Tuesday 27 January 2015

my buddhist blog number 79

Hi Everybody,

Hope all is well with you. Last week was great for me I have to say, on two counts. One I broke through a bit of a writer's block I've been having with the new book, and managed to write a few thousand words, most of which I was pleased with. And then Jason Jarrett rang from Vancouver to say that his determination this year is to get 12 podcasts out on the buddhist podcast, and the first one was Chapter 1 of...The Case for Buddhism!! It went out last week and the feedback from so many different parts of the world has been amazing. So that is just a great start to the year. It is so encouraging to get messages on facebook from so many different parts of the world, saying basically that the book and the podcasts are helpful and useful and make a difference to their lives. That is huge. How often can we really make a difference to people's lives?

Anyway, we are in the middle of Chapter 11, which is about Buddhism and Money. Not an easy subject, but a really important one I think for all of us, since we're all caught up in this desire to get more of the stuff. We pick it up on page 202.

' As I mentioned earlier, since Buddhism claims to be about our ordinary daily lives, and since money undoubtedly has a very important part to play in those daily lives, Buddhism somehow has to embrace that fact in its teachings. Man may not be able to live by bread alone, as the Christian scriptures tell us, but he certainly has to be able to buy bread pretty regularly. That is to say, man needs money. The fact is that Buddhism has a lot to say tha tis refreshingly direct about wealth and how we might best relate to it. Perhaps the crucial point we need to grasp, mainly because it runs directly counter to a widely held stereotype, is that Nichiren Buddhism is not in any way about not wanting things, or not having things or indeed about giving up lots of things. How could it be, since it is about the reality of daily life, and part of that reality for all of us, is to want things and to have things.

So Nichiren Buddhism is not about diminishing or reducing, or setting arbitrary limits on what we might or might not possess. Not at all. It teaches simply that since we clearly have extensive physical as well as spiritual needs, we have to attend to both if we are to achieve the most meaningful and the most fulfilling and value-creating lives of which we are capable. That it teaches, is the very purpose of our lives, and the key to achieving success in this, as in so many things Buddhism argues, is establishing a keen sense of balance.

Earthly Desires
These physical needs are often described in  Buddhism as earthly desires, not earthly in any pejorative or derogatory sense, but simply in the sense that they are needs and wants that relate to the material aspects of our life. And Buddhism clearly accepts them as playing an essential role in our sense of well-being. That is to say, they are not in any way of a lower or marginal order of priority, simply for being material. Wanting things is part of our basic humanity, and has been ever since there have been things to want, from sharp stone hand axes and pretty cowrie shells for our homo sapiens ancestors, to these days, a better paid or more satisfying job and a more comfortable home and a car big enough to take the whole family and the dog, and a bit of spare cash for an enjoyable holiday. Buddhism is ordinary daily life.

So Buddhism makes clear that we shouldn't in any way try to reject, or struggle not to think about these wholly natural wants in our life, or see them as somehow separate from, or in conflict with our spiritual life, because there is no conflict, not at this level of wanting. It doesn't really matter  what it is that launches us down the road of establishing goals for our life, both material and spiritual, and then committing ourselves to a Buddhist practice as  a way of strengthening our lives and setting out to achieve them. The understanding that lies at the very heart of  Buddhism, and proven over countless generations, is that once we set off down this road, it will inevitably draw out the perception that what we are really seeking in life is meaning and purpose, and a sense of self-worth, and the durable sense of well-being that comes from the exercise of altruism and compassion, whether or not we happen to achieve those material goals that we set out with. '

Well that's it for today.
Thanks for reading this far.
Hope it makes sense.
See you next time ,
William
PS

Sunday 18 January 2015

my buddhist blog number 78

Hi Everybody,

How time flies. I look at the date of the last episode and it's the 2nd Jan. I had an urgent script commission that had to be completed by 15th. Anyway I'm back. I hope I've been missed!! I think I'd decided in this period of the year that is conspicuous for spending; all those Xmas presents for other people, and then the sales orgy of presents for ourselves. A lot of money flows out of our accounts at this time of the year, so I moved on to Chapter Eleven, Buddhism and Money, because it's an interesting and illuminating subject isn't it, that we rarely dig down into. When did you, last go to a discussion meeting for example, where that was the subject? Never in my experience. Or a Chapter Study. Or a Taplow seminar. And yet of course, as we all know so well, money is a hugely important dimension in our lives, and the source of a lot of agony.  So, ww pick it up on page 200 precisely.

' In thinking about our relationship to money, to wealth, the accumulation of wealth in all its forms, we are dealing with something that undoubtedly can have the most profound effect on how we see ourselves, to the point indeed of changing who we believe we are. and whether or not we have ever thought about it, or are prepared to ackowledge it, it would be very strange wouldn't it, if all of us haven't been shaped and conditioned and affected, in some measure, by this long-running, supremely acquisitive, materialist environment that we all inhabit.

If we ask ourselves the direct question, how have we been affected by it, we might find it difficult to give a clear answer, but that doesn't really undermine the validity of the question does it? Certainly it's a debate that those of us who live in the western-way-of-life parts of the world can't really duck out of. Nor should we want to I suggest, given that the impact that money has on our general sense of satisfaction and contentedness with life, is such a big deal. On the face of it, it seems to mplay a very big role indeed in any picture of happiness we paint for ourselves. The longing for the kind of life-style that only money can buy seems to be very deeply embedded in the western psyche.

So how might we define the issue itself, since it's clearly a complex one?

Put at its simplest, the crux of the argument put forward by the sociologists seems to be that we have allowed the endless cycle of earning and spending, buying and acquiring, to become pretty much what our lives are about. It has been called the distinctive signature of our time, although it doesn't sound in the least distinguished does it? let alone desirable. Is that what we really want this time we live in to be remembered for? The sociologosts talk for example about our replacing meaning in our lives, for the mere pursuit of money, and exchanging genuine quality of life, for mere standard of living. As one commentator puts it for example, writing about some of the obvious dysfunctions of the materialist culture,

' One of  those shortcomings may be that we chase money at the expense of meaning. Too many in the western world have made materialism and the cycle of work and spend as their principal goals. Then they wonder why they don't feel happy. That's Gregg Easterbrook, an American economist and writer. And elsewhere in the same essay he raises a key cause of  the dissatisfaction that many people feel in their lives, comparison with others. He writes,

'Paradoxically, it is the very increase in money...which creates the wealth so visible in today's society...that triggers dissatisfaction. As material expectations keep rising, more money may engender only more desires.'

And, he might well have gone on, more dissatisfaction! So in a sense you could say that we're all chasing our tails. Dr. Edward Diener from the University of Illinois, and one of the prime movers in the field of positive psychology, has expressed very similar views. He talks of our being so conditioned by the materialist environment we live in that we constantly focus on what we haven't got,  as opposed to what we already have. So he argues, as men and women move up the economic ladder, most of us immediately stop thinking about, and feeling in any way grateful for our newly improved circumstances. They simply become the new staus quo, the new base line, and our thoughts switch to what we don't have and need to acquire. So in  a sense the itch to acquire becomes a constant dimension in our lives. And that's by no means the only scary paradox that research into this issue has revealed. But let's change direction for a moment, and try to determine what Buddhism has to say about this complex issue.'

And that's where we go next time. about Thursday I would hope.
Thank you for reading thus far.
Please pass the blog onto friends if you think they might be interested.
The book The Case for Buddhism is of course available on Amazon, or Kindle as a download.
Hope to see you next time,
William x

Friday 2 January 2015

my buddhist blog number 77

Hi Everybody,
Hope you had a great xmas break. It seemed so long this year don't you think, from xmas eve to new years day? Perhaps because it streteched over two weekends. Anyway, we had a really warm and loving and generous time. Its at xmas that I realise how large my family has become, with children and their partners and in-laws and grandchildren it's become a regular tribe. And they're all such nice people!! Any back to blog. I started doing chapter 10 on Buddhism and Anger, but it seems so out of kilter with the period of peace and family love that I don't want to continue with it. I'll go back to later on. So I've leap frogged over ten, to chapter eleven, on the very seasonally appropriate title of Buddhism and money. Very appropriate don't you think with sales and all that stuff going on? So heads down here goes...
' Since Buddhism claims to be about daily life, and since money is an integral part of the complexity of all our lives, we all have bills to pay and ambitions to realise, it's obviously important that we have a clear idea of what it is that Buddhism has to say about our relationship to the stuff. Indeed as it happens, money, money that is in a slightly different form, but fulfilling precisely the same function as we know it today, actually came into being and started to have its effects on the way people behave, at about the same time as Shakyamuni was travelling around teaching, and in a place not all that far away from where he was in Northern India.

It was actually created by someone whose name is still very familiar to us in relation to money even today, King Croesus, who ruled the ancient kingdom of Lydia, in Asia Minor, roughly where modern day Turkey is, during the 6th Century BCE. Up to that ime, leaving aside the role of barter, goods were paid for by bits and pieces of metal, mainly gold and silver of course, that had to be carefully weighed and assessed for purity at every trade. So not only a very laborious and cumbersome proces, but one that was clearly open to all sorts of manipulation and corruption , and the cause of much conflict and controversy. So, the story goes, it was the smart financial advisors at the court of King Croesus, who came up with the simple but brillaintly practical idea of churning out small pieces of gold and silver ( shaped as it happened as parts of a lions body) that were already stamped with marks to validate their weight and purity, and so carrying in a sense, the authority and guarantee of the Lydian treasury as to their relative value. It was awhole new paradigm, and it's held by historians to be the birth of coinage as we know it.

Sardis, Lydia's capital, rapidly became a mecca for traders from all over the world, because of the surety of its coins, and Croesus gained the reputation for his fabulous wealth that has echoed across the centuries right down to modern times. We still use the phrase, 'to be as rich as Croesus,' to indicate when someone is very rich indeed, even today. I notice in fact that in the Wikipedia entry on him, Bill Gates is cited as the modern example of the Croesus phenomneon! Although Croesus soon lost his kingdom to the warlike Persians, they too thought that minted money was such a brilliant idea that they just carried on doing what he had started, and you could say with some truth that his coins travelled throughout the world; they've been found for example, in Viking hoards buried as far away from Lydia as York, in Anglo Saxon England.

And basically that same model, that systemm of minted money, guaranteed by a national treasury, has continued right down to the present day. Economists still generally go on regarding money pretty dispassionately as this sort of lubricating device, an impersonal medium of exchange that goes on doingn very much what Croesus invented it to do, namely to make the whole business of trade and markets, and buying and selling, flow more smoothly.

But we all know that it has come to mean much more than that don't we? Much more personal, and mor einfluential in all sorts of ways. We may not actually think about it too often, or too deeply, we may not ever put it into words, but we all recognise in some subliminal way, that money is right in there close to our sens eof self-worth for example. And that personal view is very much confirmed by what the sociologists tell us.

An article in a popular but genuinely scientific journal for example, triggered by the effects on so many people of the on-going financial crisis, actually carried the sub-heading, ' Why money messes with your mind.' The article went on to explain in some detail just how far that messing with the mind could go,

' Some studies even suggest that the desire for money somehow gets cross-wired with our appetite for food. And of course, because having  apile of money means that you can buy more thingd, it is virtually synonomous with status..so much so that losingn it can lead to depression and even suicide.'
And although that statement migth seem at first glance to be way over the top... ' it couldn't possibly ever affect me in that way ' we say to ourselves. But if we think about it even briefly, the evidence is clearly there. We're well aware for example of the literally hundreds of suicides following the Great Crash of 1929 in America, people willing to throw away their very lives because their stock values had crashed overnight. Something very similar happened in the UK, albeit on a much smaller scale, with the crash in the Lloyds Insurance market as recently as the 1990's. And as I was actually researching this book, the press and television were all covering the truly tragic story of a 50 year old businessman who was it seems a loving and thoughtful husband and father, who became so mentally disabled by the thought of the impending bankruptcy and the fear of losing all the wealth and possessions that he had accumulated over the years, that he simply couldn't face the thought of living a life without them. So he became virtually a diferetn person, capable of shooting his wife and daughter and then dying himself in the fire he lit to destroy thier family home. His money tha tis had somehow become more meaningful to him than his life or his loved ones. An immensely tragic messing with the mind indeed.

That is of course an extreme case and I mention it only with very considerable difficulty because it is so utterly saddening ( in fact as I was writing this at this moment I didn't want to go on , it's so painful and distressing ). But the fact that these things can happen at all underlines the key point we're seeking to establish, namely that whatever we think may be the case, our emotional relationship with money is cleary not a marginal issue.'

OK that's it for starters. I did find that difficult I must say. It is a tough subject, but one that needs tackling I think. Anyway, hope to see you next time.
Happy New Year,
William