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
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