"Right Bucks" by Ken Wilber

Some may be interested in this essay by Ken Wilber. It begins: "The Dharma is free. No one should charge money for teaching or transmitting Dharma. Dharma that touches money is no dharma at all ..." From this beginning one might get the impression that "dharma is free" is the thrust of the essay. Read it and find out.

It can be read here: integrallife.com/node/60741
or
downloaded as a PDF file here: www.kenwilber.com/Writings/PDF/RightBucks_GENERAL_b42000.pdf

AugustLeo

In that article Wilbur says:

"There are gifted Dharma teachers who have over 20 years of experience and wisdom--and who by teaching will save their students enormous expense in time and money (and suffering)--and yet they gnash their teeth, put on their hair shirt, and grimace as they ask for 5 dollars to cover expenses.

This is not transcendence, this is pitiful, guilt-ridden puritanism. Emptiness will not relieve you or me or anybody else of the need for appropriate relational exchange in the manifest world. Becoming less attached to money does not simple-mindedly mean having less money: less attached does not mean don't touch. It means gracefully touch and don't squeeze to death. It means touch with open hands, it doesn't mean cut off your hands."


Sounds about right to me.

Everybody should read this essay! It's a masterpiece, IMHO. Thanks for reposting the link, AugustLeo, and thanks Chris (cmarti) for putting it in context. Here's more:

"The pure Dharma doesn't touch bucks: therefore pure practitioners shouldn't care about money. Which means, a good practitioner should be thoroughly, totally, and wildly out of touch with reality..."

"I believe that this hippie dharma (filthy lucre) actually cheapens the Dharma. It sends out the message that the Dharma hasn't a clue as to how to make it in the real world. It sends out the ages-old ascending nonsense that Dharma equals puritanical, dead from the neck down. It sends out the message that Dharma cannot touch money without sullying itself. And that is the cheapest of the cheap." -Ken Wilber, "Right Bucks"

integrallife.com/node/60741

I would urge everyone with an interest in dharma to read the article from start to finish; whatever your opinions about this hot-button topic, I believe you will be challenged and entertained, possibly even educated.

-Kenneth

More tidbits from this classic Wilber masterpiece:

"And as for the disdainful view'”filthy lucre'”I guarantee you that, for structural reasons, that view is ineradicably linked to an anti-body, anti-earth, anti-ecological, anti-sex, anti-woman stance: in every way, a package deal (they historically arose together, and they will only fall together: they are linked by hidden structures of relational exchange)."

"And we will drag the Dharma, kicking and screaming, into the modern and postmodern world only when every single one of those "anti" stances (money, food, sex, body, earth, woman) is attacked simultaneously: they stand or fall together." -Ken Wilber, "Right Bucks."

integrallife.com/node/60741

Whatever you think of Wilber, he will be remembered as one of the great thinkers and visionaries of our age. And this article is brilliantly representative of his clear thinking on a topic too often left to moulder in the dust bin of unexamined assumptions.

Some may be interested in a current discussion of Wilber's essay on The Taobums Forum:

www.thetaobums.com/index.php?/topic/1697...__st__0&#entry236314

OK Leo, I'll chew on your bait a bit...

For the most part, I found this article an inaccurate rant and I think Ken could have done much better. Too bad. It largely consists of Ken using his theory to back up his theory and contains many unexamined assumptions.

Ken wrote: "Money, food, sex. The great no-no's in the purely Ascending, agrarian, male-oriented wisdom traditions. It is no accident that the Buddha's second noble truth'”the cause of suffering is desire'”specifically meant sexual desire; and that meant, of course, women. "Eve" (by whatever her name) was everywhere the great temptress, even the great source, of evil."

My understanding is different. I learned about Dependent Origination - This is the little engine of samsara and it was this little nut that Buddha had to crack for people if they were going to be free from suffering.
See: Downbound Confounded Rebounding Conjuration
tinyurl.com/25xxtcn

Samsara: 'wandering on'. If Buddha could get people to the point for just one moment where they were free of it - they would see the deathless and the rest would be (relatively speaking) a cake walk.

So Buddha had to get people turned around to look inward at their own experience. In order to do this he had to first get them to stop chasing money, sex, drugs, and all manner of diversions that people continue to do today - which basically take up all our time and make our mind so restless that we can not calm it sufficiently to see what is going on.

Sensuality defined:
www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.014.than.html

Where are the babes?

"the entire manifest world was viewed, basically, as evil"

- I thought it was just about creating a sense of permanent self by clinging to ever changing conditions.

"allegedly "free" Dharma (as a matter of "purity"), which is to say, Dharma on the cheap, sends out the unmistakable message that Dharma is worthless"

Does it?

The Economy of Gifts
www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/economy.html

No Strings Attached
www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/than...stringsattached.html

Money is a non-issue - Charge or don't charge - who cares. Teaching dharma for a living in this economy is going to be like selling anything else - which often translates into how to maximize perceived value while minimizing costs. Should this worry anyone? The gift economy will try to continue to maintain an accurate teaching and to provide an opportunity for those who wish to penetrate this teaching to its depths.

Ken: "A thorough-going friendliness with samsara, as the perfect expression of an all-pervading Spirit: this is the Nondual revolution...
... And we will drag the Dharma, kicking and screaming, into the modern and postmodern world only when every single one of those "anti" stances (money, food, sex, body, earth, woman) is attacked simultaneously: they stand or fall together."

- That's the all pervading Spirit! Btw, not sure why he drags the Tao Te Ching into all of this.

Good points, Chuck. I actually don't see much conflict between your point of view and Ken Wilber's. You are concerned that people "stop chasing money, sex, drugs..." so they can "calm [their minds] sufficiently to see what is going on."

Wilber is concerned with "right bucks" and right sex. His point seems to be a more nuanced version of your own. My interpretation of his thesis is that the question is not black or white; you don't have to give up sex in order to awaken, you just have to give up your clinging to it. Similarly, you don't have to avoid contact with money in order to awaken, you just have have a healthy relationship to it. In addition to the observable accuracy of it (many people we know are awakening while living ordinary lives), this position seems sane to me given that most of us are householders and cannot reasonably avoid the mainstream economy.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that Sigmund Freud wrote that "all philosophy is personal." So, if I make my living by teaching dharma, I might want to rationalize my own existence by saying that it's not only okay but wholesome to expect to be fairly compensated for my time regardless of whether I am a dharma teacher or a truck driver. On the other hand, if I wanted to rationalize my own unwillingness to pay for a dharma teacher's time, I might argue that dharma teachers are ethically bound to give their time away (to me).

I am not at all suggesting that you are in the latter camp; for all I know you may be extremely generous with your dharma teacher. But I think it's important to note that each of us is primarily in the business of rationalizing his or her own trip; and while it's easy to spot another's unexamined assumptions, it's not so easy to spot one's own.

I'm also intrigued by your use of the term "accurate teaching." What does that mean?

"I'm also intrigued by your use of the term "accurate teaching." What does that mean?"

Hi Kenneth,

It means that without direct contact with someone that is deeply awakened - I have to be very careful about the depth of my own awakening. Shinzen Young mentioned that when he decided to start teaching the first thing he did was go out and find the most awakened teacher he could to 'kick his but' - because he knew his students couldn't. Having such teachers is I feel one goal of the traditions. Not always realized (so to speak) but a goal. At the very least it is to maintain accurate teachings - written or otherwise. Tradition specific. Basically, not allowing a watering down or eroding of teachings. A standard.

The standard is something I can check with regarding my own experience - ideally that is in the form of a living, breathing example.

The article presented some reasonable solutions with regard to money later on. I feel that it would have been better if it had simply taken this up from the beginning: how do we approach our feelings about money and how to teach dharma outside of the gift economy institutions in an equitable way.

Personally, I see these as two different issues:
1) If I am worried about how to make a living, what I should be charging, how much I should be paying or donating - well, these are manifestations of stress in this moment asking to be investigated. The world is reflecting back at me my own fear so that I can work with it. That's the nature of 'all pervading spirit' - as I see it.

2) What are my intentions in wanting to teach dharma, what are my needs, what are my responsibilities, what are my abilities, what are my resources, what do I know to be true and how do I live from that, etc.

Some decision will come out of all this, conditions will continue to change, and we move on.

I hope you intentionally reversed the order of those two questions, Chuck

"
I hope you intentionally reversed the order of those two questions, Chuck

"

Hi Chris,
Are you suggesting that I should think about wanting to teach before worrying about how much to charge for it?

We might talk more about how dharma teachers approach relational exchange. For me, Wilber's Integral movement has lost a lot of credibility in part because it has adopted aggressive overselling as a money-making tactic. Integral Spirituality e-mail blasts and other marketing efforts seem designed to appeal to this idea that Humankind is on the Verge of an Evolutionary Shift, and We in Integral are at the Forefront. There's all kinds of weird, sci-fi, New Agey imagery and a lot of explicit and implicit suggestion that Integral folks are at the apex of a grand developmental hierarchy and that Integral is superior to traditions. (Ken has a particular ax to grind against Theravada.) Meanwhile, several of the leading Integral teachers have been involved in really shocking scandals involving stuff like verbal, physical (literally hitting and kicking), sexual and financial abuse of students. Then you have Genpo, who as far as I know has not been involved in any major scandals, telling people that a Big Mind session will move their practices forward five years. It's all a bit much, for me, even though I love Wilber's ideas. There has to be some kind of middle ground between "disowning" money, sex, etc., and just soberly recognizing the reality of life in the world for what it is. For me, when Genpo says "F*ck those people, I don't give a damn what they think" (in reference to criticism of the way he asks his richest students to give $50k to his organization), it's a red flag. That anger seems to arise from some genuine uneasiness about what he's up to.

I love Kenneth's dana model because it is balanced. One thing I do agree with, though, is that a lot of people who could afford to support dharma teachers simply don't. The ball is in the court of students, who need to take the initiative and support the teacher. The more they fail to do that, the more the teacher is forced to embrace marketing, etc.

"Are you suggesting that I should think about wanting to teach before worrying about how much to charge for it?"

That might be a good idea, yes.

Wow. Mr. jgroove can be really harsh about Integral. Must be something there that is activating the old shadow side. (Hmmm...) Anyway, sorry about the tone of the above...

Well if anyone wants to send me 50K, I'll write up their prayer on the interweb and I know people who could do with having something, anything at all, to eat. They'd better hurry though any ongoing interest in giving a crap about money one way or the other for any reason is slipping away rapidly. Oh yeah, and Ken Wilber is a gluehead.

"Oh yeah, and Ken Wilber is a gluehead." -triplethink

Hi Nathan,

Please remember that name-calling is not encouraged on the forum. From the Q&A page:

Q: What are the rules?

A: You have to be courteous. That means relating to others with care, dignity, and compassion.

Thanks!

Kenneth

""Oh yeah, and Ken Wilber is a gluehead." -triplethink

Hi Nathan,

Please remember that name-calling is not encouraged on the forum. From the Q&A page:

Q: What are the rules?

A: You have to be courteous. That means relating to others with care, dignity, and compassion.

Thanks!

Kenneth"

Yes, of course, this is why after considering all of the terms I thought more appropriately described the quality of Ken Wilber's thinking I settled on gluehead even though it is far from accurately suggestive of my honest opinion of how deeply he has dug under the philosophical sub-basement of everyone preceding him throughout the known history of thought.

My apologies again for the usual lack of fashion sense and for not simply parroting the new mantra, 'un-reflective middle class sense of entitlement good, considerate ontological dissent bad'. Besides how can you all come together in complete confidence that you are unquestionably right in such a revolutionary take on this issue without those with whom to visibly oppose about it. I'm just doing my tiny part here.

"A "Glue Head" is a person who sniffs or "huffs" solvent and or petroleum based adhesives. Prolonged inhalation of the fumes from these products produces a state of inebriation that some find pleasurable. The downside of this behavior (if you want to call it that) is that it causes brain damage.

Glue heads are easy to spot if you know what to look for. Outward signs that someone is a glue head include: extreme stupidity, slurred speech, general lethargy and a proclivity for watching Spanish infomercials even though they don't speak Spanish. "

www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Glue%20Head

I don't think Buddha ever said that dragging a body through space and time was going to be easy. My heart bleeds for these poor awakened folks. Here they are, having awakened to some profound truth - the end of suffering and all that - even at stream entry there is but a tiny bit of dukkha dirt left for them to go through - and they can't make a decent living from all these sentient beings destined for endless lives of woe in hell realms, etc. Never mind that if it hadn't been for countless beings dedicating their lives to this practice - out in the forests or wherever - many succumbing to wild animals, malaria, etc. - in order to keep this knowledge alive and available - that they might still be one of those samsaric beings. The all pervading spirit owes them darn it! If I only had a violin ...

@Mr JGroove: I thought that was a great rant. I subscribed to one of Wilburs things for a while but cancelled because of the spam and commercialism.

@Chris: Seems like a reasonable suggestion - I think I went post-logical

"My heart bleeds for these poor awakened folks. Here they are, having awakened to some profound truth - the end of suffering and all that - even at stream entry there is but a tiny bit of dukkha dirt left for them to go through - and they can't make a decent living from all these sentient beings destined for endless lives of woe in hell realms, etc." -Chelek

If the awakened folks you refer to are Ken Wilber and Genpo Roshi, I don't think either of them are complaining about not making a living. They are both doing well in that department; they're just doing it in a way that many of us find distasteful. But I don't understand why this discussion has to devolve into sarcasm and venom. I thought that Wilber's point in the article was that there is something dysfunctional about insisting that dharma teachers must not touch money. He traced the idea back to a particular spin on dharma that arose within a particular time and culture. He argues that this kind of puritanical guilt and general discomfort about the nitty-gritty realities of life no longer serves us and that it's time to move on. I still don't see the conflict between his point and one of your own, which is that life is difficult for everyone and the groceries have to be put on the table.

"Never mind that if it hadn't been for countless beings dedicating their lives to this practice - out in the forests or wherever - many succumbing to wild animals, malaria, etc. - in order to keep this knowledge alive and available - that they might still be one of those samsaric beings. The all pervading spirit owes them darn it! If I only had a violin ..."

Do we have to choose one or the other? Can we be grateful for those who practiced and sacrificed, studied and taught in order that we can benefit from the teachings while also appreciating that times change?

triplethink wins the balloon dart award. a well-timed deflation is always funny.
i'm sure wilber is highly valid in a lot of regards, but i much prefer to read him interpreted through others so i don't have to delve into the denseness my own denseness is too dense to de-densify. and there's something creepy about his whole scene, which said personal prejudice may preclude me from aquiring some interesting interpretations of the universe, but i can always get my interesting intrepretations of the universe from somewhere else, there's a never-ending supply.

kenneth still wins the logic, clear-view award, as always. (*edit* ie. the balance of proper context. i tend to agree with triplethink's position below however.)
sorry, i got stuck on a 'winning' metaphor, which free discussion is never really about.

I just think it is, even for Wilber, a particularly ill conceived and badly written piece. I disagree with almost all of his analysis, all of his conclusions and most of his alleged facts are false when they aren't merely misrepresented, with the possible exception of some of the completely unrelated impacts of technology on social structures (not the alleged technological impacts on something as abstract as nondualistic philosophies). For instance the Buddha wasn't a simple farm boy who was loathe to return to his plow. Having been raised in a palace and tutored by the greatest teachers available he could have easily seen himself as entitled to the best of everything particularly in light of having achieved "perfect right self realization". Instead he consciously chose to continue living as a homeless and wandering beggar on the margins of a society he could as easily have subsequently conquered and ruled over. So clearly for him and his disciples, a life of comprehensive worldly renunciation, simplicity and solitude was the natural response to their realizations and a product of the given understandings. That this does not equate to the definition of enlightenment and the responses to the realizations spoken of these days is not surprising. That it took 2.5 millenia of progressively less insightful practices and modes of understanding, the accumulation of numerous philosophical side trips, head trips and metaphysical meanderings, the development of a chattering leisure class, the elevation of the working class to alleged middle class status, the emancipation of slaves, universal suffrage, automobiles, the atomic bomb and mass media to bring us back to the point where 'the enlightened' are embracing the core problem as the final solution (aka samsara is nirvana) without the slightest hesitation is somewhat surprising. What was the hold up?

I have unrepentantly old school sentiments. It has never ever occurred to me that I should profit from these sorts of interests or from telling anyone anything about what I know and understand. I also think that if someone thinks they can buy or sell their realizations, knowledge and understandings they are welcome to go out and buy or sell all of the realizations, etc. they wish. I also think that if someone thinks they can buy or sell the same realizations, knowledge and understanding that the Buddha and his Noble Sangha had that then they are beyond real hope of ever developing the first clue about those understandings. It isn't that the Buddhadhamma couldn't have been sold. It quite easily could have been, probably numerous such attempts have been made. It's just that if you do happen to see all things fully in precisely the way that the Buddha did you simply won't have the slightest interest in making a cent on it. That kind of understanding is its own reward and compared to that reward anything and everything else is kind of worthless. To equate any form of payment with that kind of understanding is somewhat insulting to say the least, but certainly completely pointless, even if the only available alternative to being paid off somehow for being that way is starvation, which has been, is and may yet be the only option for some of us. Of course everyone is entirely at liberty to realize some other, 'better' ways of looking at things, some more comfortable, sensible and modern way. All I'm saying is that some of us see things in this very old, odd, inexplicable, antisocial, subversive and unpalatable way and we don't expect to be applauded or paid for it either and so will happily take the understanding quietly and unacknowledged to the grave.

"It's just that if you do happen to see all things fully in precisely the way that the Buddha did you simply won't have the slightest interest in making a cent on it." -triplethink

How do you know?

"That kind of understanding is its own reward and compared to that reward anything and everything else is kind of worthless. To equate any form of payment with that kind of understanding is somewhat insulting to say the least, but certainly completely pointless, even if the only available alternative to being paid off somehow for being that way is starvation, which has been, is and may yet be the only option for some of us. Of course everyone is entirely at liberty to realize some other, 'better' ways of looking at things, some more comfortable, sensible and modern way. All I'm saying is that some of us see things in this very old, odd, inexplicable, antisocial, subversive and unpalatable way and we don't expect to be applauded or paid for it either and so will happily take the understanding quietly and unacknowledged to the grave." -triplethink

OK, but this is the same kind of self-congratulatory attitude I see from religious people in all sorts of different religions. If moralism and painting everyone else as impure and yucky is all there is to wisdom, why should we favor Buddhist wisdom over any other moralistic tradition?

I question the need to claim the high road in this way. One could just as easily say that the "true realization" would make it unnecessary for you to participate on online forums. That doesn't make any sense.

"It's just that if you do happen to see all things fully in precisely the way that the Buddha did you simply won't have the slightest interest in making a cent on it."

How do you know?

Because he was methodical and precise and the specific causality for the exhaustive dispassion that would arise in this case is well elucidated in the Buddha's discourses and borne out in practice, so people can test those teachings and see for themselves.

OK, but this is the same kind of self-congratulatory attitude I see from religious people in all sorts of different religions. If moralism and painting everyone else as impure and yucky is all there is to wisdom, why should we favor Buddhist wisdom over any other moralistic tradition?

Which underscores the purpose of questioning just how discerning people really are if they think this is a helpful generalization to foster. More pointedly, what is the purpose in disembedding from one's experience if one then embeds the posts of others with imagined passions?

There is benefit in making key distinctions such as how to discern the important differences between the full awakening recounted in the Buddha's Dhamma within the Tipitaka from the prajnaparamita of Nāgārjuna maintained by the Mādhyamaka schools from Kenneth Folk's Dharma from Ken Wilber's Integral whatever from the insignificant generalizations such as the common misconceptions and misaligned values with which all wisdom teachings in all times are occulted and distorted by the ignorant and the worldly wise from by turns supporting, surrounding or submerging cultures. Unlike WIlber's furthering of a harmful gloss under the rubric of 'dharma' which is thoroughly meaningless.

I question the need to claim the high road in this way.

It can be said that these are neither the same roads nor the same destinations, without any reliance on claims.