Would The Buddha encourage you to make more money?

The Buddha was against making money, right? Wrong. It turns out that most people’s perception of Buddha’s belief about money and making money is not quite right.

In this video, as part of my series of videos pondering the question, “what if The Buddha was on your company board?”, I explore what The Buddha can teach us about money.

00:00 What if The Buddha were on your company board?

00:35 What The Buddha taught about money (which may surprise you)

01:04 What the primary goal of making money should be

01:20 Why money is a by-product

01:40 How we can use money to support our communities

02:08 Why you need to think about usefulness when it comes to money Here’s what to do next:

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TRANSCRIPT:

If the Buddha was on your company board, would it even make money? It seems to be a question that comes up when we're exploring this idea if the Buddha was on your board, because I believe that if the Buddha was on your board, it would be a more effective company. It would be a more useful company. It would be a longer running company. It would take a bigger, broader perspective of things and that would make it more resilient, more creative, more adaptable and more potent. And it would make more money.

There's interesting teaching from the Buddha about money. Like there are in lots of spiritual traditions, the Buddha didn't argue that money is bad. The Buddha argued that money is a necessary part of how we interact. It's a necessary part of how we function. So clearly the Buddha wouldn't argue that you shouldn't make any money, but he would probably argue that you only need to make enough money.

We don't need to make the pursuit of money the overarching goal of what we do. We don't need to make the pursuit of money, the return of money to investors as the primary and only real focus of what our companies do.

Yes, money is a by-product of providing services and providing them well in exchange for that. We get paid money, we earn money and increasing what we earn little by little year after year is an important indicator that we're doing useful work, that we're doing good work.

And it's also important because it allows us to build-up reserves, stores of money that we can use to invest in the community that we can use it. And, you know, use it to invest in the community of people who work with us, invest in the community of people who depend on what we do to invest in the community of people that we serve, investing in them, by refining what we do, making it better, improving what we do generally, improving the lot of everybody we're connected with.

So yes, making more money is important, but doing it incrementally and using it in service of upscaling, upskilling, investing in all of the different people who depend on what you do that becomes the purpose, the usefulness of your money.

If the Buddha was on your company board, it wouldn't be that you stop making money today, but you would focus on the money in the right way for the right reasons. And that is all for now.

Until next time, Ben.