(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for Your Life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. (clapping) - Thank you very much, Nodhavacha. And very nice to see you all. I realized that actually I started this class. Yes, in 19, whatever it was, many, many years ago. So I'm gonna give you a talk tonight that I gave in India just eight weeks ago. On that occasion, I gave it to 10 million people. (laughing) But I don't mind a smaller audience. (laughing) I gave the talk in a context where it was filmed for Lord Buddha TV. There's a TV channel in Narpur, which, well, they claim at least goes out to 20 million people. And I was shown the next night and next day, several times, apparently. And I was assured that 10 million people'd seen me. I think it's probably an exaggeration. I'd put it only five million people. (laughing) But it was a talk that meant quite a lot to me. I was trying to address the fact that in India, we're talking, as you may well know, against the background of conversions to Buddhism in 1956 by so-called untouchables or ex-untouchables, Dalits is the term that's more acceptable now, who converted to Buddhism to get away from the oppressive social system that's bound up with Hinduism. And, well, they are still an extremely poor and deprived community. But because of general developments in India, because of Dr. Ambekha's work, because of some work that we've done, they're a rising Buddhist middle class as some relatively wealthy people in the Buddhist community these days. And I felt that we begin to face in India not merely the problems of poverty, but even the problems of wealth, the problems of commercialism, consumerism, and so forth. So I was trying to address that particular issue. But, well, what I had to say there is very much applicable here, even more applicable here. Who, yes, I skillfully got us to India because this talk originated in India. I was sitting in India when I came across a sutra in which the Buddha is talking to one of his leading disciples, who was a banker, no two ways about it. His name was Anatha Pindaka. Anatha Pindaka means the one who cares for those who have no one to care for them, the orphans, in other words. So he was, besides being an exceptionally wealthy man, he was a wealthier even than the kingdom within which he lived. And the king used to borrow money from him, as kings tend to do. And he was a devoted follower of the Buddha, not merely a devoted follower in the sense of one who supported him with money and so on and so forth, which indeed he did, he gave many parks where the monks could live and the nuns could live. And he fed many, many of those who were leading a full-time spiritual life. He made a regular practice of it and it said, he didn't sort of send his servants to feed them. He went himself and fed thousands of people leading a full-time meditative spiritual life. So he was, yes, a banker, you know, north India at that time, north eastern India at that time was booming. Gangetic plane was developing a whole new commercial culture. It was part of the culture within which the Buddha was able to teach. But in Athapindaka was a classic example of that, of the new middle class that was rising up to greater importance than even the nobles and the priesthood. And in Athapindaka was such a devoted follower, not merely in the sense of being a supporter, as I've said, in the financial sense, but a very devoted practitioner of the Dhamma. And this is particularly interesting. I know dark bankers weren't what bankers are today, they didn't spend their times on telephones and before computer screens and so forth. But nonetheless, they must have had, you know, a lot of things on their minds and so on. But in Athapindaka was a keen practitioner of meditation. He was a devoted student to the Buddha. Whenever the Buddha was anywhere near, he'd go to hear him speak. He put many, many key questions to the Buddha. And he was one of the only people to not merely question some of the monks, but even teach some of the monks. So some of the monks would find an Athapindaka in front of them who would be correcting them and say, "No, I don't think you've got that quite right." I don't think that's what the Buddha actually said. So an outstanding individual by any standards. And so outstanding that when he died, the Buddha said that he had attained to the edges of enlightenment. He was on the edges of full and perfect enlightenment. For those of you who know the technical terminology, he was a non-returner. So he'd completely gone beyond worldly attachment. He was a banker. Interesting, something to reflect upon. But a full worldly life appears to be possible, at least in ancient India. But you need quite exceptional qualities and an exceptional energy and dedication. It's a very attractive personality, an Athapindaka. He comes through very strongly in the party canon again and again, who's the leading lay person. And the Buddha is often addressing discourses to him. But he's having a very interesting conversation with him. If I say discourses, it sounds like he got on a pulpit and spoke. So one day, an Athapindaka went to see the Buddha and were not given the context in the text. But it seems as if something arose between them, some conversation arose between them. Where the Buddha felt it's worthwhile to go into, well, the question of prosperity, of course, is a banker. So prosperity is a crucial question. And he started by defining prosperity in the sense of what it is that people really want from life. What do most people think of as a good life, as a prosperous life? And then, well, what is it that gives you that? How do you get a prosperous life? And then he goes into it in a very, very practical way. He asks, well, what do you do with wealth? If you're living in the world and you have got an income, what do you do with that income? How do you use it? How do you use it so that it creates prosperity, real prosperity? So I think this is always a pertinent issue. And I think it's especially a pertinent issue today because prosperity tends to be defined in such crass terms. Prosperity today tends to be defined in terms of your income, the size of your income, the size of your bank account, the size of your house, the size of your car, or the number of your cars, the size of your televisions and whether you've got one in your toilet, as well as every other room in your house, and so on. It tends to be defined in terms of the quantity of consumer goods that you have accumulated. And no doubt in the Buddha's time, that would not have been quite the way people would have seen things, but surely it's been a perennial issue that people have seen prosperity in terms of accumulation of material possession and wealth. But a lot of debate about this recently, I don't know, but we define the wealth of the nation, the success of the nation by the gross national product. The amount of wealth that's produced in the country year by year, we define whether the country is doing well or not, by the extent to which the GNP has grown. That's the key statistic. You know, we all get in a panic because Britain's been shrinking. It's assumed that if we're growing, we're getting happier, we're getting better. There's actually no evidence to this effect, in fact, much evidence to the contrary. That's a larger issue that I won't go into now. That's a great deal of evidence. This is not the case that we don't get happier because we're getting wealthier. So yes, a lot of people are asking, even government has been asking what is well-being. And you know the Bhutanese government, which is largely Buddhist in orientation, has been saying, we're not interested in GNP, we're interested in GNH, gross national happiness. Measuring what is is real happiness. So the Buddha starts off with a rough and ready definition, you might say, this is how you could interpret what he says to an arthropindica, of what is prosperity? What is it that people really want? What is it that they think of as happiness when they think about it quite squarely? It's some interpretation, but I think we can recognize something desirable. So there are four factors, he points out. The first is that we've got material work well-being, you've got what you need, you've got an even, you could say wealth. But the key thing is you feel you've got your wealth, honestly, even in the text it says, by energetic striving, by strength of your arms, by the sweat of your brow, righteously gained. So that you not only have the wealth that you need, but you feel you've got it, you know, worthily, you've exerted yourself, you've used your powers, your skills, and you feel that what you've got is a sort of just reward from the effort that you've made. And things that I've read recently about the study of prosperity from a psychological and economic point of view, says one of the key things that people have work, which they feel is properly rewarded, that it is so that they feel that the money they've got, they've earned, not that they've sort of calmed it or they've got away with it. No doubt, winning the pools is a great joy to you. But if you feel you've actually striven, that you've worked and you've got something from that, there's a deeper satisfaction from it. Now you get a strong sense of, yes, I earned that, I deserved that, I was worthy of that. I made the effort, I got it myself. It gives you dignity, it gives you self-confidence, it gives you pride, it gives you a sense of worth, not everybody's privileged to be in that position, of course. Some people can't get the work that satisfies them in that way, of course that's afflicted many the last couple of years. Some people are forced to do work that they don't feel is sort of worthy. So the Buddha is saying, well, this is something that gives you deep satisfaction. If you feel you've sweated and you've got the reward that goes with that at the end of the day. You feel the task you've done is a worthy one and you've been rewarded in proportion to what you've done. So that's the first ingredient you could say of prosperity. Then the Buddha said that the second ingredient is that, well, the way he puts it is that you've got a good reputation. People think well of you and people think well of yours. So they think well of your family, the people you're associated with. So that when you go about, you know that people have a good idea about you and sort of speak of you well. We're less aware of this, I think, probably in the fragmented and to some extent alienated culture that we come from nowadays. I'm very vividly aware of this in India. People intensely concerned about those around them view them. Sometimes obsessively so, sometimes obsessively so. And sometimes to the extent of putting on an appearance. But there's something deeply human about that, something that's natural about it. But you want basically people to think well of you. You want to live in a society where you have a place, an honoured place where you belong, where people acknowledge and accept and value your contribution. And of course, many worthy people don't experience that. It's perhaps a measure of a healthy society that it is able to afford honour to those who are honourable. Those who really do something, there's a genuine contribution who live a decent life, are honoured for it. That is what a decent society could be defined as. And it's something deeply desirable that you stand in relation to your society in an honourable position. It's something I think that in our Sri Ratna, Buddhist community, we're trying to create a community within this overall society. Because, well, because we think it's desirable in its own right, but perhaps it's extra necessary because few people any longer belong in a natural community. I live in Wales in a very Welsh part of Wales. The parish that I live in is said to be the most Welsh in Wales. They all say that. They're very proud of it. And everybody knows everybody. I won't say they've got a good word to say about everybody, but everybody knows everybody. It really is a genuine sense of community and of caring and helpfulness. Less so than the wants since the advent of TV, one old man told me, that's begun to break down. Very interesting, by the way, the statistical research on what happened in Bhutan when TV was introduced. A massive increase in disruptive behaviour in schools in social disorders of many different kinds. That's another question. Anyway, yes, we want to be really it's a deep human need to have a sense of belonging within a social context. And it's something I think that we're going to have a struggle reviving in our modern situation. And it's something that our order, our community, strives to bring about a sense of an extended community where you can have a place within it of when you want to, as long as you want to. And hopefully where you'll be respected and honoured for, just in the first place for being yourself. But then, for what you bring, for what you do, for the way you live, the ideals you hold, the principles that you stand by, all of that. So that's what we want. We want to be thought of well, quite natural to us. We want our families, our friends to be thought of well. You get such pleasure, don't you? When people talk well of your friends, that tremendously gratifying experience. You know, when I find that when people sort of talk well of a Sri Ratna centre or some people from Sri Ratna, I feel really sort of pleased about that. Not merely out of group solidarity, but a sense that, well, things that are important to me, people are important to me are respected, liked even. So, yes, we want a good reputation. We want ours to have a good reputation. And then, of course, we want to live a healthy and, if possible, long life. Of course, this was spoken at a time when probably many people died in, well, many children would have died almost at birth. And their average life expectancy would have been relatively short. But what people naturally want to live a long life, life is itself a great good. If you could put it this way, that the most basic wealth that we have is our life. And we want it, generally speaking, if it's not so awful that it's unbearable, we want it to continue. And it's amazing the conditions under which people will continue to live, even if they're suffering greatly. They want to continue to live. So, yes, we naturally want a healthy life. We want a long life. So this is an ingredient of prosperity, health and longevity. Then there's a fourth one, which is perhaps a bit more difficult to relate to for some of us. We want a happy outcome to our lives in the sense of a good rebirth. If you don't find it easy to subscribe to the doctrine of re-becoming, well, you'll have to think of this in different terms. Maybe you could say you want at the end of your life to feel satisfied with your life. You know, when you, as that great test, isn't there? If you imagine yourself on your deathbed, how would you feel about your life? What do you think? Yeah, I put in a good showing. You know, there's a photo here of a very, very dear friend, Badra Vijaya Tara, some of you will have known who died just yesterday morning. The one thing you could say about her is, in a while, I don't feel sad that she's gone. Although I wish she was still there and I could still meet her because she was such a joy to meet. Why, she lived her good life. She had a tough life, a very tough life, and she made something of it. She triumphed in her life. Even though she died at age of 49, she really made something of her life, and she left it. Nothing on her mind, nothing on her conscience. She was square with life, and she'd put in far more than she got from it. And I'm completely confident. I do, completely, I find, completely credible the idea of rebirth, and I find it incredible that somebody like her will not, in some way, continue. She'll be back, and whatever she did in this life will continue whether she knows it or not. So, you know, will you be able to lie on your deathbed as she did? And sort of think, yeah, I really dealt with the circumstances I had. I dealt with a hand that was given to me, and I made something of it. And, you know, I left the world a somewhat better place for having been in it. I did strive to improve the quality of my own consciousness, and therefore the sum total of human consciousness. Did I contribute to human well-being? You could put the whole question in that way. That's what you want to feel. You want to feel when you die. I've really made something good in life. And if you can feel that, well, then you can be sure that what follows on will be good. It doesn't make any sense to think of it in the other way. But if there is something that follows on, it will be good, because it will be a continuation of the momentum that you've built up in this life. That's what the doctrine of rebirth is really all about. It's that no energy is ever lost. It's all moved on and transforms and re-expresses itself. So that energy that was the Jayatara will re-manifest in some other form, and I'm sure be equally delightful, lovely, wise, and determined. So, yeah, these are the four ingredients, you could say, of prosperity according to the Buddha. That you've got wealth, and that wealth you've come by honestly, and you feel it's the just return on your own effort, that it's related to your own efforts. Then you've got good relations with people, they think well of you, they like you, they speak well of you. And not just of you, but those who adhere to you, those you care about, your family, your wife, your husband, your children, your grandparents, everything about you, it sort of stands well in the society to which you belong. Then that you'll live a healthy life, and a happy life, and a long life. And then finally, that at the end of your life, you'll feel that you've really fully used this life to greatest benefit. But whatever follows on from it will be good, will be continuation of the positive that you've created. So, the Buddha starts off with this really quite telling definition, you could say, of prosperity. Which to me speaks to me, these are things I want, these are things that are valuable to me. I think they're valuable to all human beings at a very basic level. So then he says, well, what brings that about? How do you get that? If you want all these four things, if you want prosperity, what do you do? So he says that what you need to do is to develop four qualities. I'm reminded that this is the year of positive emotion. Well, these are really qualities, these are four positive emotional qualities or attitudes that lead to prosperity. So the Buddha's saying that prosperity in this definition isn't to do with wealth, it's not to do with the accumulation of wealth necessarily. It's to do with moral and spiritual qualities, with basic human values that you accumulate. If you have these, then prosperity naturally follows. Of course, it follows under the law of karma. The Buddha taught that prosperity itself is governed by invariable laws. Just as the rise and fall of the tide is governed by the gravitational pull of the moon, so prosperity is governed by the gravitational force, so to speak, of your own skillful action, your own skillful intentions. So what are the basic four that you need to develop? This is really quite important, doesn't it? If you can get hold of this, you've got the key to prosperity, you've got the key to what our society should be aiming at. Instead of worrying so much about us all going shopping, which after all was the great solution that the great departed... I can't even remember his name. What's the prime minister before this one? Gordon Brown, that's right. Gordon Brown said when he was trying to rearrange the world economy, the great G7 summit, what they all decided was that we would all go shopping. That was the way to bring about greater prosperity, so that's not what the Buddha's suggesting. What we need to do is, first of all, develop faith. Faith, well, Shredhar is the basic Buddhist word, which doesn't really accurately translate as faith, because faith has got such a strong connotation within our cultural contexts, or perhaps for most of us at least. So what does the Buddha mean here? What it really means is that you've got confidence in, you believe in higher values, in higher values. You've got belief that those higher values are attainable, those higher values can be lived, that they can be realized, and in the Buddhist context you have faith that those higher values are embodied in the person of the Buddha. So you believe that such a person as the Buddha did arise, that the Buddha did gain a state of transcendence over all that disturbs and that leads to inner suffering, that the Buddha really did get freedom. So you have confidence that there's something beyond the merely human, that human life has some perspective, some depth. Do you know that the experience I call the shopping-mile experience, I used to, when my mother was bedroom when I used to go look after her and take her shopping, and she liked to go shopping in the local shopping complex, the SAVA Center, so-called, it actually seemed to be a spender center. But the SAVA Center, I used to go in there, and you know, I was happy because my mother liked an outing and so forth, but I used to find a strange sort of sensation would creep over me, when I was there, and I can only define a cramping of my imagination, a cramping of my mind, a sense that dreams died in my brain, that horizons narrowed, that all the colour gradually went out of things, and everything became absolutely dead, black and white, flat, featureless, and the most disturbing thing was the most exalted images were reduced to commercial coinage. So you could see, you know, quite frequently, there's some weird reason the Buddha is used as a shopping image, as a sort of association, I suppose, with some sort of satisfaction. So you'd see in a shopping, a shop window, you know, somewhere, there'd be a picture of the Buddha, I've got a sort of Buddha radar, you know, wherever there's a good one, you can see it immediately, and you see it in that context, and the Buddha had been killed. So what one felt, what one entered a universe without dimension, a two-dimensional world, well that's what Blake called it, wasn't it, a two-fold world, a world which was flat, no horizon, no depth, no vast, infinite possibility, and that is deeply depressing to a sensitive soul. If you find yourself in that sort of world, you know those moments when you cease to believe in anything, you just lose all sense of anything beyond the daily grind, just how miserable it is, you know, the proverbial wet Sunday afternoon with all the shops shut and you finish the Sunday papers, or you've read the Sunday papers even worse, and the full of themselves of depression, gloomy cynical and selling, you know, refinements of uselessness. So the human life needs perspective, it needs depth, it needs a higher dimension to use that metaphor, a deeper dimension to use that metaphor, it needs something that brings it to life that makes it more than just about me and eating and drinking and dying that lifts it onto a plane of ultimate meaning. So that's what the Buddha says you need in order to be prosperous, you need faith, you need confidence and you need, not merely I believe in one Buddha, but you know a definite sense, a definite emotional, imaginative connection with a realm, a dimension that is more than the merely birth and death. That's what you need in order to be truly happy. I mean indeed some of these modern studies of happiness, you know, done by very respectable and eminent scientists have to say from the LSE, but of course it's rather discredited these days, done by Colonel Safi and his cohort, no joking aside, you know, done by respectable economists, so it demonstrates that one of the ingredients of happiness is the sense of living for some higher purpose, but those people who tend to be happiest are those who have some sense of a meaning and value that transcends the merely this worldly and who also in addition have a sense of serving that. So this is what the Buddha is saying, for prosperity you need some infinite perspective and that infinite perspective for Buddhists is expressed in the Buddha. You need to be able to say the Buddha really did gain enlightenment, for those of you who are with me at the weekend, you need to be able to say Ithipi-sauv, hagavah, adhan, sambhar, sambuddhasa, the Buddha really was free, fully and perfectly awakened. So then secondly you need Sila, Shila, that is virtue, you need ethics, you need to be living an ethical life, you need to be living on good terms with life, you need to be in harmony with the life around you, especially in the sense of other people. So you need to be acting towards them with love, with generosity, with contentment, not constantly sort of grabbing at more and more competitiveness you could say, you need to be living honestly and you need to be living awarely, awakely. In other words you need to be living by the five precepts and the five dhammas, the five kusala dhammas, the five skillful ways of contact, that we commit ourselves to in the sevenfold puja when we do the the five precepts, that's what we're committing ourselves to, this virtuous aspiration that I will not harm others, I will try to cultivate love, I will not steal from others, I will be generous, I will not disturb others' family arrangements and their partnerships, I will be contented, I won't commit sexual misconduct, I will not lie, I will not tell untruth, I will be honest, I will not cloud my mind, I will not muddle my mind, I will be aware, awake, so the Buddha says that if you develop these you will be prosperous because they are the basic skillful mental states which give rise to positive fruits under the law of karma, your own mind emerges under the law of karma through these actions in a happier, richer, more sensitive, fuller way, so virtue in the sense of shila, skillful conduct as we would put it is an ingredient of prosperity, then thirdly generosity, if we want to develop prosperity, true prosperity, we need to live generously, the Buddha says not with a mind free from stinginess, a freely generous, open-handed delighting in relinquishment, what he means here is that when you give something, when you let something out of your own hand, you don't think, I wish I hadn't done that, you sort of rejoice, you feel good, I've given, may they enjoy it, delighting in charity, yeah there we are, clue again to Caroline, delighting in giving, delighting in sharing, when you share something, if you do it truly, if you truly share something, you get a lot of pleasure out of it, you know those moments when there's only one pudding left and you let somebody else have it, there's a perverse, a strange sense that actually you sort of know you've enjoyed it more than you would have done if you'd had it, believe me, it really is true because the taste of the pudding is relatively transitory, the sort of qualification of your own consciousness endures at least for some time, so when you're generous you do something inside yourself that has a lasting effect, so living generously, living open-handedly, living in free and harmonious interchange with the world around us, giving things away, not holding on to things, not saying no, you know the more you cling on to something the less you can enjoy it, the more freely you give it, well in a way the more pleasure you will get from it, if you really enjoy something, when you share it with others you enjoy it far more, these are all truisms aren't they, they're ordinary common places of every culture, but the Buddha said that these are very very important for prosperity, and again modern research shows that this is the case that when people are living a generous life when they're giving, especially giving their time, you know for instance making phone calls to get people to be helping them to give, they will get a great deal of inner satisfaction, I think that this is something to be taken very seriously, I don't regard for instance our coronavirus trust as merely about getting money for India, I regard it as giving a chance for people in Britain to get the benefits of generosity, to engage at the most simple level, in the most simple spiritual practice there is, in some recensions of the path, you know the path is usually defined in terms of Sheila Samadhi Pregnaar, but it also accounts to the path that Godana Sheila Samadhi Pregnaar, so the first step on the path is often giving, because when you, when you give, you let go a little bit of yourself, you take a long journey to the complete transcendence of yourself, so yes that's the third, that you develop generosity, the fourth is wisdom, you develop wisdom, if you develop wisdom you get prosperity, but the Buddha defines wisdom here in a very interesting and simple way, it's not in terms of Pregnaar Paramaitaar, it's not even in terms of insight into Anitjataa, Anupthman and Dukkha in permanence etc, it's understanding what inner mental states bring suffering, and what inner mental states bring freedom, so the Buddha said that the most basic level of wisdom is understanding the conditioned patterns within your mind, he talked about it in terms of the hindrances, the nivarana that some of you are familiar with, for instance when you're in a state of mind of greed, it's a painful state, it's odd because greed is all about a pleasure, so sometimes you don't notice that actually greed is painful, because when you're thinking of, when you're in the state of greed you're thinking about something pleasurable, but actually the state itself, when you stop and look at it, is a state of want and deprivation and lack, and is an egg, an inner egg, so you know the beginnings of wisdom are really beginning to see the difference between skillful states of mind, positive states of mind, happy states of mind, and unskillful ones, and seeing that the painful states of mind, the states of mind, greed, hatred, tumtitaa, duty-doo, sloth and torpa, a sort of dull, lazy, lacking in energy, state of mind, or an excitable feverish mental state, or a state of indecision and wavering and failure to commit yourself, all of these lead you to do what really you'd be best not doing, and to avoid you, what you would be best doing, so that you end up feeling really painful, you end up with a redoubling of your painful mental state, a most of all you end up by altering your mind so that it's cruder, coarser, darker, more painful, it arises in that way, so wisdom in the first place means just understanding the difference between those mental states that work for you and those mental states that work against you, those mental states that bring you up to a greater capacity for enjoyment and happiness and friendship, ability to interact with others in a positive way, deeper understanding, and those mental states that lead to the dulling, the dimming, the shrinking of your mind. So practical the Buddha sometimes, so yes the Buddha said that if you have this wisdom then you abandon what is bad for you, your abandon those mental states that are bad for you, and this he says is the noble discipline of wisdom and it's great, vast in its range and accomplishment, so something as simple as that as knowing what in your mind leads you onwards, what leads you downwards, so these are the very practical bases of prosperity, faith in some larger perspective, some broader horizon to life, virtue that is living a decent life, acting in a way that's harmonious, harmonious in social sense, harmonious in terms of your own life, generous and wise, understanding what really does work for your benefit and what does not. If you do these things then the wealth that you get and you will get more this way than you would another will be got in a way that you can be proud of, that you can feel self-respectful, self-respect is perhaps one way one can talk about this, you will get a good reputation, people will think well of you, they'll be attracted to you, you'll have a bit of a glow to you, you know people who are living well, they're attractive, it's good to be with them, and yes, you're more likely to be healthy, of course health is not just to do with moral qualities, but a lot of health is to do with psychological factors and this has been well attested, so if you are living a good life in this sense it's likely you're likely to be healthier and you're likely to live longer and yes, you'll end your life thinking well of yourself with a sense of satisfaction, you know with a sense of rejoicing, you'll end your life, you could even say happy, you'll feel you've done what you could in your life, you've made a success of it, you're ready to go, you will not feel regret, disappointment and what happens afterwards if anything happens afterwards is bound to be more of the same direction, so yes these are the four things that lead to prosperity, faith, virtue, generosity, wisdom, so then the Buddha said speaking to a banker, what or what about that wealth, if you've got material well-being to any extent what do you do with it, how do you use it, how do you use it so it works for you rather than against you, how do you use it so it supports your prosperity rather than just increasing your gross domestic product, well he said that that wealth that you acquire through energetic striving by the strength of your arms, by the sweat of your brow which is righteously gained, you do four worthy deeds with it, so the first of these I'm going to have to hurry a little bit, it's the most interesting part but I need to let you all go home and be prosperous, the first is that you make happy and pleased and properly maintaining happiness yourself, so you use the wealth that you've got to give yourself what you need in basic terms you know not I need a new superduper microwave oven as it were but just you give yourself what you need, I don't really know what a microwave oven is but yes you give yourself you know the basics of a decent human life, so the Buddha isn't saying to pry yourself, he's not saying you know lead a tatty life, he's saying lead a decent life, a contented life, a simple life but well he says it should be not a sordid simplicity but an elegant simplicity, a simplicity which is beautiful where what you have is elegant and attractive if you can get it and where you know the simple things that you use in your life are of some well sort of aesthetic worth as well as of use, so yes you maintain yourself like that, you maintain your parents like that, this is always in the Buddhist text, the Buddha always puts after yourself your parents which is quite interesting and quite important and then your husband or wife come a bit further down the line and your children and then well this perhaps tells who he's talking to, he's talking to a banker, your servants and your workers and employees, you make sure that you use your wealth to make sure that they're happy, so if you are in the position of employing people in whatever context you're working you make sure that something of your wealth or the wealth of the company you own or the organization that you run goes to really give people what they need and to make them happy and pleased I like that but you're not just looking to give them what they want but to leave them feeling happy and pleased so that they go from you with a smile on their face, your friends and your colleagues, so this is the first thing you do with your money, you use it to keep yourself in what you genuinely need for a human life and a decent human life, a happy human life, a life in which you can be pleased and elegant and simplicity, secondly you interestingly, you set some aside for insurance, you provide for losses possible from fire, flood, kings, bandits and unloved heirs, I've been trying to find the commentary to discover what unloved heirs are but one can imagine, anyway yes there are all sorts of disasters that happen in life, this is so topical, and you make sure that you and the society of course that extends to the society you belong to is setting something aside for the normal and natural disasters that life is as heir to, so again you can see just how sensible the Buddha is, then thirdly you give money, you give some of your money as sheer generosity, sheer generosity you could say first of all to guests and friends, you give gifts, so you keep some of your wealth to give away to people just because you like them, just because you want to please them, just because you value them, not because they're particularly spiritual or anything like that, but just because they're the people in your sphere who you like, you respond to, you respect, you just give, to interestingly it says what the guests, quite struck the other day just before I came from India, I went to visit a friend with a doctor, and when I came she gave me a package and in this package was a complete set of clothes, a quite expensive one, for India, that's why I'm so stylish now, and you know it's just natural to her, obvious to her, she's quite well off, she's a doctor, quite a wealthy professional in India, and so she just naturally wanted to give to me, she likes to, she's a friend of mine, so she just gave in that way, so that's very much the Indian tradition, generosity is a very strong part of the Indian tradition, it's overwhelming the attitude to a guest, it's absolutely extraordinary, to ancestors, it's very interesting, so that to the remembrance of your own forebears, there's a lot that could be said about that, to kings, well presumably this is paying a taxes, and paying for the social infrastructure and so forth, to the gods, now I take this to mean the whole aesthetic dimension of things, so giving something for art, for beauty, anyway I'll just hint at that, so lastly the fourth one of course is a lofty offering of arms to those who are leading a full-time spiritual life, those who are trying to practice the dhamma, and who are devoting their lives to exploring the further reaches of what is possible for a human being, and respecting what they're doing, if you don't respect what they're doing it cannot be a benefit to you, and you show that by helping them, by helping them in the way that you can, which is giving to them, so in the Buddhist tradition this is very strongly urged that you give to the work of the Sangha, and the members of the Sangha, you give to those who are striving to live a spiritual life, who are striving to communicate the dhamma to others, and the Buddha said that if you do these things, do you know I've forgotten something that, what a coincidence, of course you also give to those who in need, you give to those around you who are deprived, who are in suffering, who are in want, sorry that was under your offerings, the third one I was tasting a bit, and this is something vitally important, because this is when Karima comes in. But yes, so the fourth one is giving to those who are living a spiritual life, giving to the work of the Sangha and spreading the dhamma, because it can't happen without that, without contributions from those who appreciate what is being done, it cannot continue, it cannot flourish, and if you do you will value it, by giving to it you express your value in it, the value you have, the value you give it, and that strengthens its importance for you, it strengthens its effect on you. So if you use your wealth in this way, by just looking after yourself, looking after yourself so that you're happy and pleased, and you're those who are around you, those who are dependent upon you or connected with you, putting some aside for crises, and then offering to a range of people, just guests and friends, people in need, giving to the society as a whole, giving to aesthetic pursuits and all that, and then finally giving to the dhamma, to the Sangha. If you do that, you'll be prosperous, that's what the Buddha is saying. So this was what he had to say to Anatha Pindaka, who was a real exemplar of all of this in his own life, he manifested very, very much the faith, virtue, generosity, and wisdom that the Buddha talks of, he used his wealth very much in the way that the Buddha speaks of, and although Anatha Pindaka was a banker 2,500 years ago, the advice is very easily translatable into our own context and our own circumstances and situation, and I think has a very widespread application. If we could urge this upon political parties, this could be their program, something like this, find a way of putting it, perhaps Britain would be a genuinely prosperous nation, so chasing after the chimera of growth in gross national product. So I hope that's been useful to you, and I hope that even though there weren't 10 or 5 million of you, you're all benefited from it as much as I hear people did. Thank you. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO]
