Dharma of money

What is harder — to create wealth or to give it away? The desire for wealth is really a desire to get into the flow of what Sri Aurobindo defined as the Money Force. Quite like how wind and water are harnessed to create electricity, channelling the Money Force is to turn an intangible, unseen, abstract power, an idea, into matter through the purchase and acquisition of things and availing oneself of services. Just as converting one form of energy takes some doing, earning money is not easy — we spend the first two decades of our lives studying to get an entry into the money club, the next four decades earning it to finance the last two decades. We fight to get admission into colleges, careers, jobs. Turn into rats. Leaving our little wants and desires and joys and delights by the wayside.

How can we give this away?

Only by looking at money as a spiritual force. Then we realise that like every other force it needs to circulate. And the more it circulates the stronger it becomes. The cynical dictum that money attracts more money stands on spiritual foundations, which may not always have a moral base. As we have seen, there is a skill that few people have in being able to manage money efficiently. Even as a writer on money, I confess I don’t have it. But Warren Buffett does, Bill Gates does. One of the reasons why Buffett, the world’s second-richest man, is giving $31 billion to Gates, the richest, is that the latter can and does manage it better than anyone else — first as a commercial entrepreneur and now as a social entrepreneur.

Money has no colour, no religion, no race. But it has a dharma. And that dharma is: to circulate. In that context to say “this is my money” is Maya, an illusion that has become this civilisation’s biggest quest. Yes, wealth was pursued in the Inca, the Egyptian, the Indus Valley civilisations. But never on this scale or so widespread. In a sense, therefore, this could well be the Age of Money, a time when the Money Force comes to life. It is this force that we need to understand before we can harness, much less use it. As Buffett said in a recent interview: “I’m giving it (wealth) through him (Gates), not to him.”

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