money under the headings of the five principles of the five precepts and explored awareness under the headings the five hindrances. I began by talking about money as energy and I hope that these reflections on money will help you to use the energy of money appropriately, unblock the energy of money where it’s blocked, refine the energy where it’s coarse and keep the energy clear and clean and not waste the energy of money. I talked about our conditioning around money and our current attitudes to money; money past and money present. I hope that your future in relation to money is characterised by loving kindness and awareness.