The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Bringing Virtue Into Life”
You may have been born rich, or perhaps during the course of your life it has been relatively easy for you to make money, gain riches. Or perhaps during the course of your life, at some point you have inherited riches. And you wonder to yourself, “How is it that I hear about the starving poor and yet I, who wasn’t even hungry in the first place, have inherited this money, or I have this money? How is it? It would seem as though I am completely undeserving. How has that happened?” You wonder about that. “Why is it easy for me to make money?” Well, the reason why it is easy for you to inherit that money or to make that money is because some time in the past you have earned it; and the way that you have earned it is by engaging in virtuous activity concerned with generosity toward others. If you have given food to others, in this life you always have enough to eat, and more. In fact, the problem is not eating too much.
So then, if you have a lot of money and things have been pretty comfortable for you, then sometime in the past you must have been very generous toward others, and your big problem in this lifetime is not how to make money but how to spend it, or not spend it. In that case, you deserve everything that you get. You deserve all of it.
Now, in this lifetime, if you just take that money and express through it no acts of generosity,… Let’s say maybe you keep it in your family to make sure that your children are provided for. Well, that’s a kind of generosity. You did give some to your children, but that isn’t real generosity, because children are kind of like an extension of our own ego. We think of them as part of us. We don’t think of them as being separate from us. We like our children to be rich because it’s a good reflection on us and it makes us die happy.
But let’s say in this lifetime, although you have lots of money, you haven’t really given any to benefit others. You haven’t helped others not to be hungry. You haven’t given it to children that don’t get any toys as Christmas. You haven’t made any offerings to the temple where you receive all your spiritual benefit. You haven’t done anything with your money. If you think then that you’re going to somehow be able to legally make it happen that they’ll find you in your next incarnation and give you back that money,… Au contraire, monsieur. You can’t take it with you. It’s not going to appear again in your next life. Forget it! It’s not going to happen. But in your next life you will probably be born much poorer because, even though you had the money before, you were not very generous.
So it’s very, very clear that cause and effect are interconnected. In fact, the Buddha teaches us that they arise interdependently: When the cause arises, the effect arises at the same time, but in seed form. Think about that. Think about that the next time you have non-virtuous behavior. One of the reasons why it’s so easy to be non-virtuous is because you think, “Well, O.K., I’m being non-virtuous now, but I don’t see the effect rising yet. So maybe they…(Who are they anyway? We don’t know.) they’ll forget about it. “ You know, the guys with the x’s and the checks. They’re up there. They’re sitting on the throne. You know, the guy with long beard. Maybe he’ll forget about it by then. But in fact the Buddha teaches that, number one, there is nobody with a book up there, or a beard. And number two, when you give rise to the cause, the effect is already born, and you will experience it. You will experience it.
Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo. All rights reserved
