Treasures No One Can Touch

There’s a phrase, “spiritual materialism.” The people who invented the phrase thought that it was a bad thing. You’re meditating in order to gain things. But the Buddha himself said that there are treasures that we gain as we meditate. So there’s a skillful form of spiritual materialism, as you’re trying to gain valuables inside that no one else can take away.

If your happiness depends on the world outside, it’s very vulnerable. As we see all around us—people being pushed out of their jobs for no reason at all. Worse things than that are happening all around the world. People pushed out of their homes, homes destroyed. This is the human realm. It’s not the case that this happens only to other people. It can happen to all of us.

So we need to have something inside that’s not subject to being taken away. The Buddha talks about seven kinds of treasure. They start with conviction—in other words, conviction in the power of your own actions. This underlies all the rest, because when you believe that your actions come out of your mind, you know that your mind needs to be trained. That’s the beginning of all the forms of treasure.

They include a sense of shame and compunction, virtue, learning, generosity, discernment. All these things come out of your conviction that you need to do well, that you can do well, and that what you do becomes your own treasure. The things of the world that come your way from outside, the world can take away. But if good things come from within, they’re yours.

So try to cultivate these treasures. Have conviction that your actions do matter—not only while you’re here at the monastery, but also wherever you go. You want to act only on skillful intentions. You’re going to find a sense of well-being in being virtuous—a sense of pride, a sense of self-esteem that comes when you know that you wouldn’t stoop to do the kinds of things that a lot of other people do. That’s a treasure as well.

And of course, discernment: realizing that whatever is going to make the mind suffer, it comes from within. That means that if you train the mind within to see what it’s doing to make you suffer, you can stop. You have that power. And you have the ability to discern what’s going to be skillful, what’s not.

Our problem is that we’re not paying much attention to this issue. We’re paying attention to all kinds of other issues. We think that the issue of skillfulness becomes obscure. Well, we’re the ones obscuring it. If you really look carefully at your mind states and look at the actions that come out of the mind states, it becomes pretty clear after a while which mind states you can trust, which ones you can’t. Once you’ve taken care of that, that takes care of all the other treasures you need—all of the other treasures that you can really rely on.