297



The modern world is so materialistic  that we sometimes joke about the
religion  of "moneytheism."  But the joke is on us: for more  and more
people,  the  value-system   of  money   is  supplanting   traditional
religions, as part  of a profound  secular  conversion  we only  dimly
understand.   I  think  that  Buddhism   (with   some  help  from  the
psychoanalytic  concept  of repression)  can explain  this  historical
transformation and show us how to overcome it.

    The  Buddhist  doctrine  of no-self  implies  that  our fundamental
repression  is  not  sex  (as  Freud  thought),  nor  even  death  (as
existential psychologists  think), but the intuition that the ego-self
does not exist, that our self consciousness  is a mental  construction.
Here, the repressed  intuition "returns to consciousness  in distorted
form" as the symbolic ways we compulsively try to ground ourselves and
make  ourselves  real in the world: such as power, fame, and of course
money.

    To  present  a Buddhist  critique  of the  money-complex, and  the
Buddhist  solution, this paper  is divided  into two parts.  The first
part summarizes  the existential-psychoanalytic  understanding  of the
human  condition  and  modifies  that  by bringing  in the fundamental
insight of anatma, the denial of ego-self.  The Buddhist  critique  of
the ego-self not only gives us a different perspective  on repression,
it  also  suggests  a  different  way  of  resolving  the  problem  of
repression.  The second part applies the conclusions to understand the
psychological and spiritual role of money for modern secular humanity,
demonstrating  how the money complex amounts  to a demonic religion  -
demonic because it cannot absolve our sense of lack.


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THE REPRESSION OF EMPTINESS

      When Samuel Johnson  was asked, "I wonder what pleasure  men can
      take in making beasts of themselves?" he answered: "He who makes
      a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."(1)

Dr.  Johnson's  reply  points  to why we anaesthetize  ourselves  with
alcohol, television, and so money other physical and mental addictions.
(As Dr.  Johnson also knew, the alternative to not getting rid of that
pain is often depression.)  Today, Western  philosophy  and psychology
have finally caught up with his insight: existentialism highlights the
anguish  of the human condition, and psychoanalysis  traces  neurosis,
including  the low-grade  neurosis we call normality, back to anxiety.
But  why  is it painful  just  to be a human  being? What  causes  our
anguish and anxiety? This is where Buddhism can carry the analysis one
step further.
    Freud emphasized  that repression  is the key discovery underlying
all psychoanalysis.  The concept  is basically  simple: when something
(usually  a thought or a feeling) makes me uncomfortable  and I do not
want to cope with it consciously, I may choose  to ignore  or "forget"
it.  This clears the way for me to concentrate  on something else, but
at a price: part of my psychic energy must be spent resisting what has
been  repressed,  to  keep  it  out  of  consciousness,  so  there  is
persistent  tension.  Even  worse, what  has  been  repressed  usually
returns to consciousness, by being transformed  into a symptom that is
symbolic (because that symptom re-presents the repressed phenomenon in
distorted  form).  Freud understood  the histerias  and phobias of his
middle-class  Viennese patients to be symptoms of repressed sexuality,
and  therefore  concluded   that  sexual  repression   is  our  primal
repression.  As  with  many  of us, however, his  attention  gradually
shifted  from  sexuality  to  death  as  he  got  older.  More  recent
existential psychologists, such as analysts Rollo May and Irvin Yalom
and scholars Norman O. Brown and Ernest Becker, have shifted the focus
from  sexual  dynamics  to the fundamental  issues  of life and death,
freedom   and  responsibility,  groundlessness   and  meaninglessness-
concerns  that  are just  as central  to Buddhism, and therefore  make
possible   a   more   fruitful    dialogue    between   Buddhism   and
psychoanalysis.(2)
    William  James observed  that our "common instinct  for reality...
has always  held the world to be essentially  a theater  for heroism."
But why do we want to be heroes? Natural  narcissism  and our need for
self-esteem  mean  that  each  of us needs  to feel  we are of special
value.  Heroism  is how we justify that need to count more than anyone
or anything else, because it can qualify us for a special destiny. And
why do we need a special destiny? Because the alternative is literally
too much to contemplate.  The irony of humanity's  unique  ability  to
symbolize  is  that  it reveals  our  fate  that  much  more  clearly.
According to most existential psychoanalysts, our primary


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repression  is not sexuality, but death.  Although  fear  of death  is
necessary  for  self-preservation, it  must  be repressed  for  us  to
function with any degree of psychological  comfort.  Most animals have
such fears programmed into them as instincts, but we fashion our fears
out of the ways we perceive  the world,(3) suggesting  that, if we can
come to experience  the world differently, we might be able to fashion
our fears differently, too.  Or is it the opposite: do our fears cause
us to perceive  the world the way we do, and might someone  experience
the world differently  if they were brave enough  to face the thing we
avoid most?

    According  to Becker, "everything  that  man does  in his symbolic
world  is an attempt  to deny  and  overcome  his grotesque  fate.  He
literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games,
psychological tricks, personal preoccupations  so far removed from the
reality  of his situation  that they are forms  of madness."  Even our
character-traits  are  an example  of this, because  they  provide  an
automatic  response  to situations.  These  sedimented habits  are  a
necessary  protection, for without  them  the e can only be "full  and
open psychosis";  to see the world  as it really  is "devastating  and
terrifying"  "it  makes  routine,  automatic,  secure,  self-confident
activity impossible....  It places a trembling  animal at the mercy of
the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it." Thus the bite
in Pascal's aphorism: "Human beings are so necessarily mad that not to
be mad would amount  to another  form of madness."  For Becker this is
literally  true: what  we  regard  as  normality  is  our  collective,
protective  madness, in which  we repress  the grim truth  about  the
human condition.  Those who have difficulty  playing this game are the
ones  we call mentally  ill.  Schizophrenics  are suffering  from  the
truth.  Psychoanalysis  reveals  the high price of denying  this truth
about the human condition, "what we might call the costs of pretending
not to be mad.'(4)

    Thus, the early  experience  of the child becomes  an attempt  "to
deny the anxiety  of his emergence, his fear of losing his support, of
standing alone, helpless and afraid."  This leads to what Becker calls
"the great scientific simplification of psychoanalysis":


      This despair is avoided by building defenses; and these defenses
      allow us to feel a basic sense of self-worth, of meaningfulness,
      of power.  They allow  us to feel in control  of life and death,
      that  one  really  does  live  and  act  as a willful  and  free
      individual, that one has a unique  and self-fashioned  identity,
      that we are somebody....All  of us are driven to be supported in
      a self-forgetful  way, ignorant of what energies  we really draw
      on, of the kind of lie we have  fashioned  to live securely  and
      serenely.(5)

    This implies  a different  way of understanding  such key Freudian
concepts as guilt and the Oedipal complex.  Freud traced guilt back to
early

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ambivalent  feelings  of the child, especially  hate  and death-wishes
directed  toward  parents  that alternate  with fears of losing  them.
Existential psychoanalysis sees the problem as far more basic: "Guilt,
as the  existentialists  put  it, is the  guilt  of being  itself.  It
reflects the self-conscious animal's bafflement at having emerged from
nature, at sticking  out too much  without  knowing  what  for, at not
being able to place himself securely in an eternal meaning system."(6)
Such "pure" guilt has nothing to do with feared punishment  for secret
wishes;  rather, the major  sin is the  sin  of being  born, as Samuel
Beckett  put it.  It is the worm in the heart of the human  condition,
apparently an inescapable consequence of self-consciousness itself.

    This transforms  Freud's Oedipal complex  into an Oedipal project:
the  never-ending  attempt  to  become  one's  own  father,  as  Freud
realized, but not by sleeping  with mother.  Why? To become  one's own
father is to become what Nagarjuna described  as self-existing  -  and
exposed as an impossibility. Becker calls the Oedipal project a flight
from obliteration and contingency. The child wants to conquer death by
becoming  the creator and sustainer  of its own life.  To be one's own
father is to be one's own origin. In Buddhist terms, we could say that
the Oedipal project is the attempt of the developing  sense of self to
become  autonomous.  It is the quest to deny one's  groundlessness  by
becoming  one's  own  ground: the  ground  (socially  conditioned  and
approved but nonetheless  illusory) of being an independent  person, a
self-sufficient Cartesian ego. From a Buddhist perspective, then, what
is called  the Oedipal  complex  is due to the discovery  of the child
that it is not part of mother, after all.  The problem is not so much
that Dad has first  claim  on Mom, as what  that means  to the child's
dawning realization  of separation: "But if I am not part of Mom, what
am I part of?" This  becomes, more  generally: what  am I? who am I? A
need is generated to discover one's own ground, or rather to create it
-  a futile project never to be fulfilled, except by identifying  with
something  ("I may  not be Mom, but  I am this!") -  which, of course,
always includes the fear of losing whatever  one is attached  to.  The
result  is a delusive  sense  of self  always  anxious  about  its own
groundlessness.

    If so, the Oedipal  project  actually  derives  from our intuition
that selfconsciousness  is not something obviously "self-existing" but
a fiction, ungrounded  because  it is a mental construct.  Rather than
being  selfsufficient, consciousness  is more like the surface  of the
sea: dependent  on unknown  depths ("conditions," as the Buddha called
them) that it cannot grasp because it is a manifestation of them.  The
problem  arises  because  this  conditioned, and  therefore  unstable,
consciousness  wants  to ground  itself, to make itself  real.  But to
real-ize  itself is to objectify  itself  -  meaning  to grasp itself,
since  an  object  is  that-which-is-grasped.  The  ego-self  is  this
continuing attempt to objectify oneself by grasping oneself, something
we can no more do than a hand can grasp itself.

   The consequence  of this is that the sense  of self always  has, as
its

                             301

inescapable  shadow, a sense of lack, which (alas!) it always tries to
escape.  It is here  that  the  psychoanalytic  concept  of repression
becomes  helpful, for  the  idea  of "the  return  of  the  repressed"
distorted  into a symptom shows us how to link this basic yet hopeless
project with the symbolic ways we try to overcome our sense of lack by
making ourselves real in the world.  We experience  this deep sense of
lack as the feeling that "there is something wrong with me." It can be
manifested  in many different  for s, and we can react to that felling
in many different ways.  One of the most popular is the money complex,
which will be discussed later. A better example for most intellectuals
is the craving to be famous, which illustrates perhaps the main way we
try to make ourselves  real: through  the eyes  of others.  (If we can
persuade  enough  others that we exist,...) In its "purer"  forms lack
appears  as guilt  or anxiety  that is almost  unbearable, because  it
gnaws at the very core of one's being.  For that reason  we are eager
to objectify anxiety into fear of something, because then we know what
to do: we have ways to defend ourselves against the feared thing.

    The  tragedy  of  these  objectifications, however, is  that  (for
example) no amount of fame can ever be enough if it is not really fame
you want.  When we do not understand  what is actually motivating us -
because  what we think  we want is only  a symptom  of something  else
(here, our  desire  to become  real)  -  we end  up being  compulsive,
"driven."  Such  a Buddhist  analysis  implies  that  no true  "mental
health"  can be found, except in an enlightenment  that puts an end to
the sense of lack that "shadows"  the sense of self, by putting an end
to the sense of self.

    I do  not  know  if psychoanalysis  is coming  close  to the  same
realization, but  it has come  to agree  with  the  great  insight  of
existentialism: anxiety is fundamental  to the self, not something  we
have but something we are.  The anguish and despair neurotics complain
of are  not the  result  of their  symptoms  but  their  cause;  these
symptoms  shield them from the tragic  contradictions  at the heart of
the  human  situation: death, guilt, meaninglessness.  "The  irony  of
man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety
of death and annihilation;  but it is life itself that awakens it, and
so we must shrink from being fully alive."(7)

    This suggests  a new perspective  on the sense of guilt that seems
to bedevil  our lives: it is not the cause of our unhappiness, but its
effect. "The ultimate problem is not guilt but the incapacity to live.
The illusion  of guilt is necessary  for an animal  that cannot  enjoy
life, in order to organize a life of nonenjoyment."(8) This shifts the
essential  issue  from what we have done to why we feel bad.  From the
Buddhist  perspective, if  the  autonomy  of  selfconsciousness  is  a
delusion  that  can  never  quite  shake  off its shadow-feeling  that
"something  is wrong with me," it will need to rationalize  that sense
of inadequacy somehow. If fear of death rebounds as fear of life, they
become two sides of the same coin. Then genuine life cannot be opposed
to death  but must  embrace  both  life  and death.  "Whoever  rightly
understands and


                             302

celebrates death, at the same time magnifies life" (Rilke).  The great
irony is that, as long as we crave immortality, we are dead.

    Most psychoanalysts  have decided  that it is not possible  to end
anxiety, but that conclusion does not necessarily follow. Rather, what
follows is that ending death anxiety would require ending the ego-self
as usually experienced, a possibility  Brown is sympathetic to: "since
anxiety   is  the  ego's  incapacity   to  accept  death,  the  sexual
organizations    [Freud's   anal,   oral   and   genital   stages   of
ego-development]  were  perhaps  constructed  by the ego in its flight
from death, and could be abolished  by an ego stro g enough  to die.'"
An ego strong enough to die: in Buddhist terms this is a sense of self
that suspects  it is a fiction, a delusive  construction, and is brave
enough to "let go" of itself.


     Anxiety  about  death  is  our  reaction  to  becoming  aware  of
ourselves and our inevitable fate; so it is something we have learned.
Is the dilemma  of life-confronting-death  an objective  fact  we just
see, or is this also something constructed and projected, more like an
unconscious, deeply  repressed  game  that each of us is playing  with
ourselves? According to Buddhism, life-against-death is a delusive way
of thinking because it is dualistic, but if the denial of death is the
way the ego affirms itself as being alive, that also implies it is the
act by which the ego constitutes itself. To be self-conscious is to be
conscious  of  oneself,  to  grasp  oneself,  as  being  alive.   Then
death-terror  is not something the ego has, it is what the ego is. The
irony here is that the death-terror  that is the ego actually  defends
only  itself.  Everything  outside  is  what  the  ungrounded  ego  is
terrified of, but what is inside? Fear is the inside, for that is what
makes everything else the outside.

    If the  ego  is mentally  constituted  by this  dualistic  way  of
thinking, the ego should be able to die without physical  death.  That
is precisely  the claim of Buddhism: the sense  of self can disappear,
but there remains something else that cannot die, because it was never
born.  Anatma is the "middle way" between  the extremes  of eternalism
(the self survives  death) and annihilationism  (the self is destroyed
at  death).   Buddhism  resolves  the  problem  of  life-and-death  by
deconstructing  it.  The evaporation of t is dualistic way of thinking
reveals  what is prior  to it, which  has many names, the most  common
being "the unborn."
    In the Pali  canon, the two most  famous  descriptions  of Nirvana
both refer to "the unborn," where "neither  this world  nor the other,
nor  coming,  going   or  standing,  neither   death  nor  birth,  nor
sense-objects  are  to be found."(10)  Similar  claims  are common  in
Mahayana. The most important term in Mahayana is sunyata, "emptiness,"
and the adjectives  most often used to explain  sunyata  are "unborn,"
"uncreated"  and "unproduced."  The laconic Heart Sutra explains  that
all things  are sunya  because  they are "not created, not annihilated,
not impure and not pure, not increasing and not decreasing."(11)
    The "Song of Enlightenment"  of Yung-chia, a disciple of the sixth
Ch'an

                             303

patriarch, says: "Since i abruptly realized  the unborn, I have had no
reason  for joy or sorrow  at any honor  or disgrace."'(12)  That "all
things are perfectly resolved in the Unborn" was the great realization
and the central teaching of the Japanese  Zen master Bankei : "When you
dwell in the Unborn  itself, you're dwelling  at the very well head  of
Buddhas  and  patriarchs."  The Unborn  is the  Buddha-mind, which  is
beyond living and dying.(13)

    For Buddhism, the dualism  between  life  and  death  is only  one
instance  he  more  general  problem  with  dualistic   thinking.   We
discriminate  between  such opposites  as life and death  in order  to
affirm  one and deny  the other, and, our tragedy  lies in the paradox
that the two opposed terms are interdependent.  In this case, there is
no life without  death  and -  what we are more likely  to overlook  -
there is no death without  life.  This means our problem  is not death
but  life-and-death.  If we can realize  that  there  is no delineated
ego-self that is alive now, the problem of life-and-dea  th is solved.
Since  our minds  have created  this dualism, they  should  be able to
un-create or deconstruct it.  This is not a devious intellectual trick
to solve the problem  logically, while leaving our anguish  as deep as
before.  The examples above refer to a different  way of experiencing,
not  some  conceptual  understanding.  It is no coincidence  that  the
Prajnaparamita sutras of Mahayana also repeatedly emphasize that there
are no sentient beings.

      The Buddha: "Subhuti, what do you think? You should not say that
      the  Tathagata  has  this  thought: 'I  should  liberate  living
      beings.'  Subhuti, you should not think so.  Why? Because  there
      are really  no living beings for the Tathagata  to liberate.  If
      there were, the Tathagata  would hold (the concept of) an ego, a
      personality, a being and a life.  Subhuti, (when)  the Tathagata
      speaks  of an ego, there is in reality  no ego, although  common
      people think so.  Subhuti, the Tathagata  says common people are
      not, but (expediently) called, common people.(14)


If there  is no one  who has  life, then  there  is no reason  to fear
death.  If the ego-self  is not a thing  but  a continual  process  of
consciousness  trying  to grab hold of itself  and objectify  itself -
which, since it can never do so, leads to self-paralysis -  unmediated
experience "of" the Unborn is the final shipwreck of that project. The
problem is resolved  at its source.  The ego-self that has been trying
to make itself  real by identifying  with one thing or another  in the
objective world collapses.  In term of life-versus-death, the ego-self
forecloses  on its greatest anxiety by letting go and dying now.  "Die
before  you die, so that  when  you come  to die you will  not have to
die," as the Sufis put it. Of course, if the ego is really a construct
-  composed  of automatized, mutually-reinforcing  ways  of  thinking,
feeling  and acting -  it cannot  really die, yet it can evaporate, in
the sense that those cease to recur. Insofar as

                             304


these   constitute   our  basic   defense   against   the  world   (in
psychoanalytic  terms) and our main hope of making ourselves  real (in
Buddhist  terms), this letting-go  is not going  to be easy.  It means
giving up my most cherished  ways of thinking about myself (notice the
reflexivity), which are what I think I am, to stand naked and exposed.
No wonder it is called the Great Death.
    This cannot save the body from aging and deteriorating;  then does
such ego-death  really  solve  our problem? Yes, because  the Buddhist
analysis of the "empty" ego-self implies that death is not our deepest
fear, and the desire to become immortal  is not our deepest  hope, for
even they are symptoms that represent  something else.  They symbolize
the desire  of the sense  of self to become  a real self, to transform
its anguished  lack of being into genuine  being.  Even the terror  of
death  represses  something, for  hat terror  is preferable  to facing
one's lack of being now: death-fear  at least allows us to project the
problem  into the future, so we avoid facing  what we are (or are not)
right now.
     One way to approach this is to consider whether immortality - the
actuality of an existence that never ended -  could really satisfy us.
As much as we may fear death, is ceaseless  life really  the solution?
Many have suspected that, like "the immortal"  in Borges' story of the
same title, our existence would eventually become a burden, unless we
discovered a meaning system to place it in, a cosmology wherein we had
both a home and a role.  As the interminable  succession  of centuries
undermined  all my futile  projects  to make  myself  real, what anguish
would accumulate! Mere immortality  would become unbearable as soon as
I no longer  craved  it.  As with other symbolic  (because  repressed)
games, victory  in the form  I seek it cannot  satisfy  me if I really
want something else.
     This implies  that our ultimate  hunger is ontological: it can be
satisfied  by nothing less than becoming real, which in the nondualist
terms of Mahayana means realizing  that my mind is actually one with -
nothing other than -  the whole universe;  and that is possible if the
core  of my own  egoconsciousness  is not  self-existing  but  hollow,
because  groundless: If  consciousness  is not  "inside," there  is no
outside.'"  Then  even  the desire  for  immortality  is reduced  to a
symptom, the usual  (but  distorted)  way at we become  aware  of this
repressed spiritual thirst. Death too becomes reduced to a symbol, not
only representing the feared failure of this reality project, but also
serving  as a catch-all  for all the ugly, negative, tragic aspects of
existence  that we cannot  cope with and so project  as the Shadow  of
Life.
    Why do we need to project ourselves indefinitely  into the future,
unless something  is felt to be lacking  now? Obviously, we are afraid
of losing  something  then that we have  now.  Many  have  found  this
unpersuasive, answering it with variations  on the theme that, if life
is not something  we have but something  we are, there  is nothing  to
fear because  we shall not be around  to notice (what) we are missing.
Epicurus stoically asserted that "the

                             305

most  horrible  of all  evils, death, is nothing  to us, for  when  we
exist, death  is not present;  but when death  is present, then we are
not." A more Buddhist formulation  is that, if nothing is lacking now,
immortality  loses  its  compulsion  as the way  to resolve  lack, and
whether  or not we survive physical  death becomes, if not irrelevant,
at least not the main point.

    Then   what   is   the   main   point?  According   to   "Buddhist
psychoanalytics," our most intimate  duality  is not life-versus-death
but being-versus-nonbeing;  and our most troublesome repression is not
life repressing  death but the sense of self repressing  its suspected
nothingness.  Instead of identifying  with being the Buddhist approach
is to conflate their duality by not rejecting nonbeing;  that can lead
to the discovery  of what is prior to the polarization  between  them.
"Being is not being;  non-being is not non being.  Miss this rule by a
hair  and you are  off by a thousand  miles"  (Yung-chia  again).  The
speculations  of theologians  and  metaphysicians  are only  the  most
abstract  form of this game, which  I suspect  is our most troublesome
game, because the bifurcation  between being and nonbeing  (or reality
versus  nothingness, existence  versus emptiness, etc.) is not obvious
and  natural  but mentally  constructed, a separation  that  has to be
maintained.  The  tension  between  them  is the  core  of existential
anguish, the source of our sense of lack.  Again we see why a sense of
lack  is the  shadow  of  the  sense  of self.  Like  the  matter  and
anti-matter   particles  of  quantum  physics,  they  arise  together,
opposing each other;  and they disappear  together by collapsing  back
into each other -  which leaves  not the nothingness  we so dread (for
that is one of the two terms) but... what?
    The  way to end that  bifurcation, like  any other  dualism, is to
yield  to the side that  we have avoided  in this  instance, to forget
oneself  and  let  go.  If  it is nothingness  we are  afraid  of, the
solution  is to become nothing.  Meditation  is learning to forget the
self by becoming  absorbed in one's meditation-object  (mantra, etc.).
If  the  sense  of self  is a result  of consciousness  attempting  to
reflect back upon itself to grasp itself, meditation is an exercise in
de-reflection.    Enlightenment   or   liberation   occurs   when   the
usually-automatic   reflexivity  of  consciousness  ceases,  which  is
experienced  as a letting-go  and falling  into  the void."  "Men  are
afraid  to forget their minds, fearing  to fall through  the Void with
nothing  to stay  their  fall.  They do not know that  the Void is not
really void, but the realm of the teal Dharma" (Huang-po).(16) What we
fear  as  nothingness  is not  really  nothingness, for  that  is  the
perspective  of a groundless  sense  of self  haunted  by the fear  of
losing  its grip  on itself.  Religious  faith  should  provide  not a
bulwark against such nothingness, but the courage  to let oneself fall
into it.  Letting go of myself and merging with that nothingness leads
to something  else, the common  origin  both of what  I experience  as
nothingness  and of what I experience  as myself.  When  consciousness
stops  trying  to catch  its own tail, I become  nothing, and discover
that  I  am  everything   -   or,  more  precisely,  that   I  can  be
anything."(17)

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THE MONEY COMPLEX

      If there is to be a psychoanalysis  of money, it must start from
      the  hypothesis   that  the  money  complex  has  the  essential
      structure  of  religion  -  or, if  you  will, the  negation  of
      religion, the demonic.  The psychoanalytic  theory of money must
      start  by  establishing   the  proposition  that  money  is,  in
      Shakespeare's words, the "visible God";  in Luther's words, "the
      God of this world."(18)


    Money is both a religion and the negation of religion, because the
money complex is motivated  by our religious  need to redeem ourselves
(fill our sense of lack).  In Buddhist terms, the demonic results from
the sense  of self  trying  to make  itself  real (that  is, objectify
itself) by grasping the spiritual in this world. This can be done only
unconsciously, that is, symbolically. Today, our most important symbol
is money.

    Schopenhauer  notes  that money is human  happiness  in abstracto;
consequently, one who is no longer  capable  of happiness  in concrete
sets one's whole heart on money.  It is questionable  whether there is
really  such a thing as happiness  in abstraction, but the second half
is  true:  to  the  extent  one  becomes  preoccupied   with  symbolic
happiness, one is not alive to concrete happiness.  The difficulty  is
not with money as a convenient medium of exchange, but with the "money
complex"  that arises  when money become the desired  thing -  that is,
desirable  in itself.  How does this happen? Given our sense  of lack,
how could this not happen?

    Money is the "purest" symbol, "because there is nothing in reality
that corresponds to it."(19) In itself it is worthless: you cannot eat
or drink it, plant  it, ride in it or sleep under it.  Yet it has more
value  than anything  else because  it is value, because  it is how we
define value, and therefore it can transform  into anything else.  The
psychological problem arises when life becomes motivated by the desire
for that pure value.  We all sense what is wrong  with this, but it is
helpful to make it explicit: to the extent  that life  becomes focused
around  the desire for money, an ironic  reversal  takes place between
means  and ends;  everything  is degraded  into  a mere means  to that
worthless  end, all else is devalued to maximize merely symbolic ends,
because our desires have been fetishized into that pure symbol. We end
up rejoicing  not at a worthwhile  job well done, or meeting a friend,
or hearing a bird-song  -  the genuine elements  of our life -  but at
accumulating  pieces of paper.  How such madness  could occur be comes
apparent when we relate it to the sense of self*s sense of lack, whose
festering keeps us from being able fully to enjoy that bird-song (just
this), etc. Since we no longer believe in am original sin, what can it
be that is wrong with us? Without some religious expiation, how can we
hope  to  recover?  Today  the  sociallyapproved  explanation  -   the
contemporary original sin -  is that we do not have enough money;  and
the solution is to get more, until we have enough

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and no longer feel any lack - which ends up being never.

    The transition  from barter  is hard to understand;  how can human
cravings  be fetishized  into pieces  of metal? The answer  is elegant
because  it reveals  not only  the origin  of money, but its character
even today. Money was and still is literally sacred: "It has long been
known that the first markets were sacred markets, the first banks were
temples, the first  to issue money were priests  or priest-kings."(20)
The first coins were minted and distributed  by temples  because  they
were medallions  inscribed  with the image of their  god and embodying
his protective  power.  Containing  such manna, they were naturally in
demand, not because  you could  buy things  with them  but vice-versa:
since they were popular, you could exchange them for other things.

    The consequence  of this was that "now the cosmic  powers could be
the property of everyman , without even the need to visit temples: you
could now traffic in immortality in the marketplace."  This eventually
led to the emergence  of a new kind of person, "who based the value of
his life - and so of his immortality -  on a new cosmology centered on
coins." A new meaning system arose, which our present economic  system
makes increasingly  the meaning-system.  "Money becomes  the distilled
value of all existence..a  single  immortality  symbol  a ready way of
relating  the increase  of oneself  to all the important  objects  and
events  of  one's  world."? (21)  If  we  replace  "immortality"  with
"becoming real." the point becomes Buddhist: beyond its usefulness  as
a medium of exchange, money has become modern humanity's  most popular
way of accumulating Being of coping with our gnawing intuition that we
do not really exist. Suspecting that the sense of self is a groundless
construction, we went to temples and churches  to ground ourselves  in
God; now we ground ourselves financially.
    The problem  is Chat  the true meaning  of this meaning-system  is
unconscious, which  means, as usual, that  we end  up  paying  a heavy
price for it.  The value we place  on money karmically  rebounds  back
against  us: the more  we value  it, the  more  we use  it to evaluate
ourselves.  In his great historical study of death in Western culture,
The Hour of our Death, Philippe  Aries considers  the modern  attitude
toward material things and turns our usual critique upside down. Today
we complain  about materialism, but the modern  person  is not  really
materialistic, because  "things  have become  means  of production, or
objects to be consumed or devoured":

      Can one describe a civilization  that has emptied things in this
      way  as materialistic? On the  contrary, it is the  late  Middle
      Ages,  up  to  the  beginning   of  modern   times,  that   were
      materialistic!...  [T]he ordinary  person  [now] in their  daily
      Life no more believes  in matter than they believe  in God.  The
      individual  in the Middle Ages believed in matter and in God, in
      life  and  in  death, in  the  enjoyment  of  things  and  their
      renunciation."(22)

                             308

Our  problem  today  is that  we no longer  believe  in things  but in
symbols, hence our life has passed  over into these symbols  and their
manipulation  and then we find ourselves manipulated by the symbols we
take so seriously.  We are preoccupied not so much with what money can
buy, but its power and status; not with a Mercedes-Bent in itself, but
what owning a Mercedes  says about us.  Modern  humanity  would not be
able to endure  real economic  equality, "because  he has no faith  in
self-transcendent, otherworldly immortality symbols;  visible physical
worth  is the only  thing  he has to give him eternal  life."  Or real
Being.  Our spiritual  hunger to become  real, or at least to occupy a
special  place in the cosmos, has been reduced  to having a bigger car
than  our neighbors! It seems  that  we cannot  get rid of the sacred,
because  we  cannot  get  rid  of  our  ultimate  concerns, except  by
repressing  them, whereupon we become "the more uncontrollably  driven
by them."(23)
    The most brilliant  chapter of Life Against Death, "Filthy Lucre,"
links money to guilt: "Whatever the ultimate explanation  of guilt may
be, we put forward  the hypothesis  that the whole  money  complex  is
rooted in the psychology  of guilt."  The psychological  advantage  of
archaic  society is that it "knew" what the problem  was and therefore
how  to  overcome  it.  Belief  in  sin  allowed  the  possibility  of
expiation,  in  seasonal  rituals  and  sacrifices.  This  provides  a
different perspective on the origin of gods: The gods exist to receive
gifts, that  is  to  say, sacrifices;  the  gods  exist  in  order  to
structure  the human  need  for self-sacrifice."(24)  For Christianity
that sacrifice is incarnated in Christ, who is believed to "take away"
our sins.  Religion  gives us the opportunity  to expiate our sense of
lack by means of symbols  -  for example, the crucifix, the eucharist,
the mass -  whose  validity  is socially  agreed  upon and maintained.
Hence, we feel purified and closer to God after taking Holy Communion.

    What of the modern  "neurotic  type," who "feels a sinner  without
the  religious  belief  in sin, for  which  he therefore  needs  a new
rational  explanation?"(25)  What do you do with  your sense  of lack,
when  there  is no religious  explanation  for  it, and  therefore  no
socially-agreed  way to expiate it? The main secular alternative today
is to experience  our lack as "not yet enough."  This converts  cyclic
time (maintained  by seasonal  rituals of atonement)  into linear time
(in which  the  atonement  of lack  is  reached  for  but  perpetually
postponed, because  never  achieved).  The  sense  of lack  remains  a
constant, but our collective  reaction  to it has become  the need for
growth: the "good life"  of consumerism  (but lack means  the consumer
never has enough) and the gospel of sustained economic growth (because
corporations  and the GNP are never big enough).  The heart (or rather
blood)  of both  is the  money  complex.  "A dollar  is...  a codified
psychosis   normal   in   one   sub-species   of   this   animal,   an
institutionalized dream that everyone is having at once."(26)

    The result of this is "an economy driven by a pure sense of guilt,


                              309

unmitigated  by any  sense  of redemption," "the  more  uncontrollably
driven by the sense of guilt because the problem of guilt is repressed
by denial into the unconscious."(27) Today our particular form of that
insanity  is the cult of economic  growth, which  has become  our main
religious myth.  "We no longer give our surplus to God; the process of
producing an ever-expanding  surplus is in itself our God.....To quote
Schumpeter : 'Capitalist  rationality  does  not do away  with sub- or
super-rational  impulses.  It merely  makes  them  get out  of hand by
removing the restraint of sacred or semi-sacred tradition.'"(28)
     Money (the blood)  and economic  growth  (the body) constitute a
defective  myth because  they can provide no expiation  of guilt - in
Buddhist  terms, no resolution  of lack.  Our new holy  or holies, the
true temple  of modern  humanity, is the stock market, and our rite of
worship is communing with the Dow Jones average. In return, we receive
the kiss of profits  and the promise  of more to come, but there is no
atonement  in this.  Of course, insofar as we have lost belief in sin,
we  no  longer  see  anything  to  atone  for, which  means we end  up
unconsciously  atoning  in the only way we know  how, working  hard to
acquire all those things that society tells us are important  and will
make  us happy.  Then we cannot  understand  why they  do not make  us
happy, why they do not resolve our sense of lack.  The reason can only
be that we do not yet have  enough.  "But  the fact  is that the human
animal  is  distinctively  characterized, as a species  and  from  the
start, by the drive to produce a surplus.... There is something in the
human psyche which commits  man to nonenjoyment, to work."  Where are
we  all  going  so eagerly? "Having  no real  aim, acquisitiveness, as
Aristotle  correctly  said, has no limit."  Not to anywhere  but  from
something, which  is why there  can  be no end  to it as long  as that
something  is our own lack shadow.  "Economies, archaic and civilized,
are ultimately  driven by that flight from death which turns life into
death-in-life."(29)  Or by that flight from emptiness  that makes life
empty: by  an  intuition  of nothingness  that, when repressed, only
deepens my sense that there is something very wrong with me.
    In Buddhist terms, then, money symbolizes becoming real, but since
we never quite  become  real we only make our sense of lack more real.
We end up in infinite  deferral, for those  chips  we have accumulated
can never be cashed in.  The moment we do so, the illusion  that money
can resolve  lack is dispelled;  we are left more empty and lad-ridden
than  before, being  deprived  of our fantasy  for escaping  lack.  We
unconsciously suspect and fear this; the only answer is to flee faster
into the future.  This points  the fundamental  defect of any economic
system that requires  continual  growth to survive: it is based not on
needs  but on fear, for it feeds  on and feeds  our sense of lack.  In
sum, our preoccupation  with manipulating  the purest symbol, which we
symptom  to be the means of solving  the problem of life, turns out to
be a symptom of the problem.
     If this  critique  of the  money  complex  is valid, what  is the
solution? It is

                             310

the same solution that Buddhism  has always offered: not any quick fix
that can be conditioned into us, but the personal transformation  that
occurs  when we make  the effort  to follow  the Buddhist  path, which
means learning how to let go of ourselves  and die.  Once we are dead,
once we have become  nothing  and realize  that we can be anything, we
see money for what it is: not a symbolic way to make ourselves real to
measure ourselves  by, but a socially-constituted  device that expands
our freedom  and power.  Then  e become  truly  free to determine  our
attitude  toward it, toward getting  it and using it.  If we are dead,
there is nothing  wrong with money: not money but love of money is the
root of evil. However, we also know that our essential nature does not
get better or worse; just as it does not come or go, so it has nothing
to gain  or to lose.  For those  who do not experience  themselves  as
separate from the world - as other than the world - the value of money
becomes  closely  tied to its ability  to help  alleviate  suffering.
Bodhisattvas are not attached to it, and therefore they are not afraid
of it; so they know what to do with it.


NOTES

   1.  Murray's Johnsonia.
   2.  Rollo May et al., ed., Existence (New York: Basic Books, 1958);
Irvin  D.  Yalom, Existential  Psychotherapy  (New York: Basic  Books,
1980); Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning
of History  (New York: Vintage, 1961);  Ernest  Becker, The Denial  of
Death  (New York: Free Press, 1973)  and Escape  from  Evil (New York:
Free Press, 1975).
   3. Becker, Denial of Death, pp. 11-18.
   4. Becker, Denial of Death, pp. 27, 66, 60, 29; Becker, Escape from
Evil, p. 163. Pascal's Pensees, no. 414.
   5. Becker, Denial of Death, pp. 54-55.
   6. Becker, Escape from Evil, p. 158.
   7.  Becker, Denial of Death, pp.  181-82 (quoting Roy D.  Waldman),
and p. 66 (my emphasis).
   8. Brown, p. 268.
   9.  Brown, p.  113.
  10.  Udana 6, 7:1-3 (my emphasis in the first selection).
  11. Heart Sutra; my translation.
  12.   All  Yung-chia  quotations   are  taken  from  an  unpublished
translation  by  Robert  Aitken, director  of the  Diamond  Sangha  in
Honolulu, Hawaii.
  13.  Norman  Waddell,  ed.  and  trans., The  Unborn: The  Life  and
Teachings  of Zen Master  Bankei  (San Francisco: North  Point  Press,
1984), pp.  47, 52, 55.  Many other Buddhist examples  of "the Unborn"
and "the Uncreated" could be cited.

                             311

  14.  Vajracchedika-Prajna-Paramita  Sutra  (Diamond  Sutra), Charles
Luk, trans.  (Hong  Kong: Hong Kong  Buddhist  Book, n.d.), 20;  Luk's
parentheses.
  15.   For  an  analysis  of  nonduality,  especially  subject-object
nonduality,  see  David  Loy,  Nonduality:  A  Study   in  Comparative
Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
  16.  The Zen Teaching  of Huang  Po, John  Blofeld, trans.  and  ed.
(London: The Buddhist Society, 1958), p. 41.
  17. For a more detailed exposition of the argument condensed in Part
I, see David  Loy, "The  Nonduality  of Life and Death," in Philosophy
East and West, Vol.  XL, no.  2 (April, 1990).
  18.  Brown, pp. 240-41.
  19. Brown, p. 271.
  20. Brown, p. 246.
  21. Becker, Escape from Evil, pp. 76, 79 (ref. Geza Roheim), 80-81.
  22.  Philippe  Aries, The Hour of Our Death (Harmondsworth, England:
Penguin, 1981), pp. 136-37.
  23.  Becker, Escape from Evil, p.  85 (ref.  Rank). Rilke: "Even for
our  grandparents  a 'house,' a 'well,' a familiar  tower, their  very
clothes, their coat: were infinitely  more, infinitely  more intimate;
almost everything  a vessel in which they found the human and added to
the store of the human.  Now, from America, empty  indifferent  things
are pouring across, sham things, dummy life...A house, in the American
sense, an American  apple or a grapevine  there, has nothing in common
with the house, the fruit, the grape  into which  went  the hopes  and
reflections  of  our  forefathers...  Live  things, things  lived  and
conscient of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are
perhaps the last still to have known such things. Letter to Witold von
Hulewicz, 1925, in J.  B.  Greene  and M.  D.  Herter  Norton, trans.,
Letters  of Rainer  Maria  Rilke, 1910-1926  (New York: Norton, 1947),
Vol.  II, pp.  374-75.
   24.  Brown, p.  265.
   25. Otto Rank, Beyond Psychology (New York: Dover, 1958), p. 194.
   26.  Weston  Labarre,  The  Human  Animal  (Chicago: University  of
Chicago Press, 1954), p. 173.
   27. Brown, p. 272.
   28. Brown, p. 261.
   29. Brown, pp. 256, 258, 285.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death.  New York: Free Press, 1973.  _.
Escape from Evil.  New York: Free Press, 1975.
Brown, Norman O.  Life Against  Death: The Psychoanalytic  Meaning  of
History. New York: Vintage, 1961.

                             312

Huang Po. The Zen Teaching of Huang Po. John Blofeld, trans. and ed.
   London: The Buddhist Society, 1958.
Loy, David.  Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy. New Haven,
Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1988.
   "The Nonduality  of Life and Death." Philosophy East and West, Vol.
XL, no. 2 (April 1990).
Luk,  Charles,  trans.  Vajracchedika-Prajna-Paramita  Sutra  (Diamond
Sutra).
   Hong Kong: Hong Kong Buddhist Book distributor, n.d.  May, Rollo et
al., eds. Existence. New York: Basic Books, 1958. Waddell, Norman, ed.
and trans.  The Unborn: The Life and Teachings  of Zen
   Master Bankei. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984. Yalom, Irvin
D. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, 1980.