Facing the Financial Crisis: How Buddhism can help

A panel discussion with David Loy, Sharon Salzberg and John Tarrant.

Introduction by Michael Carroll

My father was a steamfitter—as were my uncles, grandfather, brother, and many cousins. Heating schools, building oil refineries, and tearing down massive, obsolete boilers—these men worked carefully with their hands and minds to build a world that functioned well. My father was a tough man who, like many other Irish-Americans of his generation, wrestled life into order and shaped it to his will.

Part of my father’s journey was relating to money as an obsession. He had watched his father lose his job during the Great Depression, and as a teenager had become the breadwinner for his family. He had learned as a child to fear the possibilities of failure; to dread the prospects of poverty; to worry endlessly about a worst-case scenario. So my father spent interminable hours managing his checkbook and investments, as if his very life, and his family’s, depended on it.

Because of his obsession, my father was not a confident man. He was smart, reliable, and devoted; tender in his own way. He had an unshakeable sense of right and wrong, always looking out for the underdog. But, underneath it all, my father was afraid of his life.

“Life offers you happiness and pain, Michael,” he once said to me, “and if you can make it to the end of your life having at least 51 percent happiness, then you have succeeded.”

And so he struggled—admirably, powerfully, and, in the end, futilely—to live life with a scorecard, hoping for the best and fearing the worst, trying to be as confident as he could in a world that offered absolutely no guarantees.

I, too, became frightened of my life, and not just in my corporate career or in trying to secure myself financially. But, because of my father, I was able to see early on that my fear was deeper than just losing a paycheck, a job, or a savings account. My fear was about losing confidence in myself. My fear was about strategizing my way through life rather than living it; securing my life rather than opening up to it; arguing with life’s circumstances rather than embracing them. My fear, like my father’s, was about losing touch with my basic resourcefulness.

In Buddhism, it is noble to face the facts of life. Life hurts (at times a lot), nothing lasts, anything can happen, and we will die. It is noble to face these facts not because we enjoy the pain of it all. It is noble because in facing such facts we express a confidence that has no conditions; a confidence that does not rely on emotional scorecards, retirement funds, or paychecks; a confidence that stands utterly on its own—resourceful, dignified, and free. In Tibetan Buddhism such confidence is called ziji—the indestructible confidence of primordial mind.

But as we all know, and as our panelists so aptly point out, millions of people throughout the world have become profoundly disoriented by our present economic disaster. Many of us have become frightened and distressed. And given the present stark reality in America that 3.9 million jobs and $7.1 trillion in household wealth evaporated in 2008 alone, such anxieties at first glance seem to be in order. But what are we to do? How can we, as Buddhists, help? We can’t simply say to those in distress: “Here’s a big piece of ziji pie. Take a bite of unconditional confidence and cheer up.”

Our panelists contend that Buddhists ought to be humble about offering solutions, and be wary of offering trite advice. Yet not surprisingly, our panelists point to the wisdom of sitting meditation that can help us see through our false hopes and deconstruct them, become more mindful of the anxiety that tends to arise when money problems occur, and possibly discover the genuine source of happiness.

In the end, our anxiety about money—indeed our fear about all of life’s uncertainties—is about our human longing to rediscover our natural resourcefulness, one that relies on nothing but is a courageous expression of our original nature, the unconditional confidence of ziji. And in my heart I know this was what my father was searching for each time he balanced his checkbook and each time he worried about paying my college tuition.

MICHAEL CARROLL is a consultant and business coach, and the author of Awake at Work and The Mindful Leader.

Excerpted from the Summer 2009 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly, available on newsstands May 19.

Buddhadharma: Some practitioners have been in a quandary about what to do since a lot of their financial security has recently eroded. Some are in the latter stages of their working lives and have lost jobs. They’re wondering whether to get back in the game, or radically downsize, or what.

David Loy: Clearly, there are no pat answers, but such situations do give us the opportunity to start from scratch, go back to the basics, and reevaluate what the most important things in our lives are. I may well be in that situation myself in another year. I’m not sure there is anything more one can say from a dharma standpoint except to take the opportunity to really look at what is important.

Sharon Salzberg: I don’t think whether we “get back in the game” or not is the issue. It’s more about making a realistic assessment based on a more inclusive, more comprehensive view of what we really care about, what brings us happiness. Most of us have to work, not only to get by of course, but also because there is a kind of dignity, or usefulness, about something well done. There’s craftsmanship in doing whatever we do as well as we can. That’s quite wonderful. So dropping out of the work world or the economy may not be the point so much. What may be more to the point is dealing with the fear, anxiety, and sense of helplessness. One can approach what one needs to do step by step. We’ll find there are many gifts.

John Tarrant: I surveyed my friends when the financial meltdown hit, when Lehman Brothers went belly up, and so on. There was quite a range, but one friend had his money with Madoff. So suddenly he went from having a fair amount of money to having not much. I was curious how it affected him, what the symptoms were.

He said, “Well, I’ve found a real interest in cooking. And then sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and my leg seems to be twitching.” But that seemed to be about it. Things rise and fall. We gain. We lose. Someday all of us, if we’re not hit by a bus, will get a diagnosis. At that time, the question will be what is valuable about life, what do we love, how do we help each other? And one of the things we love is helping each other.

Buddhadharma: Money is also a skillful means. In the Tibetan tradition, you have the example of Marpa, a wealthy landowner, who used his wealth to become a translator and travel to India three times. He was a great propagator of dharma. His student, Milarepa, was a wandering penniless yogin, and his student, Gampopa, was an abbot. All had very different relationships to wealth, property, and money.

John Tarrant: If we’re doing meditation in action, meditation in the world, we don’t give people a rigid rule about what to do with money. You can do dharma really well in different ways. I like the variety that’s possible. You can be quite happy and be poor. And yet there are people who don’t really understand dharma and try to be poor in principle, and are often very unhappy. They don’t participate in the culture in a way that would just make life easier for everybody.

You could have a lot of money and be great with it, or you could be needy and clingy and always wanting more. Money is an independent variable where happiness is concerned. If you have a meditation practice and if it’s working, you’re probably happy and you also probably are generous, because generosity is deeply part of the dharma.

Practice also leads you to see through, to deconstruct, the relationships you have that might be delusory, and allows more intimate, loving, and generous relationships with each other.

David Loy: Practice also helps us become more mindful, more aware, of the anxiety that tends to arise when money problems occur, rather than simply responding to that anxiety.

Sharon Salzberg: And there also is a radical revaluation of both who we are and where genuine happiness is to be found.

David Loy: One thing I’ve noticed in the last few years, especially since I moved back from Japan, is how in North America we have a lot of dharma and a lot of Buddha but not as much sangha. It strikes me that this current crisis is going to push us in that direction. It’s possible that financially things are going to become an awful lot worse and that isn’t necessarily all a bad thing from a dharma standpoint. It may encourage the development of sangha, of community—depending on each other rather than our bank accounts.

Sharon Salzberg: That’s already happening. In traveling around to various communities, I see sheets available for people to offer help and ask for help in these trying times. It’s quite beautiful to see.

Historically, one of the main roles of the monastic sangha has been to be a tangible symbol of the separation of happiness and well-being from accumulation and stuff. There was a an article in the New York Times recently about the plane that left New York City and went down in the Hudson River. Everyone managed to get out, but after the plane had landed in the river and everyone had to evacuate immediately, one of the passengers was blocking the aisle, reaching into the overhead bin. She kept saying, “My stuff, my stuff!” She wouldn’t leave the plane without her laptop or something. The other passengers literally picked her up and walked her out, because she was risking everyone’s life

That phrase, “my stuff, my stuff,” is quite telling. The monastic order is almost designed to be an affront to our cherishing of “my stuff, my stuff” above all else. The question is not one of amount—how little or how much—but what does stuff mean to us, and how are we relating to it? Is it creating harm?

David Loy: We may not have quite the division in the West that they do in Asia between monastic and lay sangha, but it’s the same challenge. Practice involves transforming greedy tendencies into more generous ones.

Buddhadharma: Some people are very hard on themselves for having not paid better attention to their money, but they also are bothered by the fact that they’re bothered.

Sharon Salzberg: Here’s where the dharma can address not getting caught in the game, in a conventional, or conditioned, assessment of what counts. It’s a time to appreciate real value, as individuals and as a society.

John Tarrant: The question is always, “Well, what is the dharma now?” The question isn’t about what you should or shouldn’t have done, or whether you feel bad about feeling bad. That’s not only ineffective; that’s delusion. Who’s responsible? We’re all responsible. That’s the world. Even if you’re complicit in the whole thing, and you were very greedy, transgression is one of the traditional ways of getting into the dharma. Look at Milarepa. He was a murderer. We always have the opportunity to start treating everything in our life as practice. It’s not about solving another problem. There will always be another problem. What is practice while I’m walking through, enduring, perceiving, experiencing this situation? And then the situation resolves itself, or doesn’t. You get a job, or you don’t. Your money goes back up a bit, or it doesn’t.

The first layers of practice are often about practice making us kind of comfy. It’s a kind of peak performance thing—I’m calm, my mind isn’t so anxious, isn’t that lovely? But the deeper layers of practice are about a big welcome to whatever comes. The degree of freedom is so much greater.

David Loy: I agree with what John is saying, but there is also a societal level to consider. It is important that this crisis makes us more socially aware, to ask, what does Buddhism tell us about an economic system that has failed us badly? If we had a decent healthcare system, for example, that would make a huge difference. It doesn’t make sense for someone to feel totally responsible for what happens to them. There is that element to practice, to be sure, but it’s also important to see that our social system has been failing in some very significant ways.

So one issue that certainly concerns me is some of the institutional, economic implications of the dharma. It’s an opportunity for us to become more aware of what’s wrong with this social system and to be more conscious of the need to address this, because of all the increased suffering that’s happening.

Sharon Salzberg: It makes total sense, and I completely agree.

John Tarrant: I agree, but you don’t have to be a meditator to see that. One of the things I’ve noticed is how much ordinary people who have had no exposure to teachings of Buddhism really get the basic principles we’re talking about. There’s a generosity and kindness and compassion that seems to come naturally out of a basic kind of prajna. People have moments of noticing they can do something helpful, perhaps like elect a black president. They naturally want to help people. I think some humility is in order in terms of what Buddhism has to offer. People who have no interest in Buddhism are doing amazing work with homeless shelters and free clinics.

Buddhadharma: Concerning this crisis, though, the Zen teacher Norman Fischer was saying to me recently that practitioners—being very humble and not having some superior attitude about having the great dharma answer for everybody—may nevertheless be able to contribute something uniquely helpful during these difficult times, and it may behoove us to speak up and say so.

John Tarrant: Yes, that offering is practice. The idea of practice is a noble and tremendously profound idea. It focuses the natural qualities of mind, and the clarity and brilliance of mind. But with the big interventions, like whether a stimulus package or a bailout of an industry or an economic reform will work—I don’t think most of us are qualified to know the answers. I’m not sure that anybody is qualified to know; there’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty and guesswork.

There are clearly things we can do in terms of healthcare and other means of being helpful, but one of the nice things about Western culture that’s different from the old feudal cultures is that we have a respect for what we don’t know, a skepticism for our own opinions.

Sharon Salzberg: Something that amuses me these days in political and economic discourse is how often the word “interconnected” appears. President Obama said it just this morning in his address about the mortgage crisis. He said, “These problems are all interconnected,” and went on to use that word over and over again.

It’s not necessarily common understanding that one needs to fix the healthcare system, for example. The understanding is more widespread than it was, and the suffering of people is more widespread than it was, so it’s sort of a wake-up call. But there are many people who don’t understand that we are interconnected, and that someone else’s difficulty and pain reflects back on the quality of our own lives. We could propagate the idea of interconnectedness at times like these, and that doesn’t have to mean we are propagating Buddhism. The fact that we’re all interconnected and that our choices are interconnected is not a Buddhist idea alone. It is simply a values-based vision of life. It also just happens to be true.

John Tarrant: David Patterson, the governor of New York, said something the other day about the other plane crash, the one in Buffalo, where everyone died. He said, “We’re all connected, and we find out how connected we are on days like this. We try to love our neighbors as we would love ourselves, but today we love our neighbors because we realize they are ourselves.” You can’t get much more of a Buddhist statement than that.

Buddhadharma: The Patterson quote could have come from the Dhammapada.

Sharon Salzberg: Yes, it could have.

Buddhadharma: But isn’t it practice that gives one a more sustained discovery of interconnectedness that goes beyond the intellectual notion, something that would have a more profound effect on how we work with money and economy for example?

Sharon Salzberg: Definitely. The practice of insight is seeing things as they are, and that’s very compelling, but I’m also fascinated by even the intellectual understanding out there, and frankly it’s sometimes quite visceral, foundational. There seem to be many openings today, because we live in a time when you can’t so easily believe that what you do over there will stay over there rather than filter back to what’s happening over here. The financial crisis, global warming—these are prime examples. And they provide us an opportunity for a much greater understanding.

John Tarrant: To me it’s interesting to see all the ways Buddhism is already here, so to speak. When prajna is there, compassion will come out.

David Loy: It’s also part of our practice as Buddhists to contribute whatever we can to these larger issues of social transformation. We’re in a time when a lot of things have come into question. Buddhists have a responsibility not to be presumptuous about having the answers, but also to contribute what we can to the debates and discussions. For example, we could hear more and say more about the interconnectedness of economy and ecology, which all the panic over the financial crisis has tended to bury.

From a Buddhist standpoint, when we talk about money and economic issues, we ought to see the wider context. The economy and the financial system are a wholly owned subsidiary of the biosphere.

John Tarrant: The ongoing train wreck of the ecology is certainly connected to how we handle money.

David Loy: When the system seems to be working well, it’s harder to get people to look at it, but now there are a number of crises coming together. With more and more people raising these questions, I’m hopeful that we may be able to change things.

John Tarrant: I work a lot in the medical world, where we talk about exceeding the scope of one’s practice. We can do that, too, as preachers. I don’t know if I really know enough about economics to offer anything of real value in that realm. I know that none of the known economic systems seems to work very well. And sure, trading is about greed, just like having a body is about having desire, but it’s one of those things where it’s easy to say it’s imperfect, and it’s not very easy to say what we should do about it.

David Loy: I agree, sure. I don’t mean to imply that Buddhism has the answer to the economy and the ecology. I do think, though, that Buddhists have some role to play there because of what we’ve learned from practice.

Buddhadharma: Why do you think money is such a juicy and powerful klesha-generator that can lead to such harmful disagreements?

David Loy: In our culture, money is not only a medium of exchange and a storehouse of value. It’s also a collective reality symbol. It’s how society has taught us to evaluate ourselves. There’s not simply a fear of being able to eat and find a roof over one’s head. There is also an element of judging ourselves—we decide how well we’re doing and how good we are and how real we are.

Sharon Salzberg: One of the reasons money is so powerful is that it can cover the full hierarchy of needs. For one thing, it represents safety and security. For many people, the current financial breakdown is not simply a crisis of status. It’s a real crisis, about eating and having shelter. Then, of course, there is the esteem issue that David was just talking about. People are not just facing fear and uncertainty about how to proceed. There’s also a level of humiliation as people are facing not having as much, or not being able to spend as much. That’s worth examining.

John Tarrant: Money is so interesting to us, as practitioners, because if the meditation practice is real, it has to engage with the world—love, work, money, everyday things like that. There’s a romantic part of us that would rather not think about money, but the things that are difficult are things that you can get good practice from.

David Loy: How we regard money is also wrapped up with our being an individualist society. More traditional societies would have stronger family networks and more extended community networks. Religion would often play a stronger role.

John Tarrant: I’m not so sure it’s wise to say that there are other cultures that do this better. There are cultures that do bits of lots of things better, but wherever people can get money—no matter what culture—they try to get it. It doesn’t help to be romantic about the past or about some other more evolved society, as if we should all be peasant farmers. Sure it’s not great if people start thinking they are their money, but someone can just as easily think they are their cow, their car, their number of wives, their tall husband, or whatever counts for status in their culture.

Buddhadharma: In an article in Harper’s many years ago, Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, referred to money as “green energy,” something to work with practically as you said, but he also said that the abstract quality of money can cause us to lose track of earth.

David Loy: Exactly. I would disagree with John. There is an essential difference between money and other forms of value. It has a lot to do with the abstractness of money. When we’re preoccupied with money, we’re not being materialistic per se. We’re caught up in a symbol. We’re not experiencing the world as it is; we’re worrying about pieces of paper or numbers in bank accounts, which in themselves are nothing.

Buddhists often talk about things being empty. Money is doubly empty. It’s nothing in itself, a collectively agreed potentiality, which has meaning only because everyone agrees that it has meaning. The abstractness of it tends to create real problems.

John Tarrant: I think that’s all nonsense. The more cultures one lives in, the more one realizes people make anything into a construct. The fact that money doesn’t mean anything is not in itself intrinsically bad. You can put it to bad uses, but you can put anything to bad uses.

David Loy: I’m not saying that money is intrinsically bad because it’s abstract. I’m just saying that being abstract, it leads to different potentialities, such as easily losing track of the meaning it has taken on in your life. But money is not good or bad in itself.

John Tarrant: All right. I’m with you then.

Sharon Salzberg: If your wealth is in plants and animals and things go bad, you can always eat your wealth. In some ways, it has more flexibility than a completely abstract system. The vulnerability that people have now is, in some measure, because things have become so abstract. It would help to contemplate the power money can have over us because of what we have imbued this symbol with.

John Tarrant: The really interesting thing about human beings is the relationship among us, and money is part of that relationship. The magic of human beings is about what they do with those relationships. If you have less money, do you actually end up sharing more? What are the consequences of losing money? Does it really matter, and in what ways does it matter when it matters?

Sharon Salzberg: Yes, issues of community and generosity and the ethos of giving—all the touchy subjects that surround our relationship with money—that is the pressing issue right now.

David Loy: The formula from the Heart Sutra applies here: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. In a way, what is so beautiful about money is that it’s true emptiness. It can take any form. The challenge is always whether we use the money or the money uses us. Money is energy potentiality. It doesn’t really belong to you or to me, so how should we use it? My own teacher in Japan, Yamada Koun Roshi, was an exemplar to me of somebody who had quite a bit of money and knew how to use it to help people.

Buddhadharma: In Buddhism, developing generosity is not measured using an external scale, such as how much we tithe. The measure seems to be more subtle and contextual than that.

David Loy: Exactly. The many different stations of life give us many different opportunities for the same challenge: transforming greed, ill will and delusion into generosity, loving-kindness, and wisdom. The specific challenges vary according to who we are and where we are, but it’s the same transformation.

Buddhadharma: Money problems are causing difficulties for many people in their relationships, and they are also causing difficulties for institutions like dharma centers that are having trouble paying their bills or raising funds.

Sharon Salzberg: I co-founded a dharma center when I was twenty-three. Fortunately, there were some people on the board of directors who knew what a mortgage was. On one of the first tours we ever had of what became the Insight Meditation Society, we went straight to the basement and looked at the giant boiler, and someone asked us, what if this falls apart? What if it blows up?

We used to say over and over again in that first year, we can always close it in a year if it doesn’t work. We were extremely naïve; we had nothing in the first mini-budgets for any kind of repair. We just didn’t have that concept that if you own it, you have to take care of it. You’re the steward.

We’ve always had the idea of charging as little as we can, so more people can take part. And that brings challenges, but slowly we’ve grown up and found ways to keep it going. Now, everyone has health insurance. We’re more savvy about mortgages and finances, and we have a new, very efficient boiler.

For a dharma center, it’s important that people have a sense of integrity and are responsive to the practical needs of being in this society, and to do things well, not recklessly. It’s important to be transparent and have a strong sense of values. When we’re working with the practicalities of money and property, it’s easy to get caught up in fear and the dogmatism of what we should or shouldn’t do. It’s a very rich and creative process, whether we’re a family or a dharma center.

John Tarrant: As you were talking about the founding of IMS, Sharon, I found it very touching how you described that groping in the dark quality. That’s lovely. That’s very much the spirit of practice. When people and groups are concerned about money, they’re concerned about how they’re going to do, about scarcity, and what’s going to happen. Are we all going to huddle together in winter without heat in our houses? Will we live in shopping carts?

It’s important to remember that we can and will get by, and that even if our life changes a lot, we might have just as much happiness. If we go back to some lower level of subsistence, maybe we’ll really enjoy cooking meals for each other and sharing a cup of coffee instead of having three lattés a day. Obsessively worrying about whether we’ll do OK is an attempt to control something that we don’t know about yet. We think we may miss out on a life we could have had if things had been different.

Buddhadharma: In an article in Buddhadharma a while back, Chokyi Nyima talked about one of our primary delusions being the solid assumption that if we have a lot, we’re happy; if we don’t have a lot, we’re unhappy.

David Loy: The assumption is that we’re talking about money and stuff, but of course, there’s a very interesting tension between time and money. So many people have a lot of money and a lot of stuff, but don’t really have the time to enjoy themselves. If we have less money, is that going to make people more anxious and enjoy their time less, or will it be an opportunity to get a better sense of time? Many people have chosen voluntary simplicity because they want more time and more focus on relationship. Money is something we have, but time is what we are.

John Tarrant: That’s great. I woke up last night, and I noticed it was raining. At times like those, the mind just thinks it’s part of the rain. When that happens, I know there’s nothing more important than just listening to the rain. We have that moment over and over and over again. Maybe if we get that moment at the cost of losing some of our money, we’ll have made a good deal.

Buddhadharma: That’s what Dogen talks about as being-time. Time is not a commodity or a measuring device ultimately; it’s the essence of our being, where we are in any given moment.

Sharon Salzberg: Poor people might have very little time, as well. They may be looking for work, or housing, or just trying hard to get through the day. I think about the teaching of a precious human birth. If we’re too caught up in seeking pleasure and happiness and have too much stuff, we get obsessed with that stuff and we forget about a deeper meaning, but if our lives are horribly pressured and it’s just about survival and we’re barely getting by, it’s not that easy either. If we’ve had the chance to practice, we’ve received a gift that we can apply no matter where the situation takes us. And if we find we are in a place of relative privilege in this society, we could reflect on what that means as well.

Buddhadharma: What if in spite of all we understand about interconnectedness, simplicity, being-time, and precious human birth, when we have to decide whether it’s time to declare bankruptcy, we freak out?

Sharon Salzberg: Keep breathing.

David Loy: Become aware of that anxiety rather than be caught up in it. Be with it, be mindful of it.

John Tarrant: You’ll get through it. And it’s your job to get through it. It’s not your job to get through it pretty. Get through it ugly. We get anxious because we want certainty, and we don’t ever have certainty. Stop worrying about the outcome; it’s not here. And if you’re panicked, be panicked.

JOHN TARRANT, Roshi, is the director of the Pacific Zen Institute based in Santa Rosa, California. He has a Ph.D. in psychology and is the author of Bring Me the Rhinoceros and Other Koans That Will Save Your Life. He grew up in rural Tasmania, Australia.

SHARON SALZBERG is one of the founders of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. She is the author of Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience and The Kindness Handbook.

DAVID R. LOY is the author of Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution and co-editor of the forthcoming book, A Buddhist Response to the Climate Emergency. He is Besl Chair Professor of Ethics/Religion and Society at Xavier University in Cincinnati.