By Alvin

After I started working and earning my own living, I began to wonder how much is enough for me to enjoy a good standard of living while saving for the future. I have dreams of becoming wealthy, but I pondered, “What does it really mean to be wealthy? What does it cost to become wealthy?”

Defining Wealth

Firstly, let’s discuss how personal wealth is measured. We typically define our personal wealth based on the amount we have in our bank account or the number or type of assets that we own. We spend a significant portion of our lives chasing the dream of becoming wealthy; a dream that has become distorted by modern society’s disproportionate expectations and never-ending comparison. On a daily basis, we always compare with our peers who are doing better in life. These comparison is often done subconsciously. Money is important in life, but are we forgetting the other types of wealth that we have, or we need to accumulate?

Cost of Earning Money

I remember seeing a photo of a frail and haggard looking Chinese Kungfu star, Jet Li with the caption saying: “when young, we spend our health to earn our wealth, now when we are older and with sickness, we spend our wealth on our health”. This is the best example to illustrate the point that we are giving up too much just to make more money. Earning a living becomes living to earn money, and then living to spend the money. Money becomes the basis of our life rather than us living our own life in the way we want. We have to consciously ask ourselves: is it worthwhile to work like slaves just to have the ‘richer’ lifestyle and to be like our peers who owns fancier material things? We must make these life choices consciously. 

Many people work excessively so as to achieve their financial goals. However, we should consider how our lives are revolving around work and how it consumes our time. Whenever possible, we must manage our time so that we have time for other things in life besides work. However,if we lose awareness of our mind, we tend to allow work to occupy our mind even during non-working hours, and work stress affects us continuously. I am also guiltyof this, perhaps especially so because I am not working a 9-to-5 job. I have to constantly remind myself that time is irreversible and I cannot allow work to occupy my whole life. However, I am not advocating anyone to do a YOLO (You Only Live Once)! Yes, we should live life to its fullest, but we need to liveit wisely.

The Essential Wealth

It is obvious that there are other types of wealth, such as kinship and friendship, which are very important in our lives. However, there is an essential wealth, which other wealth depends on. I am not referring to the ‘wealth of knowledge’, although being knowledgeable is crucial in our knowledge-based economy. To me the most fundamental form of wealth is the ‘wealth of wisdom’. Being wise, we will know how to better spend our time, identify better ways to earn our living, select what to invest in, and decide how to spend our budget. A person can accumulate a tremendous amount of money, but without wisdom he can lose it easily, anytime. Being wiser, we can also improve our relationships with our family and friends.

Don’t be Greedy

Based on my existing wealth of wisdom, I am constantly reminding myself not to be too attached to money as I strive to enrich my pot of gold. When investing, I need to remind myself not to be greedy. For example, when buying a stock, we should not aim for the lowest price to buy and the highest price to sell. As long as we can make a profit, we should not regret that we could have earned more. This logic also applies to our daily groceries shopping. For example, after buying groceries from a stall,we discovered that the next stall sells it at a cheaper price. Some people will go back to the first stall and demand a refund, spending a lot of time and effort to make sure they do not lose out. Actually, we should take it as a lesson learnt for future purchases, but if we are feeling cheated and ‘heart pain’,then we are missing the point. Being smart means making good decisions to make sure we always make the most gains, but with wisdom, we avoid being ‘penny wise but pounds foolish’.

How to Accumulate Wealth of Wisdom

So, the next question is, how to accumulate wisdom? My advice is to be a BuddhistPractitioner who learns and applies Buddhist Teachings in our daily lives rather than just a ‘believer’. Even though Buddha’s teachings have been passed on for thousands of years, it still has much relevance to us. Personally, they have guided me in slowly changing my thinking and mindset. I have only just started my ‘wisdom accumulation’, but I have discovered that I am not as attached to chasing materialistic goals or being caught up in consumerism. I still feel the occasional work stress when there is a tight timeline, but I am enjoying more of my work. This is because, through my Buddhist cultivation, I am more aware of my choices in life, and Iam more balanced when I seek my pot of gold.

By 智扬

Jen Chen Buddhism is very practical and applicable in all aspects of our daily life. Recently, I realised that my outlook on life has changed. I find myself not as ‘kiasu’ (afraid of losing), and not as competitive as what our current day society has been forging us to be. Now, I am beginning to view earning money as not the most important objective in my career or even in my life. Yes, we still need to earn a living, but with a renewed perspective, I go about doing my job professionally, working to the best of my abilities and not blindly striving for the biggest profit or fat pay-checks. 

Growing up in a very competitive society, I used to aspire to lead a good life; I wanted to climb up the corporate ladder, own a property early and drive a fancy car – these were the benchmarks to gauge how well I am doing in my life. I now realise that these are just materialistic pursuits, and I had been following and chasing these external yardsticks in today’s ever changing world where it can be a endless pursuit. 

Now, I view working as more of a necessity to earn a simple living and my definition of a good life has changed. Any honest and decent job that can sustain a comfortable living is good enough. I do not need to wear fancy clothes and accessories to make myself look good, as I do not deem these as things that others will judge me on. Similarly, I do not judge others based on what they wear and how much they make. I am glad to have realised this early, rather than realising it at my deathbed when I look back and ask myself why had I spent my whole life chasing after all these materialistic stuff. We came to this world penniless and that’s how we will depart. As simply put by Jen Chen Buddhism Reverend Teacher Chen Ming-An, “there is only one path we take in our life, the path towards death” (我们人生只有一条路走，就是死路一条).

I know that the way I handle my finances is still not ideal. I hope to reduce my expenses in my indulgences; a meal at the hawker fills my stomach the same as a meal at an expensive restaurant. I will keep reminding myself I have more than enough clothes and shoes to wear, even when my favourite brand or a design I like is on sale. Hopefully, these savings can help to increase my contribution to those who need it more. A dollar to us may be small change, but to others, a dollar can be their family’s daily expenses for food. I know that I cannot contribute millions of dollars to make a big change but I know that I can start small and do my small part, and so can you.

By 亚花

Time flies, in a blink of an eye, I have taken refuge in Jen Chen Buddhism for seven years.

Speaking of which, it is truly a shame as I had only completely kicked away the bad habit of buying lottery within this year. I saved up the sum of money which I would have spent buying lottery and Toto, dividing a portion to contribute towards the Buddhist Centre and helping those in need. Although these amounts are small, yet after giving I felt joyous and this happinessexceeds that of winning lottery or Toto.

One day, I had a chat with my mother and she revealed that she had stopped buying lottery for a period of time. The reason was that she kept buying until she gave up as she had lost a lot of money.

My mother is over sixty years old this year and in her lifetime she won the top prize in lottery a few times. The highest record sum she won was twenty thousand dollars, the least amount would be a few thousand dollars but her capital to buy lottery was also not a small sum. Nowadays, she often complains that she has no money as the loss outweighs the gain.

My husband also tells me not to buy lottery anymore, he has saved quite a sum and his pockets have become more abundant.

I am very happy that my husband and I are able to change our habit: From buying of lottery and Toto to performing many virtuous deeds. Our lives and family has since become more blissful.

By 智扬

I had an interesting conversation with my wife recently. She mentioned that her friend had commented that we seemed to have a very lovely husband-wife relationship. I asked her how she replied her friend. She told me that she told her friend that we have reached the stage of ‘can’t be too bothered’ and given up on each other and thus, we may appear to have a lovely and harmonious relationship to outsiders.

While laughing at my raised eyebrows reaction, she explained that what we have given up on each other is our expectations of one another. Of course we still expect the other half’s love, care and companion as a spouse, but we have realized quite quickly in our relationship that meeting each other’s high expectations are often the root cause of many misunderstandings and arguments. We still have arguments often but luckily these are mostly over petty issues and resolved quickly. 

When I recalled and reflected upon our relationship ups and downs, I was not able to conclude whether we had reached this stage consciously or sub-consciously. If we really do not have any expectations of each other, we really would have no arguments at all, and that would make us the most ideal couple. For now, maybe we are just lucky as a couple to have a good common understanding between us. That said, in any relationship, overt expectations and poor understanding of one another’s perspectives are roadblocks in any kind of relationship. This can happen in the family, between friends and colleagues. Because of unevenly matched expectations and a lack of empathy, we can cause hurt to each other’s feelings and this will lead to disagreements, arguments or even hatred. 

Have you ever wonder, why are there expectations? Expectations exist mainly because we are being too attached to the things we love and cherish. Often, we are too attached to our own viewpoints. After spending time together in a relationship, we may slowly start to expect that the other person would naturally understand our preferences better and react accordingly. Due to this building up of expectations from the person you care about, when they do not meet up to your expectations, we feel disappointed. It is like when we are very stressed or feeling very down, we hope or assume that our loved ones would be more patient and caring to us. This assumption of something that should happen but does not happen causes frustration and arguments. Sometimes being frustrated, you just want to fight for your own right of way or your own viewpoint. But at the end of the day, the root cause is actually our own expectations and we let it develop into a ‘snowball’ effect. It starts from an initially small state of significance and rolling down, building upon itself becoming larger and in certain situation this snowball will have potentially disastrous outcomes. It can happen anywhere, anytime. In a business transaction, customers expect good service because they are paying for it. The shop owner expects the customer to make a purchase after he or she makes a few enquiries about the product or started to bargain about the price. The customer ended up walking away without buying, feeling frustrated. In some cases, the shop owner may even scold the customer for not making a purchase wasting his time and effort. Often, bigger expectations involve the persons we are dearest to and we can see that the closer a person is to us, when expectations are not met, the bigger our disappointments and frustrations are. 

I am not saying that we should have no expectations at all. Instead, we should develop more flexibility in our thinking and explore better ways of handling our state of expectations. We should always respect the other person as another individual with his or her own viewpoints and preferences. We should stop expecting them to always agreeing to our ways. Give up on the need to be always right, which is something that we are all guilty of. And by not expressing clearly you are thinking, it is unrealistic to expect the other person to read our minds. Being realistic in our expectations is also another important aspect. As the saying goes, do not expect of others what you do not expect of yourself. Not reacting immediately will give us an opportune time to exert better control to our reply and behavior. 

Though it was a random conversation with my wife, it got me thinking about how we should cherish the mutual respect and understanding we have already established and to continue to build on it. Good communication is often the solution and/or the prevention to disagreements and arguments, but better understanding of each other’s perspectives precedes and dictates how we communicate with each other. Awareness of oneself and our own feelings will enable better self-control, while awareness of the other party’s perspectives and feelings will enable better ways of communication. Softer tone of reply or use of gentle words can set the tone and environment for an enjoyable and conducive conversation. I must admit, saying and typing out my ideas is way much easier than doing but I believe by recognizing it and admitting to it is definitely a good start to better relationships. The ability to self-reflect goes a long way to prevent expectations of others to dictate our emotions.