Most Venerable Bhante Walpola Piyananda's 80th Birthday Celebrating - Collected Essays

14
How to Earn Wealth
When You’ve Lost Your Temper
When you’ve lost your temper,
You’ve lost your reason, too.
You’ll not be proud of anything
Which in anger you may do.
When in anger you have spoken
And been by emotion led,
You’ll have uttered something
That you’ll wish you’d never said.
In anger you will never do
A kindly deed, or wise.
But many things for which you’ll feel
You should apologize.
In looking back upon your life,
And all you’ve lost or made
You’ll never find a single time
When anger ever paid.
So cultivate calm patience,
And grow wiser as you age.
Never act, nor speak a word
When overcome by rage.
Remember without fail
That when your temper flies,
You’ll never do a worthy thing,
A decent deed, or wise.
Bohumil Ontl
(1906-1976)
Some scholars who have read very little of the Buddhist
literature have stated that Buddhism is a religion meant only for persons
who have renounced household life. Some others have tried to show it
as a kind of pessimistic religion. Some others, due to their prejudice or
poor knowledge of Buddhism, have tried from their bias to prove that
Buddhism is a kind of religion, hostile to world progress.
But unprejudiced and broadminded scholars have honestly and
openly praised it and declared its greatness and practicability for all
times. One of the great Pali scholars, the late Mrs. Rhys Davids, said
in the introduction to the English translation of the Sigalovadasuttanta
in the Digha Nikaya:
“This Suttanta is called the Vinaya of the Householder. In one
who practices what he has been taught in it, growth is to be looked
for, and not decay.’ And truly we may say even now of this Vinaya, or
code of discipline, so fundamental are the human interests involved, so
sane and wide is the wisdom that envisages them, that the utterances
are as fresh and practical and binding today and here as they were then
at Rajagaha. ‘Happy would have been the village or the clan on the
banks of the Ganges, where the people were full of the kindly spirit of
fellow-feeling and the noble spirit of justice which breathes through
these naïve and simple sayings.’ Not less happy would be the village,
or the family on the banks of the Thames today, of which this could be
said.” (p. 169 Dial. iii)
This world is like a school in which there are beings of varied
mental levels. A teacher uses toys and pictures and the like when he
teaches the children in kindergarten. The pupils of the middle forms
are taught lessons suitable to their standard. The students of the highest
forms are taught lessons dealing with higher subjects like higher
mathematics etc.
The Buddha viewed the world as a school of many levels and
gave instruction suitable to the mental level of his hearers. Following
along this path, economists are investigating the application of the
Buddha’s principle of Right Livelihood to improve the well-being of
the modern world. Scholars such as Ernst Schumacher, who spent a
considerable amount of time in Myanmar wrote Small Is Beautiful:
Economics as if People Mattered looked at the ways in which
communities developed using indigenous Buddhist practices. Dr. Clair
Brown, a practicing Buddhist wrote Buddhist Economics which gives
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