Advice Not Given

by Mark Epstein

  Five

  RIGHT LIVELIHOOD

  Right Livelihood is the third of the ethical trilogy that began with Right Speech and Right Action. Classically, it means avoiding some of the worst qualities human beings are capable of: those involving deceit or exploitation. Examples from the Buddha’s time include trading in weapons, buying and selling human beings, killing animals, selling drugs or other intoxicants, and manufacturing or distributing poisons. As these ancient examples suggest, things have not changed very much. People still make great fortunes in the very industries the Buddha warned against, although there are a few modern variations, like the trade in subprime mortgages, he could never have envisaged. Right Livelihood, from its inception, has asked people to consider the ethics of how they make their money. As with Right Action, the original idea was to protect the Buddhist community from its own most corrupting impulses with an explicitly stated set of moral principles. As satisfying as it might be to make money at other people’s expense, the Buddha was sensitive to the covert cost to the mind. By introducing a clear set of moral precepts into the Eightfold Path, he was safeguarding his community from within and from without. His movement arose at a time of great mercantile expansion in South Asia when there was much money to be made. Right Livelihood suggested that this was a subject worth paying attention to.

  In encouraging reflection on one’s vocation, Right Livelihood brings up a number of provocative questions. What place does work have in my life? What is driving me? Do I have ethical qualms about my job? Does my livelihood define me? Is my salary the most accurate reflection of my worth? The Buddha said that most people are motivated by what he called eight worldly concerns. Gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, and fame and disgrace are the ones he specified. He was careful not to judge people for these preoccupations, although he cautioned that they all come and go. Despite their relative impermanence, many of them are referred to with the utmost respect in the Buddha’s ancient discourses. At one point the Buddha remarks that there are four kinds of happiness a householder should seek—“ownership, wealth, debtlessness and blamelessness”—and at another time he says there are five things which are “very desirable but hard to obtain: long life, beauty, happiness, glory and a good condition of rebirths.” The Buddha was realistic about human nature and he understood that most of us subscribe, consciously or unconsciously, to a set of default explanations for why we do what we do. The most prominent of these, when it comes to one’s livelihood, is money.

  Money is not something that people talk about easily in therapy and it is not a subject I ordinarily offer advice about. People are much more comfortable, in these post-Victorian times, talking about sex than about money. They guard the details of their finances more religiously than their erotic fantasies. In my training as a psychiatrist, I was taught to bring up any business matters involving a patient—an overdue bill, a change in the fee, a payment that did not go through—at the beginning of a session. Getting it taken care of and out of the way allows for a smoother discourse thereafter. Allowing money to infiltrate a treatment by letting issues around it fester is a sure way to sabotage someone’s therapy. But even if it is not an issue in the office, money is still a major subject in most people’s minds. It is one of the primary means we have of measuring our self-worth. As an object of self-preoccupation and as a way of comparing one’s self with others, it is right up there with how much we weigh. Right Livelihood encourages us to make this a legitimate subject of meditative inquiry, not just an object of private rumination. Money is a tricky thing for most of us. Many people make its acquisition the central focus of their lives, but some people, with a tendency to undervalue themselves, have trouble acknowledging how important it actually is. Both kinds of issues arise in therapy.

  Right Livelihood asks us to pay attention to the eight worldly concerns and to try to find a place of balance within them. Do we chase praise, profit, pleasure, and fame as if they were the most important things in the world—as if once we corral them, they will last forever? Do we make our failures the linchpins of our low self-esteem? Do we judge ourselves on whether we can avoid pain and loss? If we allow our identities to rest only on such things, we are destined for disappointment. There is always someone wealthier, more famous, more recognized, or more accomplished than we are, always someone with more likes on social media. The effort to maintain one’s status, wealth, youth, position, beauty, recognition, or prestige can be an endless source of consternation. And the self-criticism that surfaces under the spell of inevitable loss, pain, blame, and disgrace can bedevil us for a lifetime.

  The Buddha made Right Livelihood the centerpiece of the Eightfold Path. Even those who renounced their occupations and joined the Buddhist order were not spared its concerns. As part of their vows, for example, Buddha’s ordained followers were asked to go out every morning to beg for their food from the nearby towns and villages. This was an important part of their day, an essential element of their livelihood. Because of their dependence on the local communities for their daily nourishment, they were actually related to as mendicants, or beggars, rather than as monks or nuns. This connection to the outside world was important to the Buddha. He did not want his bhikkhus, as they were known, to lose touch with where they had come from or to think that a life devoted to inner reflection gave them a free pass from the concerns of the outer world. The mendicants were a civilizing force in their society, a reminder of the spiritual heights a human being could achieve if freed from the need to support a family. They represented an ethical as well as a spiritual ideal. But the community was a civilizing force for the mendicants as well. They had to explain their philosophy and lifestyle to the townspeople as they wandered among them. They had to have something to offer in return for their daily alms, and so they became teachers of the Buddha’s psychology, adapting themselves to the needs of those who were feeding them. Their sustenance depended on their ability to maintain a fruitful relationship with the local people. They were some of the world’s first psychotherapists.

  Right Livelihood, in my view, takes inspiration from this. It asks us to pay attention to the quality of our interactions, not just to how successful the world tells us we are. “Right Livelihood is not only about what we do but also about how we do it,” writes Joseph Goldstein. Because it is about our behavior in the world, it can also be thought of as Right Living or Right Relationship. Many people overlook this aspect of things. They see making a living as their essential task and are bothered when the competing demands of daily life intrude. They consider anything that detracts from their primary mission as a nuisance, as beneath them, outside the realm of the meaningful, and a drag. Right Livelihood suggests that money is not the only currency worth paying attention to. It suggests that many of us are locked into a formulaic way of thinking about work that gives too little consideration to how we actually behave. The ethical dimension of Right Livelihood does not have to be limited to a prohibition in trading weapons, drugs, or human beings. Right Livelihood encourages us to be ethically aware of how we interact and how we relate—not just to our level of achievement.

  Many people find this essential teaching of the Buddha hard to swallow. If they seek meditation, it is with a not so secret hope of gaining a competitive edge in their work. They are not eager to look at the quality of their interactions or the hidden selfishness of their inner motivations. I am encouraged when meditation helps a person become more efficient, more relaxed, more attuned, or more creative, but I know these are temporary accomplishments, as likely to be co-opted by the ego as not. Right Livelihood asks us not to be satisfied with the superficial attainments of meditation. The admonishments of the Dalai Lama to “get a life” and of Munindra to “live the life fully” speak directly to this. Right Livelihood asks us to bring meditative understanding into the world just as the original Buddhist monks and nuns did in their alms rounds. It questions whether money need be the gold standard of our worth, whether livel
ihood is only about the accumulation of wealth and prestige. There is a lot of work to be done that does not fit into this model.

  —

  I thought about this recently when working with an accomplished installation artist named Gloria whose work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Gloria is at the top of her field and often installs her commissions in museums or in privately held collections. She has been chosen for residencies at some of the most renowned artists’ colonies in the world and has been the recipient of several important foundation awards. But even at this level of achievement, it is difficult for Gloria to feel she has arrived. Male artists are consistently more highly regarded—and rewarded—than she is, and no matter how much money her work is sold for, she has to pay her assistants, her studio rent, and her fabrication costs, while splitting whatever revenue she makes with her gallery. In order to supplement her income, Gloria sometimes travels to individual collectors’ homes to install her pieces in their houses. While this seems to me to be nothing to complain about, for Gloria it has become something of a trial and tribulation.

  When Gloria first began doing these kinds of private installations, she was excited. She traveled to places like Aspen, Santa Fe, Sun Valley, Palm Beach, and Jackson Hole to find spots within her collectors’ houses to place her installations. She had to do much of the work on-site—it would take her close to a week to get everything right. After a number of years, these visits have begun to make her weary. She does not like having to make conversation with the wealthy collectors (who are unfailingly friendly and supportive of her) and she does not like being away from her partner, her dog, her garden, her home, and her studio. The repetitive nature of these situations has begun to get to her and she feels constrained by the life she has created to support her creative practice. She needs these jobs, but she resents them. She depends on these collectors, but she does not want to be close to them. She often thinks that male artists at her level of achievement have it easier. They are paid more, are treated better, and would not be expected to hold the collectors’ hands in the same way. One of the things she likes most about being an artist is working alone in her studio. Now she has to spend weeks in other people’s homes installing pieces she has already thought about. The joy of creating new work has become submerged in the professional life of a successful artist.

  In one of my latest conversations with Gloria, she was on Bainbridge Island in Washington State in the home of a collector who had made his fortune as an early investor in Microsoft. I agreed to have a series of phone conversations with her while she was away. I know Gloria pretty well and have helped her find her balance in these situations before. I was sympathetic to her plight; she is a serious artist and the work of the installation, while challenging in some intriguing ways, was not of deep interest to her. And despite the kindness and generosity of her hosts, Gloria felt burdened by the attention they demanded from her.

  As we were talking, I started to think of my physician father. He had been among the first Jews admitted to his medical school and kept a box that we uncovered after he died filled with medals and awards dating back to his years in high school. But as ambitious as he certainly was, he rarely let it interfere with his concern for his patients.

  When he was a visiting professor at a now shuttered Harlem hospital in the 1960s, for example, he startled the mostly white staff of this teaching hospital by sitting on the beds of the sickest and most indigent patients while making his morning rounds. He touched them, examined them, cared for them, took their histories, and treated them with respect. I heard from a colleague that this single visit had changed the culture of the hospital in subsequent years. The physicians, who had been keeping their patients at a distance and had no personal financial interest in their care, could see what those patients had been missing. And they realized that they were missing it too.

  I told Gloria these associations when I was on the phone with her. She understood what I was getting at.

  “The poorest of the poor,” she exclaimed. “I have to have a care for it!”

  Gloria had been disparaging the situation she was in, seeing it as beneath her while criticizing herself for being “dirty” for taking the money it provided. She saw herself in competition with her male peers and was resentful of the extra effort she was required to make and the lesser compensation she was afforded. Her aversion, her envy, her judgments, and her resulting self-loathing were preventing her from giving herself to her work in a complete way. She reminded me of my own hasty escape from my teaching day at the Open Center all those years before. My inclination then had been to remain in the safety of my own little world rather than make myself available to the task at hand. Right Livelihood was asking Gloria to be aware of her own entitlement so that she could respond in a less programmed way. She was correct in her perception of the way the art world favored men, but this did not necessarily justify her attitude toward her collectors. Could she confront her prejudices the way my father had covertly encouraged the local doctors to examine theirs? Could she get past herself and have a care?

  Gloria had a real change of heart after our discussion.

  “I, too, am the poorest of the poor,” she exclaimed. Gloria was not equating the sexism of the art world with the racism of New York in the 1960s, although she could have. She was not seeing herself as a neglected patient in the hospital. She was recognizing the inner scarcity that came from her own withholding. Like the physicians in the Harlem hospital all those years ago, Gloria was depriving herself of the joy of giving. In her sudden acknowledgment that she, too, was the poorest of the poor, she realized this. Immersed in the wealth she was seeking, her inner life was poverty stricken. This was a real turning point for Gloria. Instead of holding herself aloof and resenting her predicament, she felt a stirring of humility. As the poorest of the poor, she deserved the same kind of compassion she was denying her collectors.

  “You gave me a big burst of energy,” she told me in a follow-up phone call. “I ate a simple dinner, sat and talked with my collector and her husband, and went to bed early. It was okay for once.”

  In giving attention to her patrons, Gloria was able to put herself—and her preoccupation with her livelihood—aside for a bit. This made everything easier and let her work proceed more effortlessly. She stopped comparing herself to other, more successful artists and was surprised to find that she was not feeling as sorry for herself. Her livelihood, rather than assuming the role of torturer, came more into perspective. Her ambition did not diminish, I hasten to point out, but her resentments did. Gloria saw that there was some reason, some purpose, in surrendering to the unwelcome aspects of her profession. There was something she could learn from stretching herself interpersonally as well as artistically. A previously untapped well of generosity began to emerge as a result.

  This set of conversations with Gloria reminded me of a famous story from the Buddha’s time. While it is not a story about an artist, or about a woman, it is very much about the potential of Right Livelihood to set a person straight. The story is as follows. Once, during his years of teaching, when the Buddha was camping in the countryside, his associates warned him in no uncertain terms not to go out walking by himself. A famous bandit, a murderer named Angulimala, had been sighted in the neighborhood. He was a fearsome fellow and Buddha’s followers were right to be afraid. Angulimala had made a profession out of banditry. He had vowed to collect a thousand severed fingers and was rumored to have already garnered nine hundred ninety-nine. Against all advice, the Buddha set out for his walk. On seeing the Buddha from afar, Angulimala armed himself and began to chase after him. But no matter how fast he approached, the Buddha stayed the same distance away. Some kind of magic kept them apart. This went on until Angulimala became fatigued and fed up. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before.

  Exasperated, he stopped and shouted out to the Buddha, “Stop, recluse! Stop.�
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  Continuing on his way, the Buddha responded, “I have stopped, Angulimala; you stop too.”

  The paradoxical nature of the Buddha’s response completely unnerved the famous bandit.

  “While you are walking, you tell me you have stopped, but now, when I have stopped, you say I have not stopped. I ask you now about the meaning: How is it that you have stopped and I have not?”

  The Buddha needed to employ his supernormal powers to get Angulimala to rethink his chosen livelihood. But once he had his attention, he held himself up as an example. He explained how he had stopped clinging to his exaggerated sense of self-importance, was no longer preoccupied with the eight worldly concerns, and had extinguished the fires of ignorance, greed, and rage. No longer driven by his ego, he did not have to attack or defend; he could just be. The Buddha spoke so convincingly that the murderer, who had never imagined another profession, did stop. He took on the robe and begging bowl of the Buddhist order and, despite the criticism of some of the faithful, became a trusted member of the Buddha’s entourage.