Money and work

“Are monks and hippies and poets relevant? No, we’re deliberately irrelevant. We live with an ingrained irrelevance which is proper to every human being. The marginal person accepts the basic irrelevance of the human condition, an irrelevance which is manifested above all by the fact of death. The marginal person, the monk, the displaced person, the prisoner, all these people live in the presence of death, which calls into question the meaning of life. They struggle with the fact of death in themselves, trying to seek something deeper than death, because there is something deeper than death, and the office of the monk or the marginal person, the meditative person, is to go beyond death. Even in this life to go beyond. To go beyond the dichotomy of life and death and to therefore be a witness to life.” — Thomas Merton

How should monastics understand the precepts to not work or handle money in this time and place? Almost all Western monastics need to deal with this question, especially if they are not living within a traditional monastic institution.

Read

  • The Economy of Gifts by Thanissaro Bhikku

  • Right Livelihood for the Sangha by Thubten Chodron

  • Giving at Sravasti Abbey. This community has been successful in being a completely generosity-based model in the West. The monastics only eat food that is offered by the lay sangha, and all programs (and even the bookstore) are by donation. Make sure to expand the article on “The Practice of Generosity” on this page.

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