Frugality

I firmly believe that learning to live a frugal life is part of living a spiritual life.  Several years ago (more than I care to remember) I lived without electricity and running water having to obtain my water from a well that was dug in 1887.  My nearest neighbor was five miles away—the nearest town about seven.

I remember one summer morning, which was turning out to be a very hot day, I decided to walk to town to get a few things.  I didn’t take any water with me.  While I was walking I thought of how the Buddha walked many miles daily.  I am sure he took his time chatting with everyone he met along the way.

Finally, when I got to this little town which is actually a small village, I walked into the general store and went to the back part of it.  I saw the local gaffers sitting around the old round table that was there when my dad trained as a boxer during the early 1920s.  With them was the guy who delivers the beer.  Everyone had a free beer and was having a good time.  The guy who delivered the beer asked me if I wanted a beer.  I said I did.  

When I drank that beer, I swore right then and there that this beer was the best damn beer that I had ever had.  Of course, I was hot and thirsty at the time which had a lot to do with my appreciation of beer which was like heavenly ambrosia to me!  My frugal life helped me to achieve this wonderful moment of which I was grateful!

After that, it was branded on my brain what I had always known but never realized, namely, frugality’s importance for the practice of Buddhism.  We must learn to live a frugal life shunning as much as we can the lavish life.  Such a life opens us up to not only beauty, but its greater reward is that frugality helps minimize distractions which only serve to lead us away from the Buddha’s path. 

A goodly portion of the evils in our world are hatched—not from those who lead frugal lives tied to the appreciation of beauty and spiritual wisdom—but are tied, instead, to living a lavish life always wanting more—a bigger home; a bigger car, etc.  These people are never satisfied with less, but always require more because unbeknownst to them their ravenous consumption occludes their spiritual eye which is connected with, also, the appreciation of the beauteous (in my case that beer).  As a rule, the more this eye becomes occluded the more they thirst and the more empty they feel.  Gradually, those who are addicted to living like this become spiritually blind.  The Buddha refers to them as the icchantika who forefeet their Buddha-nature through excessive want; who are like living corpses.

This leads me to say that the spiritual eye and the eye for the beauteous are one and the same eye because in the dawning moment of beauty is also the pure Mind from which the beautiful moment springs which could be a sunset or the sound of wind through the pine trees.  The artist is attuned to the beauteous moment—the sage to the creative light of mind from which beauty is born like the foam on the sea from which Venus arises in Botticelli’s famous painting.

To keep our spiritual eye 20/20 we need to consider the benefits of living in what can only be described as aesthetic frugality from which beauty and spirituality are possible.  I did this for over fifteen years and without a doubt it served to sharpen my spiritual vision and my sense of beauty. 

Comments

[Lebensgeist]

beautiful article but as Schopenhauer stated we all are slaves of the will, we all want and want all the time having no rest from the will that drives us. Or as the Buddha said, the world is slave to the thirst (tanha) Only in asceticism we find relief, that`s why the buddha lived the live of an ascetic as did his disciples.

[TGL]

It seems a troll has managed to find its way to this excellent blog page. Struggling with its daily bad karma one can in a way say that good karma (merit) brought it here. Hopefully it will make use of its large ears more then its mouth and find a way to develop good virtue.

TGL

[aryaputta]

I guess youre Egyptian? When you die theyre going to bury your hoaded $$ with you for your pleasure in the afterlife? Youd make King Tutankhamun proud. Your article doesnt differ from the pride of a money hoarding Jew in love with buying a snitzel for %75 off. Sad

[Bodhiratna]

Reading the article one can not help but get a glimpse into the irrationality of excessive consumption which is no more then the by product of not knowing the true source of fulfillment (the Light of True Mind).

Many of these Icchantikas often disguised as Buddhists, but by their own excessive and compulsive habit to consume, they are bored in their mind and often are looking for new mundane sources of excitement such as using drug like Oxycotin and collecting 50 caliber BMG sniper rifles!

Sure, these things are the typical American Icchatikas nirvana, lol....like pigs which never know when to stop eating until some one has them for dinner.:P

Bodhiratna