I know a rich man with a net worth of tens of millions. This eldest brother is not much older than me, but he started business early in his life, opened factories, and engaged in overseas trade, and made a lot of money. He has estimated assets of at least 70 to 80 million.

I know a rich man with a net worth of tens of millions. This eldest brother is not much older than me, but he started business early in his life, opened factories, and engaged in overseas trade, and made a lot of money. He has estimated assets of at least 70 to 80 million.

This man’s surname is Feng. People call him Mr. Feng, but I call him Teacher Feng, because I think that in addition to being rich, the most important thing is that he has gained something from studying Buddhism. I benefit a lot every time I talk to him.

He started studying Buddhism about ten years ago. However, there is no trace of Buddhism in his office. There are neither Buddha statues nor Buddhist songs. There is no trace that he is a Buddhist practitioner.

But he is very intelligent, carefree and calm. Everyone in his company respects him. He is dignified when he should be dignified, and like a spring breeze when he should be kind. He has principles in doing things and is able to forgive others when he is given the opportunity.

I met him five years ago when I was working for his company, and we had a great chat with him. He also liked chatting with me. Every time we met for tea, except for a small amount of talk about work, the rest was about Buddhism. In fact, it was mainly me asking him questions and him answering me.

I remember one time, I asked him

If a person practices Buddhism, can’t he make money?

Do Buddhists have to be poor and have to reduce their material burdens?

He said: What was the first thing Sakyamuni Buddha did when he returned from asceticism on the snow-capped mountains?

I said: I drank a bowl of cheese to regain my strength.

He said: Yes, this is a great method. Living a normal life is the best practice. You don’t have to starve yourself to the point of skin and bones, torture yourself to the point where you are worse than dead, and make people less like humans and ghosts.

Buddha also had to eat and sleep. You see in the Diamond Sutra , what the first thing the Buddha did was to take a rice bowl, beg from door to door, go to alms to fill his stomach, and then come back to give lectures.

Practice Buddhism not to make you suffer, but to free yourself from suffering. Liberation from suffering can be achieved from suffering, or without suffering. It should be said that it can be achieved from any angle, but it does not necessarily require suffering.

Of course, suffering is beneficial to spiritual practice.

Buddhists all agree with this point, so it is said that the evil world of Saha and the Five Turbidities is the best place to learn Buddhism. This statement makes a lot of sense, because if you are in a blissful world where you are prosperous, wealthy, very happy, and have no pain to speak of, how can you be determined to learn Buddhism and become a Buddha?

Therefore, it is difficult to give charity to the poor, and it is difficult to aspire to wealth.

It is difficult for people who are rich, happy, and satisfied with all conditions to seek the ultimate liberation in life unless death is approaching. For example, the emperors of the past dynasties, after reaching the peak of wealth and power and enjoying the ultimate glory and wealth in the world, faced life, old age, illness and death and found that everything in front of them could not be retained and could not be taken away, and that life could not be liberated in the end, so they devoted themselves to Buddhism.

However, although suffering is a help, it does not have to be this way. If you are destined to be rich and worry-free throughout your life, why do you have to waste your family property and become poor in order to learn Buddhism?

So this is all relative.

Everyone in the world has their own destiny. The Buddha taught us to follow our own destiny, accept the good and bad, and use wisdom to look at the good and bad that happen in life.

Instead of giving us a fixed routine, we have to be extremely poor and torture ourselves, not eating or drinking, and being skinny and bones, in order to practice Taoism.

When cultivating the Tao, you are cultivating the Middle Way.

What is the Middle Way? It means being impartial and not clinging to any one end.

I asked: So, rich people, like you, are indeed very satisfied with their lives. They have everything they want, they don’t need to worry about solving problems, and they are a hundred times happier than ordinary people. So how do you practice cultivation? Because you are no longer suffering? No more worries?

He smiled and said: The suffering you understand is suffering in a relatively narrow sense, and the troubles you understand are also troubles in a relatively narrow sense.

There are many kinds of suffering, not just the suffering of not having money. The Buddha said that there are eight sufferings in life, which are: the suffering of birth, the suffering of old age, the suffering of illness, the suffering of death, the suffering of love and separation, the suffering of resentment and hatred, the suffering of not being able to seek, and the suffering of the five yin beings.

These eight hardships , even if you are the king of heaven, you can't escape, not to mention you just have a little money.

So many rich friends around me want to live long, and women want to live young. They spend a lot of money to do these two things, and they always believe that there is nothing in the world that money cannot do. This is also foolishness.

No one can escape the four fundamental sufferings of birth, old age, illness and death, and should accept them as they come.

When we do not have the same wisdom to deal with life, all these sufferings are there. Only when wisdom rises, the meaning of these sufferings will decrease with the degree of wisdom.

Why, because when you study Buddhism and practice, the most important thing is not to learn supernatural powers or learn Buddhist words, but to learn how to truly and correctly view all encounters in your life.

The way you look at the world and yourself,

determines your happiness and whether you suffer or not?

Instead of whether you have money, whether you are poor, whether you are a vegetarian or not, whether you can do inediate , whether you can live in a mountain, whether you can meditate , whether you have feelings, whether you have sent forth thoughts, these are all auxiliary details.

The core is whether your perspective and mentality have changed. The real transformation is not the self-deceiving Ah Q mentality, but a complete understanding of the true nature of things and the logic behind everything. Then I suddenly wake up, and I will no longer be deceived by color and dust, and be fascinated by dust and shadow.

You know that wealth is nothing but an opportunity you get from cause and effect, and the same is true for poverty. No matter you are rich or poor, you are calm and do not force it. If you are poor, you just work hard to change. You can work hard all your life, or you can accept it directly. The key is that you have to accept yourself at any stage.

Don’t think, in the past ten years, I have been so poor that outsiders look down on me, relatives and friends all ridicule me, I can’t afford a big meal or drive a luxury car, and my life is not a human life at all. Thinking about it this way, it's over, these ten years have been wasted, and the other good things in these ten years have been wiped out by you.

Because you use worldly standards to judge your rare and only one-time life process. You label it, but in fact it is just an experience of yours, but you put a final conclusion on it.

So maybe you can conclude that every minute is suffering, so many people jump off buildings because they cannot accept the so-called depression and despair of life.

If you are rich, be indifferent. Money is just in your hands. Cherish the good days, live as simply as possible, and put your mind in a relaxed and comfortable place without being driven by desires. The most difficult thing for rich people is actually suffering.

It is not suffering, but desire, the desire for immortality, the desire for more money, the desire to have power even if you are rich, all kinds of unfulfilled desires, if you cannot control it for a while, you are tortured by this kind of thing every day, which is also suffering.

Of course, everyone would rather suffer like this than the suffering of poverty. This is also natural. Survival in the world inherently has such distinctions. There are extremely few people who must be completely at ease with the situation and can face all situations calmly.

So according to Buddhism,

does not require us to do anything, but

does not require us to do anything.

After realizing this sentence, it is actually close to the core way of life in Buddhism.

People often misunderstand that Buddhism only requires us to be born out of the world and float away from the world. In fact, on the contrary, the Buddha wants us to be like the light and the world, and to be completely involved in the world, because in his view, there is no difference between coming in and out.

For example, to become a monk, what is a monk? It is not to leave home to live in a temple, but to leave life and death, which is called a monk. To escape from life and death, where should we escape from? Be free from every small life and death.

What is every small life and death, such as the birth and death of a troublesome thing, the birth and death of a relative, the possession and loss of an object you love, the occurrence and disappearance of a relationship, the birth and death of joy and sorrow, the birth and death of a trouble, the rise and death of a thought, these are all life and death, and the world is composed of life and death.

The Buddha calls these things that can arise and cease to exist as laws of arising and passing away. And if we return to the origin of all things that are neither born nor destroyed, return to the perspective of the original element , and look at birth and death, you will be free from birth and death, transcend birth and death, free from birth and death, and accommodate birth and death.

This is the escape from life and death. The so-called escape means that there is no escape, there is no need to escape, there is no escape, and there is no escape.

I asked: Why do so many of us who study Buddhism have good theoretical knowledge, even very high levels of meditation, and very good feelings, but when it comes to life, they don’t use it at all?

He said: This is because the dichotomy between being in the world and being in the world is too persistent. Deep down in my heart, I believe that Buddhism is a transcendental method, so the direction of cultivation is to break away from the current real life and find magical induction and liberation.

But I just forgot that real life is also Buddhism. Therefore, the Buddha specifically used sixteen words to explain this matter in the Heart Sutra. ——Color is not different, emptiness is not different, color is emptiness, and emptiness is color.

The method of transcending the world and the method of entering the world are equally inseparable. Cultivation and life are equally inseparable. Breathing, eating, drinking, and having diarrhea are all practices. Making money, working, and laughing and cursing are all practice. There is nothing that is not practice.

Therefore, people who understand this principle are harmonious and know that even if they meditate, it is to help themselves enter a state of tranquility, not the Tao. Therefore, when sitting down, you also use your meditation mind.

Otherwise, practice is practice, life is life, and they should be clearly distinguished. Greed, anger, ignorance, and worries will always be the opposite of the Dharma, and it will not be possible for hundreds of thousands of kalpas.