The Buddha’s Teachings on Money and Wise Livelihood with Noah Levine

December 7, 2020 I want you to ask you to reflect on your relationship to money.

What happens in your belly? What happens in your jaw? In your armpits? When you think about money, how does your body feel?

The body teaches us so - so much - if we can tune into it.

Reflect on what your relationship to money is like….on what is your attitude about money?

Do you have like a super Wu Tang attitude, “cash rules everything around me! Dollar dollar bill y'all. 🤑 I like money. I want money. It rules! Money is good! The more money I can get the better!”

Or do you have some other attitudes? You know the other side, “money is the root of all evil”.

Is there some shame around money? Is money not spiritual?

As spiritual Buddhists people are we not supposed to even talk about it?

Have you heard many Dharma talks about money?

I haven't. I've heard a few.

I know for myself, even talking about money there's a little bit of a feeling of…. “oooooh talking about money feels weird”.

But it's such a central aspect of human life that the Buddha was wise enough to address it in his teachings on the path to liberation.

Even though he was encouraging people to renounce money, and he himself renounced wealth and said, “I'm not going to mess with it”, he also understood that most of us weren't going to have that kind of financial renunciation, most of us weren't going to become nuns and monks.

The Buddha realized people were going to stay in their professions, so it’s important to choose a profession that's not going to create negative karma for us.

So…I’m asking you to reflect on this question, “What is my relationship like with money?

And, I also want to ask you, “Where did you learn about money? Where did your attitudes about money come from?

I have this feeling that for the most part – not totally but for the most part – by the time people like us get desperate enough to start Buddhist meditation practice, by the time we find ourselves in a Buddhist sangha, we've had so we've hit some sort of dead ends. There's not that many people who show up to meditation and think, “everything is great. I'm so happy with my career, and money is good.”

Usually, we've hit some walls in the world, whether it's around the suffering of addiction or the dissatisfaction with money and power. By the time we get here, we've probably been looking at our relationship to money, and power, to societal norms.

How many of you is that's true for?

My sense is that often that's quite true for by the time we find our way into the sangha we’ve been thinking about this stuff.

@noahlevine108's Dharma talk, ‘The Buddha’s Teachings on Money and Wise Livelihood’ is now available on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/c/AgainstTheStreamMeditation?sub_confirmation=1 iTunes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/against-the-stream/id1485931128

Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/42u4AwHjBvTmhCddUzWv7d