A student asked: the late master once taught that people who value money are hard to be around, but some versions of the teaching say it's people who value work — and nowadays, people who focus on work seem to succeed more than those who focus on people. Why is that?

People who value money or work are hard to be around; people who value others are easy

He explained that this comes from a teaching in the book "60 Reflections Recorded from Father's Heart": "A person who values money is hard to be with. A person who values work is hard to be with. A person who values others is easy to be with. The courageous one is the one who can govern themselves. If you plant a tree, you must nourish the roots; if you cultivate the heart, you must nourish it with virtue and Dhamma."

Someone who values money above all is hard to be with because everything can be bought — even wrong can be made to look right. Whoever has money gets their favor; whoever doesn't, gets ignored. Money comes first, and loyalty shifts constantly with self-interest. Someone who values work above all is likewise hard to be with, because work comes first — friendship and compromise don't matter.

He shared from his early years ordained at the temple, during the era when the great cetiya, the founder's hall, and the international hall were under construction — work was constant, and friction was common. Those who put work first often clashed with everyone around them and eventually couldn't stay, disrobing in the end — especially team leaders, who tended to compromise the least. In a later era, once construction slowed, money took work's place as the priority — those chasing paid invitations and accumulating wealth found it just as hard to sustain relationships, and eventually disrobed too, because their associations were purely transactional, their minds coarse, attached to material things, with Dhamma no longer first.

By contrast, someone who values others is easy to be with, because they know how to compromise and feel for one another — after all, everyone had given up home and possessions to ordain, so they cared for and helped each other, and life together felt warm. That's how some stayed together for ten, twenty, thirty years — because they valued others, not themselves. The other two types — valuing money, valuing work — are both forms of self-interest, which is why they're so hard to be with.

True courage is self-mastery, built on wisdom before effort

The courageous person is one who can govern themselves — even something as simple as waking up early requires self-discipline. The word for "courageous" comes from vīra, meaning effort or diligence. But effort capable of real self-mastery must be paired with wisdom first. Effort without wisdom is dangerous — even Hitler is said to have distrusted the diligent-but-foolish, seeing them as a danger to the nation. Take cleaning a house: instead of cleaning the ceiling first and then the floor, cleaning the floor first means the falling dust dirties it again once the ceiling is cleaned — the whole job has to be repeated two or three times. That's what it looks like to act without wisdom leading the way.

Without wisdom, effort and courage rarely take hold, and self-mastery fails — leaving life under the control of the unwholesome or the neutral instead. Life then drifts without direction, hard to develop, unsuccessful in study or work, lacking a sound foundation. Everything moves forward through the process of the wholesome; without that process, life simply slows down, and success becomes hard to reach because self-mastery is missing. Courage cannot arise either, because a lack of knowledge and understanding breeds fear — and it's greed and fear, these two, that undermine wisdom and courage alike.

Nourish a tree at the roots; nourish the heart with virtue and practice

He returned to the analogy: to plant a tree, nourish the roots; to cultivate the heart, nourish it with virtue and Dhamma. Virtue means restraint — refrain, and beauty follows. Refraining from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and intoxicants — the five precepts — guards against the unwholesome. The eight precepts, adding three more restraints, guard against both the unwholesome and the neutral. Dhamma, meanwhile, must be actively practiced and lived out for beauty to arise. So cultivating the heart requires both virtue and practice together — just as nourishing a tree means tending its roots.

The law of kamma and the law of the three characteristics together shape our life

He added two further principles for living: the law of kamma and the law of the three characteristics. The law of kamma gives results that cannot be changed — they must simply be endured. The circumstances we're born into — parents, siblings, education, occupation, the wider economic and social environment — are all the fixed results of merit and demerit we've created; they can't be avoided. But what can improve afterward depends on the law of the three characteristics — which nature we choose to abide with. Abiding in the unwholesome makes existing suffering worse and existing happiness shrink. Abiding in the wholesome, even when the law of kamma gives a painful result, lessens that suffering — from heavy to light, from light to gone — and where the law of kamma already gives a good, flourishing result, the wholesome helps it flourish further still, though only by around 10 to 20 percent. So while we live under the law of kamma, a better, changed life depends on learning to abide in the wholesome Dhamma, keeping distance from the unwholesome through virtue — and life then grows lighter in suffering and richer in happiness.