Noble Treasures

One of the ironies of life is that the things we take get taken away. The things we give are really ours. They’re our wealth. The Buddha calls it noble wealth. Noble wealth starts with developing good qualities of mind, giving up your selfish attitudes, giving up your short-sighted attitudes. You have conviction that the Buddha really was awakened, and he found the path to true happiness.

He also found that our actions are important. That’s the important part of conviction, that what you do is shaped by your intentions, and the results are going to be shaped by your intentions as well. So you try to act on good intentions. You have a sense of shame around any unskillful intentions. You have a sense of compunction that you don’t want to cause any harm.

That means you have to be virtuous. You have to have principles in your thoughts, your words, your deeds. You’re generous. You try to learn as much Dharma as you can. Then you try to develop your discernment as to what you’re doing right here, right now, that’s causing unnecessary suffering and how you can stop doing that.

If you develop these qualities in the mind, they stay with you. Fire can’t burn them. Water can’t wash them away. Thieves can’t steal them. Even death can’t take them away from you.

So these are the areas where you want to invest your efforts, because this is the wealth that sticks with you. The wealth of the world comes and goes. In fact, the ways of the world are like a wheel. They turn around. You have gain and then you have loss. They take turns.

But the world can’t take your inner wealth away from you. So no matter what happens to the economic system outside, your inner economic system, if you learn how to act on your skillful intentions, will make sure that you’re always wealthy. In other words, the mind will always have what it needs for true happiness.

As the Buddha said, the good that we’ve done will meet us on the other side, like relatives welcoming a long-lost relative come home. As for the bad things you’ve done, the Buddha said it’s like a cart that you have to pull, and then the wheels of the cart destroy your footprints. In other words, whatever good you try to leave in the world gets destroyed by the bad things you’ve done. So you have to be very careful to make sure that you amass only good wealth, not the kind of wealth that turns on you.

As you come to the monastery and you have an opportunity to be generous, to learn the Dhamma, to develop your discernment, to hold by the precepts, all of this becomes your wealth. This is what you take with you when you go. And you keep on making more of it all the time. And unlike the wealth of the world—where the more money you churn out, the less value it has—in this case, the more money you churn out, the greater its value.

So this is where we should invest our time and our energies, because this is the kind of investment that really repays us many times over.