Законы кармы для успешного бизнеса (1998, Брисбен), занятие 1

[Говорящий 1]
It would be like in the United States if the Russians came and took over the country and everybody ran away to Mexico or Canada and tried to rebuild Harvard University or something like that. It was very, very difficult. And they did it.

There were 108 monks who survived from our monastery out of 10,000. And they reached South India. And then we started from scratch.

And so we thought it would be useful to maybe start some kind of business in the United States that would help them. So I went to Manhattan, worked very hard. We found that maybe diamonds would be a good business.

So we started a small business, $50,000 we borrowed. There were three people, started it. And then now the growth sales per year are $125 million per year.

And the profit is about, we're not supposed to say, but my boss makes about $20 million a year or something like that out of it. And he's doing well. I'm not a partner, I'm just the employee.

But he lets me run one division of the company. That division has about maybe 300 employees now. And what we did from the beginning was, we agreed that we wouldn't tell anybody I was a Buddhist.

And if he would let me run the department along Buddhist lines, it would be all right as long as I made him a good profit. So I had complete carte blanche. He said, I don't care what you are, Zoroastrian or Buddhist or Hindu, I don't care.

But I'll give you a certain amount of money every year, and you give me back 25-30%, I don't care who you are. And that was the agreement we had. So I could hire my own people, run it my way.

And it even ran along separate principles from the rest of the company. So we have five or six divisions. And our division, I was allowed to run it along Buddhist principles.

And it was very, very successful. As I said, it's over 100 million dollars a year gross sales. And I thought tonight I would go through some of the principles that we used to build it up, and the kind of Buddhist principles we used in the business.

So the talk is like Buddhist ethics. But really, I didn't tell anybody it was Buddhist. Nobody knew it was Buddhist.

We just did it along Buddhist lines and along certain standards of behavior. And I thought that, you know, especially if you have a business, it would be interesting for you to know how we did it. You know, like that.

Forbes magazine ran an article about it last month, in July. So there's something there if you'd like to see it at the end of July. I don't know if you have that paper.

You do, yeah? I'm going to have you fill it in. And that's a trick to keep you awake, okay, while I'm talking.

Alright? So, I'm going to ask you to say the words with me. The Tibetans say there's some power to saying this word.

Just saying the word of the principle has some effect on your mind. So, this outline is 2,500 years old, 25 centuries ago. This was designed in ancient India by somebody named Gautama Buddha, okay?

And then the Tibetans swiped it from the Indians about 1,000 years ago. It entered Tibet. So we're going to go through this list.

You can write in the English and the business examples. And then I hope you don't just... I hope you go and try it in your business, okay?

Business can be home, you know, running a household. I used to, when I was hiring, look for women who had had two or more children. Because they were normally used to managing a group.

And they were really good at it. And they usually needed the money too, so they were very good at it. And I think these principles apply whether you're managing a home or whether you're managing a corporation.

I think the principles are the same. So it doesn't really matter which one you talk about. So I'll go to the first one now.

Please say... You're going to have to repeat, okay? And this way I keep you awake also.

Say sok. Sok. Chöpa.

Chöpa. Sok. Chöpa.

Chöpa. In English this would be in corporate terms, okay? I'm going to talk corporate.

Respecting the well-being of your employees, okay? Watching out for the physical well-being of your employees, okay? That would be a translation.

These are actually the opposite. Like sok chöpa means to hurt someone's physical body. And then the corresponding action is to do the opposite.

So sok chöpa, the opposite would be to watch out for your employees' physical well-being, okay? That's the first principle that we would use in our corporation, okay? So, very most basic principle in our division for the last 15 years.

And the one I think which created the success of that company is to watch out for the physical well-being of the employees, okay? The example in real business would be... There's a phenomenon, I don't know about Australia, I suppose it's the same, but in New York City there's sort of a phenomenon called burnout among the managers.

That's where you get a manager who's good, and they're so good that they refuse to go home until the work is done. So they would rather, you know, not sleep than go home. And we had people stay till 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock.

The first two or three years that we ran the company, very rarely did we go home before 11 at night or something like that. I mean, that was the way it was. I remember going to the boss and saying, I'm leaving at 9 p.m. This is after 12 hours of work, you know, and he'd say, he got mad at me, and he said, I don't see how you can do that, you know. Later on we saw that the best people would burn out first. You see, the ones who really want to help the company, the ones who feel responsible, would burn out first. And then we learned that we had to watch for certain danger signs in the employees.

So danger signs would be, this person's starting to get irritable, this person's starting to fight with other people, this person's starting to get defensive about their work, they don't want anyone else to help them. We call it baby manager syndrome. They want to do everything themselves, and they become perfectionists.

And then, sooner or later, you start to see all these signs in the person, they're getting nervous, they're getting close to burnout. And we got used to being able to tell when a person was reaching burnout. Now, two things can happen.

And this is one of the morals of business ethics, is that in the short run, it's very good to have a manager who wants to stay till midnight. You know, you feel great, because you trust that they're going to get the work done. So it seems to be a short-term benefit.

If you can find somebody who's willing to stay all night at work, like a crazy person, and ignore their family, and ignore their other responsibilities, and they're just working like a maniac, then it's a temptation to think that this is a good thing, if you can find a few people like that. That's a short-term view. In the long term, they always quit.

I mean, you always end up burning them out. And towards the last few months of their careers, they're doing very bad work. And usually they are affecting the other employees also.

So this gets to be a point where, in the short term, most of these business ethic things are based on, as you'll see, there's a short-term apparent benefit from keeping this person and letting them work themselves to death. Short term, it seems like you're getting a lot of value out of them. And then in the long term, you lose them completely.

They quit, and then you've got somebody coming up who's usually not at all very capable. So the day after they quit, the department starts to fall apart because they got possessive about their position, and the next person in line doesn't know anything. And this is very common in corporate life.

So we've noticed that, over a period of time, the intelligent thing to do, the ethical thing to do, according to the first rule of this ancient system, is to watch them very carefully and take care of their health even when they don't want to. You see what I mean? To force them to go home, force them to take a vacation, force them to take a rest.

And then they keep producing for years and years. I mean, some of the employees we have have been there 15 years, since the beginning. And we're just very careful to watch them, very careful to make sure they go home and see their families, proactively watch out for their health, and very importantly, even when the employee doesn't want to watch out for their health, that you're watching out for their health.

So this is the idea in Tibetan tradition that you take better care of a person than they take care of themselves. And this is a Tibetan principle, that you are watching out, and you're observing them, and they don't want to go home, and you make them go home. They're not watching their children or their family or their wives, and you say, no, you have to go home now, and you have to take care of your family.

And then, even we found that the best employees are ones that have an outside life. They're much more creative if they're interested in ballet or photography or cooking or some kind of dancing or something like that. And we actually watch for opportunities to make sure that they go out and do some other thing.

We found that the worst employees are the ones that go home and watch TV. And we actually would ask people, I mean, we would track their performance against what they were doing on the outside. And, you see, if you don't get outside, if you don't get rest, if you're not leaving work at a good hour, you don't bring any fresh ideas into the company.

You see what I mean? And then, the longer they stay, the worse things get. So, it's to your advantage to make them go home and watch out for their mental health.

And that's the first principle of this ten-point program. Result would be, this is very interesting, okay? And we talked about this, we had a business seminar the other day.

And what I'm about to say is, I think, the key of this approach. In this system, which is 25 centuries old, they have found out that how you relate to people greatly affects the immediate future. Okay?

And I'll explain myself. If you have a certain attitude towards your employees, if you undertake certain actions towards your employees, if you do certain ethical things with your business work, each time you do something ethical, there's a change in your own mind, okay? And this is a little bit subtle, okay?

Every time you, for example, in this case, if you had an employee who was working too hard, working too late, and you actually went to them and said, you must go home now, I want you to see your family, I want you to take a rest. When you say those words to this person, and the moment they understand these words, something changes in your own mind, okay? Something happens within your own mind.

The Tibetans see the mind as a stream that goes from the day you are born to the day you die, that there's this stream of consciousness going through the world called your mind. And you can think of it as a stream of clear water or something, but they don't think of the mind as something in your mind, in your head, or something like that. They see the human mind as a stream going from the day you're born to the day you die, so a steady stream of clear water.

And then each time you do something kind or ethical to another person, a certain thing is thrown into the water, you know, they call it a bakchak. Say bakchak? Bakchak?

Bakchak means a subtle, invisible seed is put in your mind the minute you say something kind to someone or the minute you do something kind to someone. And bakchaks are very interesting. You see, whatever bakchaks you throw in the water upstream, then downstream they have a certain effect on the mind.

For example, if you were careful about your employees' health, if your board... We used to have board meetings, I remember. The board meetings were on the 6th floor.

And it was sort of symbolic because we own a building now, in Manhattan, big building. And then the 5th floor was the middle level management, the 4th floor was the lower level management, the 3rd floor was the upper factory supervisors, and the 2nd floor was the middle factory supervisors, and the 1st floor was the com employees, and then the basement was the people doing the gold and the furnaces. And it was like this realm, you know, down there, way down there in the bottom, you know.

So we would sit up in the 6th floor and have this beautiful, long director's board meeting table, and we would sit around and decide, you know, how much health benefits can we afford this year? Do we want to give them glasses or not? I mean, there were big debates around the board meeting table.

I remember one debate. I said, why don't we give the employees free eye examinations? Because looking at diamonds all day long, do you imagine how many, in a professional diamond house, they give you these little tweezers.

Then they dump 50,000 diamonds in front of you. And they say, by the end of the day, I want the good ones over there and the bad ones over there. So you have to pick them up.

You pick them up like this, you know. You're going like this all day long, like 8 hours. You're going like that.

So I said, maybe we could give them eye examinations, you know. And then somebody else says, no, actually, we don't have to. We just cost the company extra money, you know.

So I said, why do you think that? And he says, I said, don't you think their eyes are getting hurt by this process, 8 hours a day doing this thing? And he says, of course they're getting hurt.

That's what they're paid for. We're buying their eyes from them. I actually said that, you know.

According to Tibetan understanding of the mind, as a stream, the minute you say something like that, something negative is thrown into the stream. Something negative happens to you. And then maybe 6 months later or 1 year later, that flowers in your own mind, in your own consciousness.

And it affects the way you see your world. Okay? It's very interesting.

They say the entire world, the entire reality around you, is a result of things you said and things you thought 6 months ago, 1 year ago, 2 years ago. These are bhaktyaks, or mental seeds, are actually flowering in your own mind, and they change how you see things. Okay?

And that's why you have different experiences in your life. You know, that's why some things you see are good, some things you see are bad. They say it's mostly coming from your own mind.

It's a condition of your own mind. So you know, in a short term, when you get angry, or when you have an upset stomach, or when your back hurts, everything looks bad. You know, everything seems negative the whole day.

I'm not talking about that. Okay? Not talking about that.

I'm talking about when you sit at a boardroom meeting table and make a statement like, we bought their eyes. They owe us their eyes. We don't have to spend money on their eyes.

It puts a certain seed in your own mind, when you say that. When you hear yourself say it, it puts a certain seed in your own mind. 6 months later, you have a health problem.

Okay? It's very interesting. And that's what Tibetans say.

That's what the Buddhist understanding of it is. Now you can believe it or not believe it. Okay?

We have to talk about it more. But suppose it's true. Okay?

I'm not trying to prove it tonight, actually. Actually, all I'm going to do tonight is give you the list. Excuse me?

Yeah, it seems a little logical. Okay? I mean, it seems right.

It seems like justice. Whether it's fully just or not, we have to talk about it. But logically, an invisible seed is planted in your mind when you say something like that.

And especially when you think something like that. If it could come into your mind, who cares about their eyes? That's why we're paying them.

You know? We're buying their eyes from them. Every hour they get, they get money.

And their eyes get a little worse. They're selling us their eyes. That's the whole point.

I mean, actually to think like that, puts an invisible seed in your mind, 6 months later, 1 year later, you personally have a health problem. Okay? What's interesting is that, in the Tibetan system, these things can happen collectively also.

That's very interesting. So like, if the whole board around that table, we used to have tremendous arguments, 6 vice presidents, arguing about, you know, whether or not we're going to give these people eyeglasses, examinations, you know? And, if at the end of that process, you all gladly agree that these people don't deserve to have their eyes checked, that they're selling us their eyes, according to the Tibetan belief, collectively, the people in that room, their health would not be very good a year later.

They would start to be having health problems. Okay? Very interesting.

Very delicate. So what's interesting is that, if you can get a group of management that can understand these principles, and you get them concentrating on the welfare, physical welfare of the employees, the management group itself becomes stronger, physically, healthy, more healthy, less heart attacks, less ulcers. I mean, the whole group becomes very powerful.

And physically, they have a lot of energy, they feel stronger. If you keep this up, over a number of years, your body actually begins to change. You know?

You feel lighter, you're much healthier. I mean, people who do this regularly don't get sick. Just don't get sick.

Okay? And that's why. They don't have these impressions put into their mind by negativities.

And in a business sense, you see, now I'm talking about it in a business sense, the whole management group gets very strong, very healthy, they're coming to work every day, and because they're actually physically there, I mean, we found out in our company, the most important quality of a manager wasn't their intelligence, it wasn't their creativity, it wasn't their decisiveness, it was whether or not they came to work that day.

You see, it's very funny. We found out it doesn't matter how smart they are, or what kind of decisions they can make, or anything else, if they didn't come to work. So if you have a group of people, I mean, we ended up with a group of people that, I would say like in five years they missed a day, or two days, or something like that.

Okay? It's very interesting. And it comes from being concerned about the health of your employees.

Okay? And this is something that you won't hear in a business school. And you have to try to check it out, you have to see if it works.

It's very, very interesting if it is true. And frankly, we took $50,000 and made it into hundreds of millions of dollars. So, that's an indication.

I mean, you don't... Forbes wrote a three-page article a couple of years ago because they couldn't believe what we were doing, you know? And, I mean, they couldn't believe the result that the guy had made on his money.

His money, his capital, you know, return on investment, ROI, went from $50,000 to, I don't know, now he's worth about $100 million. And they did an article about it because they were just so amazed by how could it happen, you see? And these are really the principles on which it was built.

It's very, very surprising that that's the way you could do it. But then people don't try it very often. In this idea, if this is true, then there's also another implication.

If every company did the same, then all the companies would prosper. The idea that some companies have to prosper at the expense of other companies is not true. You see, according to this idea, the wealth is actually created by the people working in the company.

And if every company were following the same principles, then the market would just keep getting bigger and bigger and every company would be doing well. In Buddhism, we say that the concept that one company has to do well at the expense of another company is a fallacy. And that it could be very easy for all the companies to do well together and the market could keep growing and the value of the market keep growing.

And we experience that also. Second principle. So first principle is take care of the health of your employees and then you will see your own management team stronger and working better.

And it's not something that you ever heard in business school, but you can check it out, you can try it. Second one is ma jin len. Say ma jin len.

Ma jin len. Ma jin len in business terms would be respecting your financial commitments. In the diamond business, it's a very interesting business.

We buy diamonds. We buy 30, 40 million dollars of diamonds a year. We use in one day 30,000 diamonds.

The deal is this. You buy them from a dealer. The dealers are Indians from Bombay, Ashkenazis from Israel, Chinese from China, Koreans from Korea, all kinds of different...

There's even these weird guys from Argyle, mines someplace in Australia. And Russians have large deposits, the Canadians are finding large deposits. And so we have to deal with people from all over the world.

In the diamond business, you don't get paid for your diamonds for typically 18... I'm sorry, 6 months. The terms are 180 days in our business right now.

Which means diamonds are so expensive and it requires so much money to buy them that you don't have to pay for them until you sold them already. You see what I mean? Because you could never pay for them up front.

Nobody has that much money. And so, we make a deal. When a guy comes to us to sell diamonds, he knows he's not going to get paid for 6 months.

And all the business is done on a handshake. The entire diamond business, at the wholesale level, 2 billion, 3 billion dollars a year. 2 billion official, 1 billion unofficial, I'm afraid.

That whole business is done on word, by word of mouth, by your trust. There's nothing in writing. You call the guy in India.

There have been people I've dealt with for 10 years and never seen them, you know. And you call them in India, you say, I received your package. They say, Brinks delivered your package in the armored car today.

And say, okay. And say, I want to offer you 300,000 dollars for this package of diamonds. And they say, okay, mazal.

Mazal means in Yiddish, it's a Yiddish word. I'm Irish, okay. I'm like the only Irishman in the diamond business.

But just say, mazal ubraha means deal. Mazal means use it in good health or something like that. Once you say the word mazal, once this word escapes your mouth, even if you said it almost by accident, you must keep the deal.

You must honor the deal. There's nothing in writing. There's no thing written down.

He just remembers it, you just remember it. There's no lawyers. There's no lawsuits.

I mean, in the people in the diamond, the highest part of the diamond business, you join the diamond club, you sign a piece of paper that says, I will not use a lawyer. I will not go to court. We will decide it among ourselves, as gentlemen.

And that's the way it goes. I mean, rarely, once in a while, you have a weird case, somebody does something. If someone does not meet their financial commitments, their name is put on a list, faxed around the world within an hour, they can't do the diamond business ever again.

Nobody will deal with them. It's a very interesting code within the diamond dealers, you know, at the higher levels. And so, ma jin len means the principle of respecting your financial commitments.

The example, for real business example, okay, if you're in business, you understand, is paying your suppliers on time. Okay? We supply diamonds, diamond jewelry to companies like Bloomingdale's, Macy's, JCPenney's, Montgomery Ward's, people like that.

They don't respect this rule, okay? Sometimes we don't get paid. You hire a guy just to call them every few hours, you know, and say, where's the check?

Where's the check? And they say, oh, the computer broke today, call us tomorrow, you know, and you call tomorrow, and they say, oh, tomorrow's Saturday, why worry about it, we'll send it on Monday, you know, and then, even on Monday, even if you get the check, they make sure they don't cut it until after two o'clock, because that's when the banks close. Between two and five o'clock, you get all your checks.

Suddenly they come, that were sent like two weeks ago. Oh, those New York mails, you know, you don't know. And they squeeze the last bit of interest out of it, you know.

This is not what we do inside the diamond business. I mean, the point is to, if you follow this second principle, you pay exactly on time. You pay exactly on the right date.

And in fact, sometimes if something happened that we were late, we would pay the guy extra interest. You know, we would go the extra step and pay them interest. If the guy made a mistake, if he remembered the deal wrong, and shorted himself a few thousand dollars, we had a very strict rule that we would actually call him and say, we're sending you two thousand dollars extra, you made a mistake on your invoice, you know.

And if you keep this up over a long period of time, the result, this is a very interesting result. And these, by the way, we call the correlations. In Tibetan, they're called the correlations, meaning it's obvious that if you're concerned about your employee's health, that your health might get better.

But some of these correlations are not so clear. I mean, they're not what you would expect. These have been written down over two thousand years of experience, okay.

The result, if you pay your suppliers in a timely fashion, is that you will be able to attract more customers, okay. Like, customers will find your products interesting. And, and they will crowd, you know, sometimes you see people, you put out a stupid product, you know, something with no creativity, no imagination, this ring has been made the same for the last thirty years, and people go wild over it, okay.

And then sometimes you make an exciting new product. My boss used to come to me and say, do you like this new piece of jewelry? And if I said yes, he would cancel it, you know.

He'd say, you're not a normal person. Normal people like this boring, same old thing every year, in jewelry, it's very interesting. You make an exquisite piece, maybe three people will buy it.

We need ten thousand people to buy it, you see. So, what is it that makes ... I have a friend, a landlord of our first Dharma center in New York.

Thelma knows him. He worked for the World Bank. Then he had a child, and the child had a ...

what was that thing? Autistic. He had an autistic child.

So, he and his wife who worked for the World Bank, they quit. And they opened up a clothing business. And this is where they are actually sewing the clothing themselves, so that they can be near the child.

And he doesn't know anything about working a sewing machine. So, he takes all these pieces of material, he gets them in the sewing machine, and he tries to stitch them together. And the resulting jacket is all crooked, and the stitches are way off, and everything is off.

He takes it to Bergdorf Goodman. He shows it to the buyer. She says, oh, how chic.

This is so interesting. Everything is off. Everything is so unique, you know.

And she orders like 50 of them. And ... What is it that makes that happen, you see?

What is it that makes a person see something which is all crooked as being an exciting new product, you see? According to this principle, very interesting, it's an effect of your being honest and very strict with your financial commitments to your customers, okay? And you wouldn't see any connection, you see?

And these have been developed by Tibetans over many, many hundreds of years, okay? Wanting to get some interesting products that customers are attracted to for no good reason, okay? And that happens all the time, you know, especially the toy market and things like that.

And they come out with some stupid thing and all the kids go crazy and then everybody needs one and it sells hundreds of millions of dollars. Why? According to this idea, it comes from being strict with your financial commitments, okay?

To other people, okay? How that works, we'll talk about it, okay? Okay, third one.

Say, Logyam? Logyam? Logyam means ...

This is a very ancient Tibetan idea. Freeing the workplace from any sexual kind of harassment, sexual kind of insinuations going on, any kind of improper behavior towards your employees based on their sex, okay? And this is an ancient principle, okay?

A real business example of that would be to give the women in your office equal opportunity regardless of how they look, regardless of how they talk to you, just based on their merit, just based on how good they are at what they do, and with no relation to how they look or how nice they talk to you or whether they blink at you or not, okay? To free your office of all of these connotations or all of these kind of subliminal things where pretty ladies get treated better or women get treated worse in general because they're women or something like that. To truly look at them blindly and say anybody who can produce can go up here, okay?

And we tried very hard in our office in every way to remove discrimination. We had 18 different countries' people in our office. At any given time in our office we had people from 18 different countries.

And it was totally blind. Whoever could do the work better made the most money. And one time this one lady was angry at us.

She's black. And she sued us for discrimination which was untrue. It was just she was angry.

And the judge came and checked our place and he said, if there's any discrimination going on here, there's no white people in this place. He said, he was joking. He said, you know, I throw out your case, you know.

These guys are totally blind, you know. Anybody, if you look at the people who are doing well here financially, it's all kinds of people from everywhere, you know. We had the top diamond buyer.

He now makes 80,000 US a year. We found him in a farm in Gujarat State tending oxen. Tested him, checked him, found him to be talented, gave him a suit, brought him to New York.

And he trained like that. So, if you really look at the talent of a person and not their sex, and among their sex, not how pretty they are, even with men also, there's a tendency to to promote the ones who look the best even though they don't know how to work at all and they don't produce value. So, judging people only on the basis of what kind of value they can give to your organization.

The result of this, okay, what happens if you do that? If you really create an atmosphere where regardless of what the person looks like and regardless of their sex, that they know they can get ahead in that company. And we really did have people making a lot of money there from all walks of life.

The result of it is that physically the environment of your office becomes very, very beautiful, very attractive, very, very warm. The minute somebody walks into that office, physically, it seems very attractive to them. And, and get this, okay, I'm just, by the way, I'm not trying to prove it yet, I'm just saying this is what they say.

The neighborhood in which your office exists also becomes more attractive. They start cleaning up the neighborhood, you know. I told my students this, we have a Dharma Center in New York.

We started out in Hell's Kitchen. Hell's Kitchen, you can imagine from the name what kind of neighborhood it is, okay. Because we couldn't afford much rent.

I told the students, just be patient. Do, you know, keep following this principle. Let our organization be like that.

And the first sign of our success was across the street they opened up a pizza parlor. I really like pizza. And suddenly they cleaned up the block and suddenly the police, I don't know if you know the history of New York for the last three years, but it got so safe now that they don't know what to do with the police.

And they're suggesting that they should maybe sweep the streets or take children to school or something like that. I mean, if you lived in New York ten years ago you would think this was impossible. According to this concept, according to this principle, the fact that that's taking place in your neighborhood or the fact that your office is physically very conducive is due to the effect in your own mind of being open-minded to people of all sex and all color in your office, okay?

So, I mean, this sounds impossible. This sounds ridiculous. I mean, we don't see cause and effect here.

I mean, a normal Westerner would say, I don't see why having that attitude in my office should make the neighborhood get better. I don't see any connection like that. In the ancient Tibetan system, this is how it works, okay?

And then sooner or later, somebody comes and offers you... We ran by this principle in our school. We have a philosophical school.

We have about 300 students. We ran by these principles very strictly. Two years ago, somebody came up and offered us a $4 million property for $1.

Just like that. Just showed up and offered us that. Then another person came and offered us two stories of a building rent-free.

This is about worth $20,000 a month or something. According to the Tibetan system, this would be the result of that kind of attitude in your organization. And I'm not exaggerating.

Our treasurer is right there. She's traveling with us. You can check it out, okay?

I mean, it happens. It works. It's amazing, okay?

I think shortly before that we got a $1 million grant for social work and stuff like that. I mean, it just goes like that. It's very interesting.

This system is... It seems crazy and it works great, okay? All right.

I think we're on... what number are we on? Four.

Okay, I must have lost a page here. Say dzun. Dzun.

Okay, dzun is number four. By the way, there'll be ten principles. I'll give you a break after five, okay?

A little hot, okay. In English it means keeping your word, okay? Keeping your word.

And how it manifests itself in a business environment is that you are totally honest with your customers. Completely honest, okay? Breaking dzun, by the way, in Tibetan is very interesting.

You break dzun not when you lie to a customer, because most good businessmen will not lie directly to their customer. It's foolish. Sooner or later you get caught, they get mad, you lose them.

Dzun means you don't even give them any false impressions, ever. Okay, very interesting, okay? You keep to the spirit and not to the letter of the principle.

Meaning, your impression of the situation, whatever your impression of the situation is, you make sure that they get exactly that same impression of the situation, okay? When those two things don't match, we call it dzun, alright? That's very interesting.

You see, sometimes you can technically not lie, but you're saying all this stuff so that your customer gets a slightly different or better impression than the way it is, you know? And, you know, if they ask you, did you say anything to lie? You say, no, I didn't lie.

They say, but that is exactly, what you said to me didn't give me the exact same idea that, that the way it turned out. And you say, yeah, but I didn't lie, did I? They say, yeah, but you gave me this impression, okay?

So you have to be very careful here. Dzun works when you communicate to your customer exactly the way it is, okay? Exactly the way it is.

Like, you don't want them to know they've ordered a product from you. This would happen to us all the time. Ten thousand rings going to JCPenney.

They are being advertised on November 30th for sale for Christmas. The advertisement is being placed in the newspaper two weeks before. We are on a schedule.

We have 30,000 diamonds moving to the factory. The other division is making these gold rings. They are going to meet somewhere down in midtown Manhattan.

And then these guys are going to work all night and put the diamonds in the rings, and then they are going to go out to the customer, you know? And suddenly, the night before the shipment, you realize you've used the wrong color of gold. You see?

If you are selling to Europe, you have to use a reddish gold. If you are selling to America, you use a whitish gold. I don't know what they use in Australia, because we didn't do any business here.

If you are selling in Japan, it has to be very white. So suddenly you realize that the whole shipment is worthless. It's going to have to be melted, you know?

Then what you might do is run to the platers and plate it with a different color, okay? Which is gold, and which will rub off in about six months. And then suddenly this lady will be looking at her ring.

You can't really tell, you see? It will just change colors. You can't really tell there is a little coating on it.

It will just wear off after six months. But in the meantime, it went out of the store, you got your check, they probably won't know enough to go back to the store. You can do it, okay?

I've seen people do it, you know? At this point, if you are following this system, you call up the customer and you say, look, we made the wrong color. Do you want it?

And if you don't, then give me another two weeks, I'll melt it down, I'll redo the order, I'll lose money on the order, to give you what I promised to give you, okay? Or if you'll take it, I appreciate it, okay? But you totally keep them informed and totally honest.

This is very, very hard in business. It's easy for me to get up here and say it, you know? But when I'm in that situation, it's very, very, very tempting to say, take it to the plater, send it to them, you know what I mean?

Very easy to say that. Again, business ethics, the principle is that in the short run, in the short run, it looks like you have done something smart, you know? You have saved the order.

You haven't lost thousands of dollars. It looks like you've done something intelligent. In the long run, another effect ...

Yeah? He said this, what if they agreed to take the order, but you knew they're going to plate it, before they send it to their customer. They're also under pressure.

I mean, their boss is not going to be happy either. And their boss is not going to worry about whether it was the manufacturer's fault or not, you see? In this system, you can't do it then.

You can't give it to them, okay? We had many cases in the business where we detected a new synthetic. We did all kinds of stones.

We did 30, 40 different kinds of stones. One is like amethyst, for example. They came out with a man-made amethyst, which is much better than the natural.

We found a test to discover whether it was man-made or not. The crystal twists a different way when it grows. So we found out this very exotic test to tell that these were not for real, that these were made in a laboratory.

And then suddenly we found out that half of our suppliers didn't know. They were buying them from somebody else and supplying them to us, really honestly believing they were real, okay? And they're not, they're made in a laboratory, you know?

Too good to be true, you see? Usually the price is great, and then you have to be suspicious. But anyway, under the influence of a good price, people tend to overlook things.

According to this system, you go back down the line and you say, this is what we did. I mean, we taught them how to do the test, we took the synthetic ones, and we took a loss on them. Just took a loss on them, okay?

In the short run, that's stupid. Especially when nobody else in the world can tell yet. You see what I mean?

And legally there's no requirement to test it. But we would go ahead and tell them. This happened in several occasions.

Another occasion was in Topaz. I don't know if you know this beautiful sky blue Topaz. It's called London blue, or Brazilian blue, or this beautiful stone, this beautiful light blue, they call it swimming pool blue, and very, very nice.

Those are all made in nuclear reactors. There are no natural blue Topazes. They come out of the ground in Sri Lanka or Brazil, white or gray or brown.

Very ugly, actually. And you make the beautiful blue color with radiation, okay? And that's legal.

The government allows you to do it. So we were doing hundreds of thousands of carats. I mean, we discovered how to...

Somebody had invented it, we figured out how they did it. You send it to a neutron reactor, which is very heavy and very expensive. Only governments can build these things, but they like the extra money, you know?

And you put them there, they give them a nuclear treatment, and then they send them to a lighter electron treatment in a different kind of accelerator. And then it comes out this fantastic blue, okay? So we discovered that if you radiate the material from Brazil, it's dangerous.

You know? If you put it on somebody's finger, it would affect them in 5 or 10 or 15 years, okay? And then we found out if you do it on material from Sri Lanka, it's not dangerous.

It's a different amount of cadmium or Topaz or something like that, retains radiation. So we're under no legal obligation to tell anyone. We're totally legal to sell them.

The US government, Atomic Energy Commission approved it, and we just said, no, we won't sell it. And we sent it to Switzerland, and it's going to be there for 300 years, okay? My boss wasn't too thrilled about that one.

For storage, right? Until it's safe. But the principle is, in the short term, it looks stupid.

In the long term, what was the result of that? This is very interesting. If you respect Zoom, if you respect it, if you act this way, and without any legal obligation to do so, but because of your concern for your customer, you lose money.

All the projects that you ever undertake are completed successfully, and nothing is left hanging, okay? That supposedly is the correlation. This kind of behavior leads to all the projects in your office are successfully completed.

I mean, if you own a large business, or you've been in a large business, I mean, one of the things that kills the business is that when you undertake like ten projects at the beginning of the year, and then at the end of the year, nine of them are left unfinished. And it just seems to be some kind of weird obstacles to finishing the projects, you know? It seems like certain teams of your employees, even though they're all talented individually, they can't get together, and they can't complete, they can't bring it to closure, they call it.

They can't bring the project to closure, and the result doesn't come out. According to Tibetan system, this is due to misleading your customers. Even slightly, you see, even by implication.

You know, you don't have to lie. I'm not saying most intelligent businessmen don't lie outright. You know, we did a radio interview today, and the guy said, all these principles you're talking about, are you finding that businessmen don't have any of these principles?

And I said, no, I find that most successful businessmen have instinctively started to follow them, you see, or you wouldn't be successful. I mean, most successful businessmen have no interest in misleading their customers. They found out a long time ago that this is stupid.

But I don't think they're fully aware of the implications, you see what I mean? That... making sure that you never give your customer a false impression, would have the effect that your employees could learn to bring projects to their successful conclusion, okay?

By the way, this applies to your life also, okay? I mean, if the business you're running is called your life, okay? If you have one employee, which is yourself, the principles still hold.

If you're a person who seems to have a problem bringing projects to their conclusion, the Tibetans would say, make sure you are never giving other people false impressions, and that problem will go away. It's very interesting, very subtle, okay? We'll do one more, then we'll take a break, okay?

This is called Tama, say Tama. Tama. Tama is never speaking in terms which would split up other parties, you see?

Never ever using words which would split up other people, but rather, constantly focusing as you speak to people on the idea or the principle of bringing people together, okay? So everything you ever say is focused on bringing individuals or businesses together, rather than trying to split people up, you see? And this is very difficult for most people, I mean, to concentrate that everything you say should bring other people closer together, rather than farther apart from each other, okay?

The effect on your mind, oh, an example in business, there are two ways to go into business, I mean, one way to go into business is sort of, and one way to play Scrabble, somebody I know does that, is to concentrate on messing up the competition, you know, you put all your energy into making sure that the competition doesn't succeed, okay? That's one way to do business, you know? It requires a lot of effort, you know, in our business, it means calling them up, ordering their products, going to their stores, buying their rings from them, it's expensive too, I mean, you have to buy, we'll get $10,000 US, and go to a shopping mall and buy all the competitors' products, and bring them back home to the office and study them, and then throw them out, melt them down, so it's expensive, it takes a lot of effort, and what it does is it gets your whole company focused on some kind of negative state of mind, you know, how can we beat the competition?

They're the enemy, and we have to overthrow them, and instead of that, I mean, in this principle, in the principle of trauma, you actually forget about the competition, you don't worry about the competition, and you put your mind on increasing your own, increasing your own business, you don't worry about the other people, you don't worry about what other competitors are doing, and you do not bad talk your competitors, okay? Very firm rule, you do not, you do not get your customer on the phone and say, don't buy this from those people, they're no good, they won't treat you right, their products are no good, you never ever say something like that, okay?

This is a very interesting principle, instead of having your customer focusing on how bad the other company is, you just try to sell them your strengths, and in your own mind, you forget about the other people, and you just concentrate on what you do well, you spend all your creative energy not on trying to prove that the other companies are stupid or bad, you spend all your energy on your own products. This gets to a very interesting thing where we actually had cases where competitors would send their employees to our hiring office, and they would talk their way into a job, and they would be working in our mold, you know, these molds that you make the rings from, and they would steal the molds, and they would send them to the competitors, they wouldn't bother, there's always a little trademark stamp required in the US, there's a special stamp of your company on the inside, some of our competitors were so lazy, they wouldn't take the stamp out of the mold, it would still have our company's name on the inside of the ring, you see? And they would actually steal the mold, take it away, and start producing rings, and selling them to our customers cheaper, because they didn't have to do the research and development that we had to do, because they just stole it. And then we would become aware that they had done this, and we would have these big board meetings and we'd say, should we sue them or not, you know, get a copyright lawyer, prove that it was ours first, which is not too hard when your name is inside the ring, that they are selling your name, that was one of the easy cases, you know?

And we would, you know, we had a very interesting approach to that, we'd say, let them take our old stuff, we'll develop a new one. You just say, who cares, you forget about the competition, let them take our old stuff, we'll be six months ahead by the time they figure it out, you see? And you focus all your efforts on staying ahead, and you don't worry about them copying you or something, by the time they're copying you, you're already on, you're already six months ahead of them, and you keep in that state of mind, you know?

You're not trying to protect or defend yourself. By the time they figure out what you're doing, you're doing a new thing, and you just stay ahead of them like that. You focus on staying ahead of them, that would be a business equivalent of trauma, okay?

What would be the result in your own company of this kind of behavior, you see? You'll say, oh, this is great, you'll have new products, nobody will catch up to you, you'll always be selling more. That's not the point of trauma.

The practice of trauma means inside your own company, communication reaches a new high level, okay? And we were talking about this at a business seminar earlier this week. What hurts companies the most is not competition, and what hurts company the most is not the marketplace, you know, the economy, or the exchange rates, or the interest rates, or anything else, demand, or how many shopping days got rained out, like this lecture, okay?

Not like that. It's not that at all. The thing that hurts a company the most is when the employees don't get along with each other, you know?

So there's this subtle resistance going on in the company where somebody doesn't like somebody else. Person A is jealous of Person B. Person A, manager, especially is bad among the upper management.

I mean, if you've been in a company, a large company, the worst fights go on between the vice presidents, usually, because they're the most ambitious people. They're the people who got there from working the hardest. They usually have the least patience or tolerance for each other.

And if it happens that your group gets like that, then the company starts getting destroyed from the inside. You don't need competitors to come and knock you down. They take care of it from the inside just by not communicating.

They don't want to see each other in the hallway. They don't stop to talk to each other. Somebody leaves a voicemail and the other person says, it didn't record properly, so I didn't call you back.

You know, all these excuses not to communicate with each other. If you follow the principle of trauma closely, if you follow the principle of not concentrating on the negative parts of the competition, but you just happily, joyfully say, let them copy what we're doing because we're going to be ahead of them in another six weeks anyway, then communication improves among your top management. It's very interesting.

According to the Tibetan principle here, that lets your company grow like crazy. And again, these are not obvious things. It wouldn't seem to have any connection.

And it works like crazy. And if you try it, you'll find it. You'll find it out.

It's very interesting that you don't need to take my word for it. You just try it. Maybe you have to send me a certain percentage, okay?

Something like that, okay? But it really does work. I mean, frankly, our company went so well that I just said, I'm not coming anymore for a while.

You know, send the checks to my house. And it works like that. It's very, very interesting.

You should try at least one or two of them. Like, I'm very frustrated if I give a talk and then nobody actually tries it, you know? So I pick one or two of those things and then try it.

And see if some— I think particularly, if your company has a problem with the upper management not getting along with each other, go backwards. Work backwards. Oh, let's see, which one was that?

Oh, it was concentrating on my competitors in a negative way. So I'll stop doing that, and I'll see if it helps my the communication. You can go backwards, you see?

Look at the problems, and go backwards, and see if you can adjust the behavior of yourself and your top management, okay? Like that. We'll take like a 10-minute break, and then we'll just do a few questions and answers, and then I'll let you swim home, okay?

So take like a 10-minute break, okay? Okay, we'll start again. I'd like to open for questions, but someone asked me already one, they said, do you wear that suit when you go to work?

And I say, not at all, okay? I mean, we ... a principle of our belief is that we should make people feel comfortable, and when I go to work, I wear a normal suit, and I think for many years, none of my suppliers knew that I was a Buddhist even.

You know, my main job was to to get the diamonds around, to procure the diamonds around the world, and so I would be constantly traveling around the world, and I think one of the principles is that ... one of the principles of doing these things is that you just do it, and you don't advertise it, you see? And it makes it work better, okay?

So like, you don't go ... how do you say? Harassing people with your beliefs, you just do them, and you make money, and the boss is happy with you, and maybe 15 years later you tell him, by the way, that was all Buddhism, you know?

And he says, I don't care what it was, you know? And it actually worked that way. When I graduated from my studies, I commuted to the Tibetan monastery where he lived for many years, and upon graduation, all my students ...

I have about 300 students in New York. We decided to ... to offer a new building to the monastery.

This is a special ground, a courtyard, where they do debating. I don't know if you've ever seen Tibetan-style debating, but it looks a little like karate or something, and they scream at each other. You go like that, and you make a point like that, and it's like Aristotelian logic for four or five hours a day, and you're screaming at each other, and making syllogisms, and then they're answering them, and then you do it like this, like that.

So we actually determined to donate a new one. It has to fit 5,000 people inside. It's like a small stadium or something.

So I went to my boss and I said, by the way, you know, this was all Buddhism, and will you pay for that? And ... So he said, I'll pay for half, you know?

And he did. So you know, it's like that. You don't have to tell anybody where it came from.

It doesn't matter at all. The point is that, according to this system, the company prospers, the employees prosper, the managers prosper, your suppliers prosper, and your customers prosper. So there's no idea that someone has to suffer if you're making a profit.

The idea is to get everybody to make a profit, and then nobody has to know about it. You know? They don't have to know where it's coming from.

You don't have to call it any kind of philosophy or anything else. It just makes money, and it makes everyone more prosperous. So, yeah, I wore a suit, and I didn't tell anybody for a long time.

The only thing I asked him was that, let me run it my way. Because, if you sort of divert from one of the principles, and try to follow the rest, you get some funny results. Like, then you get business ups and downs, and things like that.

So the only deal I had with him was, let me take this division, don't bring people in that I don't approve, or that I don't hire myself, don't steal any of my people for your other divisions, and let me run it my way, and let me pay them whatever I want to pay them. And the salary ranges in our division were much higher, and we made much more money from that. You see?

It's spending money to make much more money. And, so that was the principle we had. Anybody else have any questions?

Yeah?

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah, she said, what happens when you're working with people who don't follow these principles?

[Говорящий 1]
I think, first thing, I think the first principle you have to have is that, if you're an employee, if you're going to work for somebody, and they ask you to do something improper, like in our business, I'll tell you a very common one. Someone brings me diamonds. We carry diamonds in a piece of paper like that.

It's very interesting. We don't carry them in metal boxes, or something like that. They are dumped into a paper like that.

You have a special way of folding it, and you carry it in your breast pocket, you know? You're carrying like $100,000, $200,000 around Manhattan in the subways, you know? In your breast pocket.

And, so it's very interesting. Someone brings you a package like that, it's got 30,000 diamonds in it, and then you take out the 15,000 that you like, and you give the rest back, and then you negotiate a deal. You say, okay, I'll pay you $100 more per carat, you take back 30% of them, I'll pay you in 46 days, you know, and like that.

If you need the money sooner, I'll give you 1.4% discount on 30, you know, there's a whole deal like that. And what happens in unscrupulous companies is when the diamonds come in, if they're these nice white diamonds, you take them all out, you put in, you know, 30,000 yellow diamonds, and you tell the guy, I didn't like your parcel, please come pick it up, you know? There's no way to mark a diamond, I mean, they're the hardest thing in the universe.

You can't scratch a diamond with anything else in the universe. So, the guy can't like stamp them or anything like that. He just opens it up and says, oh my god, they switched all my diamonds, you know?

But, so the question is, in an unscrupulous company, your boss would be asking you to do that, you know, when you get the next parcel in from that guy, switch them, give them back. Usually you do it very subtly, you know, one grade down, nobody can tell, march, you know, and then the guy's just a little suspicious of you, but that's all. What do you do if your boss tells you, my boss actually never told me to do that, never asked me, never did, ever.

If you're going to follow these principles, you quit the company. You just quit, okay? You will never succeed.

The company won't succeed, you won't succeed. Okay, sooner or later, if you don't follow these principles, the company will fail, you might as well leave it now. And that creates some kind of financial hardship on you.

You're going to be without a job for a while. Again, ethics is not a short-term thing, it's a long-term thing. In the short term, you look stupid.

You're giving up a good salary, you're giving up a good company, you're going to be out of a job for a while, but in the long term, there's absolutely no question, you won't make money, the company won't make money, and you just don't do it. Even suppliers, you know, if we became aware that a supplier was giving us synthetic stones, or artificial stones, we would give them one more warning. And then, we actually did a very interesting thing.

We would take a big bunch of the stones to an independent laboratory, and have them write up an analysis of the stones. And this laboratory is like unimpeachable, they're called the Gemological Institute of America, and they don't make profit, they're just public service. But they charge a lot for checking the stones, like $100 each, so we would check like $10 or $20, and they would come back synthetic.

Then we would give the guy the bill, and we would give him all the stones back, and say, you do that one more time, you're not supplying us anymore. And by the way, you're going to have to pay the laboratory this $2,000, you know. And ...

like that. You cannot benefit from dealing with them. So you just ...

you know, and people cheat you every once in a while. If they cheat you once, you warn them, because maybe it was a mistake. And then the second time, you just break off the relationship, because it cannot prosper.

It cannot prosper. According to these principles, it can't work. And if you're in a position where your employer is asking you to do something like that, just quit.

Because there won't be any prosperity there. Something will happen there. Okay?

Yeah?

[Говорящий 2]
You know, in case you need to respect the well-being of your employees, if the employee is not behaving as you would like them to, should you talk to that employee, keep them aside, and go through those issues with that employee? Is that in the purpose?

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, so he said, especially, like, you're supposed to be watching out for the well-being of your employee, and then they don't listen to you. And I assume you're saying not only that you ask them to go home at 6 o'clock, and they don't go home, they continue to abuse themselves, okay? But also, you just generally give them instructions, and they're not listening to you.

I mean ... yeah. Yeah, and does anything in here, do you violate these sacred principles, if this employee is just a bad employee?

No, you don't. Okay? And that's very important to say.

If a thing is a failure, if the person is not producing, it's not as if these principles say that you can't fire them, you should fire them. Because you're harming your other employees, they are a drag on your company. Actually, other employees are getting less benefit, because this person's not producing.

So in a way, they're not helping the situation. And there's nothing in here that says ... It's very interesting that in Buddhism ...

[Говорящий 2]
I can see why it needs to change, in order that it fits better with this, that that person, even if we sit down and talk to them, is not responsible.

[Говорящий 1]
Then it's no lack of compassion to let them go. I mean, that's a Buddhist principle. Say shi ...

ge ... wang ... tat.

Okay, anyone who's had a good lama knows these four modes of behavior of a good boss, okay? Shi means ... nice guy, peaceful, pleasant, you know, we're not getting along, I've asked you three times, I would really appreciate it, you know, from the bottom of my heart, I sincerely ask you to help out the other employees, please don't be bad, please be better, okay?

That's mode number one. Ge means ... generous.

You say, look, if you stop behaving like that, I'll give you two dollars more an hour. By next year, you know, let's say three months, okay? If in three months I evaluate you again, and you're not doing this kind of behavior, you got two dollars more an hour, because you figure in your mind that they're a good employee, they're smart, but they don't get along with people, so you say, if you clean that up, it's worth more than two dollars an hour, so you say, I'll give you two dollars more an hour, that's called ge, ge means generous, okay? You buy their behavior, you buy their agreement, okay?

Wang means ... to become powerful, and wang means you go to them and say ... something like, if I see you do that again, then I'll cut your pay, you know?

Or, if you can't change that behavior by then, then this person is going to be the new supervisor of this department, and you won't be anymore, okay? And you just ... you're powerful with them.

You try to ... impress on them, with some kind of force, actually. Then the last mode, mode number four is called dak.

Dak means ... fierce, tough, rough, you know, if you don't improve by Monday, you're out of here, I'll fire you. And then, you make it known to other people that you're going to do that, and what's very important is, you do fire them on Monday.

You see what I mean? You keep your word, you know? People get to know that when you become, when you go to mode number four, there's no fooling around.

You know? They either do it or they don't do it, but at that point, it's almost like, very important for the welfare of the whole organization, that they know there's no mercy on mode number four. You know, once you give them mode number four, it's very serious, and it's very clear.

People like clarity, they're more afraid of unclarity than they are of decisiveness. You see what I mean? A boss who threatens to do something, and then doesn't do anything, is more dangerous than a boss who says, okay, by Tuesday you're out of here, and I'm telling everyone else also.

And then everyone else sees you acting up, and on Tuesday they say, well, maybe next Thursday, you know, or something like that. It's very important, if you go into mode number four, which is an emergency mode, that you get known by reputation that, that's it. And that's very much in keeping with these principles.

It's not, these don't ever say that you have to keep losing money on a bad deal, or that you have to keep losing money on a bad employee, or something like that. That's not being compassionate to them. It's very interesting.

I mean, compassion can take the face of mode number four. Sometimes the best thing you can do in very special cases is to be very rough with them, and say, that kind of behavior is not acceptable, and I will fire you on Tuesday if you don't change it. And then you do fire them on Tuesday, and it's the most compassionate thing you can do.

Last thing to say, I mean, that's compassion to that person. It's the best thing you can do to them. They might wake up by about their third firing, you know what I mean?

And oftentimes they do, especially if they're trying to pay their rent and things like that. The last thing to say about that though, is that it does not work if you don't have compassion for them. You see what I mean?

If you're angry, or you're upset, or you're trying to get revenge on them or something like that, it fails. Then you broke the ... you broke the system.

But if out of a true desire to help them, a truly caring for their welfare, you're tough on them, then it works, you see? They say that none of the four modes works if you're not doing it because you care for them. So, it's like if you have a bad child, and you have to pretend to be angry with them, but they say in this system, if you actually do get angry while you're pretending to be angry, everything collapses.

It's very interesting. Because then that creates some bad seeds in your mind. It's very interesting.

So you can look very rough, and be very ... on the inside, because you care for them. And in the end, when you're that tough on somebody, it's because you want them to get better.

You want them to succeed in their next job. You know? Yeah?

Any more? Okay. Maybe we ...

Yeah?

[Говорящий 2]
I was just wondering whether there was ever any conflict in your mind between the principles of right livelihood and useful work, and selling what might appear to be like just a vanity type product?

[Говорящий 1]
Oh, I see what you mean. He asked, you know, you're a Buddhist monk, and one of the eight principles of Buddhism is to have an honest livelihood, beneficial livelihood. And then on the other side, you're selling something which is only appealing to people's vanity, their attachment, possibly causing them to have much more problem in their life by wanting this thing.

Okay. There's a couple of answers there, okay? First thing is, I was very careful not to keep any of the money.

I mean, all the money I made, I had an arrangement with my employer where the money went to, directly to charities. You know, I took enough money to live, and I've lived in the same room for 25 years. I rent a room in a small house, and I took enough money to support myself, which is very little, I don't have any other family.

And he actually donated the rest directly to charities that I would specify for him. That's one answer. So, I mean, it's important for a monk, we're not allowed to keep money.

And in practical terms nowadays, many monks do. But, to get the full benefit of being a monk, and the joy of being a monk, it's very healthy not to own anything. And you feel much happier if you don't own anything.

So, I actually gave all the money away to different charities. Secondly, I think, this is a very difficult point. The reason I chose the diamond business, the reason I was working in diamonds, is very special.

I don't know anyone in the diamond business. It was very hard to get into the diamond business. I was telling some people the other day, it's like trying to join the American mafia, you know.

You can walk out of the office with a million dollars in your pocket, and they won't know for two or three days. There's no way to stop someone from walking out. It's absolute trust business, you see.

So, normally people only hire their cousins or their brothers or their sisters or something like that. It took me, I went for 30 interviews before I was accepted as a messenger, you know. And the reason I did it, I was actually doing some special meditations in the monastery.

I was in a monastery for eight years before I went to work, full time. And I was doing some special meditations, and then I, after one of the meditations, I realized that I had to get into the diamond business, and that that would be useful, and that that would be important for people, and that would help people. And so, the reason I chose diamonds was because of that meditation, and had nothing to do with the diamond business.

So, all through those, I was in 16 years, I mean, I ended up being the vice president, and, but all throughout that time, I didn't forget that that was why I was there. It was some special thing happened during meditation, and said it would be useful for, that it would be important. So, I don't often tell people that, I certainly didn't tell my boss that, but that's really what happened.

Otherwise, I have no interest at all in diamonds or jewelry, or, I mean, I never did like them, so, like that. Any other? I think that's a good place to stop, maybe.

Thank you very much, and thank you for your lovely city. We've had a really good time here. This is our second day in Australia in my life, and it's really, it's really, really nice.

It reminds me of my home. I grew up in Arizona, and it's very similar. So, thank you.

Thank you for coming. Thank you.