Noble Wealth

When we train the mind, we’re making it wealthy inside. The wealth of the mind is not like the wealth of the world. With the wealth of the world, you have to take things that are already outside and make them yours.

But with the wealth of the mind, what you start out with is yours to begin with. You have the potential for having a sense of conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, a sense of shame, a sense of compunction, your virtue, your generosity, your discernment. The one thing you get from outside is the learning, listening to the Dhamma, reading the Dhamma, so that you get more informed about how to develop these qualities. You can amass more and more wealth.

Of course, in amassing wealth like this, it’s not that you’re just holding on to things. Generosity means that you have to give. Virtue means, sometimes, that you have to be willing to let other people take advantage of you. They can lie. They can steal and cheat, but you don’t. So in terms of material things, you might lose. But what you gain, in terms of the wealth of the mind, is not wealth that will weigh you down. It actually lifts you up.

The image the Buddha gives is of a shadow that follows you. It goes with you wherever you go, but it has no weight on you, it doesn’t drag you down, unlike the bad karma we can do, which he said is like a cart that you have to drag behind you. Whatever you try to accomplish, it erases all the footprints you leave behind.

So. The wealth of the mind is yours; so make the most of it. You have the opportunity to be generous?—you be generous. You always have the opportunity to observe the precepts and have conviction that the Buddha was able to gain release from suffering through his own actions, and he did it by developing qualities that you have, too—which means you can gain release from suffering as well.

When you’re convinced of that, you’re more willing to make the sacrifices that have to be made and work on the things that have to be developed, and in this way the mind becomes more and more wealthy.

The wealth of the mind is interesting; it involves leaving a lot of good things behind in the world. The more good things you leave behind in the world, the more you have going with you. Whereas the things you try to hold on to in the world are going to get torn from your grasp.

So. Work on the wealth of the mind. And in producing this wealth, it’s not like a treasure of a country where the more they print the money, the less value the money has. Here, the more you print, the more wealth you create, the greater the value. So even though there are people who say spiritual materialism is a bad thing, the Buddha wasn’t one of those people. Have a strong sense of the wealth you gain by the good that you do, because that’s the kind of wealth that can’t be taken from you.