The Money That Was Always Yours

I want to talk about something most people won’t say out loud: our relationship with money — the real one, not the polished version we perform on LinkedIn.

Not how to make more of it. Not a framework for financial freedom. Just an honest question:
Have you ever looked closely at how the money in your life actually arrived?

Was it because you worked hard enough? Or is it possible that some of it — maybe most of it — was always going to find you, no matter what?

I’ve been on a spiritual path for many years. And money has been one of my most confusing,
humbling, occasionally embarrassing teachers.

It took me until recently — on a rainy pilgrimage
up a sacred mountain — to finally find the words for something I’d been circling for a long time.

Years ago, when I was still a student at Fudan University in Shanghai, I was stopped near Jing’an
Temple by an old monk. I hadn’t asked for a reading. Honestly, I was trying to walk past him.
But he said it anyway.

“Within two years, you will be married. Within five years, your net worth will exceed —” and then
he named a number that felt almost absurd to me at the time.

I was fresh out of a breakup. My family wasn’t wealthy. I had no particular obsession with money
and no marriage on the horizon. I walked back to campus, told a close friend about it as a funny
story, and we both laughed it off.

Two years later, I was married.

Five years later, the number was real.

I didn’t engineer it. The money came through what felt like ordinary business decisions —
nothing dramatic, nothing I’d call a master plan. I chalked it up to luck and moved on. Filed it away as a strange coincidence and didn’t think about it for years.

Until recently.

That same friend from Fudan — who also ended up on a spiritual path — invited me to join his teacher on a pilgrimage to Jiuhua Mountain, the sacred site of Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva, the vow-
keeper who descends into the darkest realms and refuses to leave until all beings are free.

We hadn’t seen each other properly in years. The mountain was wrapped in low cloud and drizzling
rain, the kind of silence that only exists in places people have been praying in for centuries.

On a stone step somewhere on the way up, we sat down to rest and started talking.

About money. About karma. About whether the amount we’re meant to have in this life is somehow already written.

He brought up that old monk. Said he’d been thinking about it for years. Then he said something
that stopped me:
“Looking at you over all this time — you’ve never been particularly focused on making money. But
you’ve always had abundance. In you, this theory holds.”

The theory being: how much we have is already determined. That the wealth a person can hold in
this lifetime isn’t primarily a function of strategy or effort. It’s the fruition of something much older.

That conversation became a key. It opened something I’d been circling for years without the right language.

When I took this question into Buddhist, Taoist, and yogic frameworks, I found something that
surprised me: these three traditions — born in different cultures, centuries apart — are
describing the same underlying reality. Just in different words.

Buddhism: Wealth as ripened karma

In the Abhidharmakosha and the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra, the Buddha describes material wealth
as vipāka-phala — “ripened fruit.” What you’re able to receive in this lifetime isn’t primarily a
function of how hard you work. It’s the maturation of seeds planted across many lifetimes — specifically, the karma of generosity.

The logic is clean: genuine giving, across many lifetimes, plants seeds. When conditions are right,
those seeds ripen. The person who tips you off to buy a lottery ticket, the friend who appears out
of nowhere to invest on your behalf, the deal that lands in your lap — these aren’t the cause.
They’re just the channel. The water was always heading toward you.

Buddhism is also careful to say this isn’t fatalism. Practice can transform karma. Genuine
generosity, authentic ethical development, the purification of your consciousness — these
expand the container. They don’t create abundance from nothing; they allow what was always
yours to flow more freely.

Taoism: Virtue as the size of your vessel

The Tao Te Ching and Taishang Ganying Pian put it directly: when your virtue matches your
position, blessings come naturally. When it doesn’t, things fall apart.

Wealth is a position. Your genuine character — not performed virtue, not public goodness, but
who you actually are when no one’s watching — determines how much you can hold.

Virtue is the vessel. Abundance is the water. Water doesn’t overflow a small cup just because you want it to.

And it doesn’t stay away from a large one.

There’s a line from the Tao Te Ching I keep returning to:”An empty room fills with light.” The
more you clear out — the grasping, the performing, the carefully constructed “I don’t care about money” — the more naturally abundance moves in.

And this:”In the pursuit of learning, every day something is added. In the pursuit of the Tao, every
day something is dropped.” With money, as with everything, the work is not to accumulate more
strategies. It’s to remove the blockages — the fear, the compulsion, the performance.

Yoga: Consciousness as signal

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and Vedantic philosophy describe samskaras — deep impressions in
consciousness that function like a frequency your whole being is continuously broadcasting. The
universe doesn’t judge this signal. It just responds in kind.

A person whose consciousness is genuinely oriented toward truth, service, and compassion will naturally draw high-frequency reality — including material abundance.

This has less to do with effort than we think. Effort is just a channel, like the monk who stops you on the street and says something you don’t believe and turns out to be right.

Three traditions. One conclusion: your inner state — your actual, unperformed inner state —
determines what you can hold and what will find you.

This is the honest question that has to be asked. If wealth flows from virtue and accumulated
merit, why do people who seem entirely unconcerned with spiritual development end up with the most?

I’m not going to give you a comfortable answer. I’ll try to give you a true one.

First layer: merit is not the same as goodness

Buddhism has never claimed that wealth equals virtue. The sources of merit are more varied
than we tend to think.

Yes, genuine generosity and compassion accumulate merit.

But so does extraordinary focus — the kind of will that reshapes the reality of millions of people, a form of creativity so sustained it changes the world.

Musk’s capacity for sustained, obsessive focus is genuinely unusual in human history.
Zuckerberg’s fixation on connecting people reshaped how billions of humans relate to each
other. Whatever you think of their motivations, this level of “creation karma” generates
enormous material consequence.

The wealth reflects the ripening of a particular kind of power — not moral elevation.

Second layer: not all wealth feels the same

A teacher I respect once said: the same amount of money can be clean or heavy. Clean money
brings freedom, lightness, ease. Heavy money brings anxiety, litigation, the compulsion to keep
accumulating, an inability to rest.

Is Musk free? Is Zuckerberg at peace? Or are they being driven by their wealth — unable to stop,
searching in each new venture for something they can’t quite name?

Trump has spent a lifetime accumulating power and wealth alongside lawsuits, betrayals, and an
apparently unquenchable need to be respected and admired. That is not what abundance looks
like from the inside.

The Taoists call this “possessing the form while losing the spirit.” You get the shape of wealth. But
you miss the thing wealth is supposed to bring.

Third layer: this lifetime may not be the accounting

The Buddhist view of time spans many lifetimes. This life might be one of consumption —
spending down accumulated merit — while simultaneously planting new seeds, good and
otherwise. The ledger doesn’t close at death.
And more fundamentally: we see their money. We don’t see their inner life, their relationships,
their sleep, their loneliness. With ordinary eyes, you cannot read another person’s karma.

Now I want to tell you something more personal. Because theory without blood in it is just
philosophy.

My relationship with money has been, without exaggeration, a series of wars. Pursuit, rejection,
suppression, loss, rebuilding — and finally, something that feels like genuine peace.

War One: Abundance Without Trying

At Fudan, I wasn’t focused on money. Most of my classmates graduated into finance, consulting,
tech — making the moves that made sense in China’s economic landscape. I went a different
direction, one that confused a lot of people.

But looking back, I think my consciousness during that period was relatively unencumbered. No
obsession with accumulating money. No aversion to it either. The channel was open. Things
flowed.

War Two: The Spiritual Person Who Was Too Good for Money

When I came to a spiritual path, I started feeling something close to shame around money. Real
practitioners, I told myself, weren’t supposed to care about it.

So I took the money I’d earned through business and poured it into a nonprofit. Didn’t pay myself
for years. Told myself this was “true letting go.”

The nonprofit bled money. Cash flow became a constant anxiety. And somewhere in the
struggle, I saw it clearly: I hadn’t let go of anything. I’d just found a more sophisticated way to be attached — using “I’m more evolved than people who chase money” as a cover story for a very ordinary sense of lack.

Suppression is not release. That was the lesson.

War Three: Chasing Money to Change the World

After my divorce, I left the marriage with almost nothing. Net worth: essentially zero. Meanwhile,
my professional world was full of people — leaders, philanthropists, people with serious
resources and influence — who moved through the world differently than I did.

I talked myself into a new story:”Instead of rejecting the rules of the game, become someone
powerful enough to change them.”

So I started chasing. Money, visibility, influence. I told myself it was noble. I was going to do
something with it.

It was the hardest period of my life. I worked hard. I didn’t earn much more than before — not
through effort, anyway. What I did eventually receive came through channels I hadn’t
engineered, which I can only understand now as the fruit of earlier generosity — the nonprofit
years, earlier lifetimes, something.
What I learned: the universe can read your motivation. Fear wrapped in a mission statement is
still fear.

War Four: The Surrender, and the Money That Came Anyway

Eventually, I went to the mountains. Monasteries. Months of meditation — ten, twelve hours a
day sometimes. And I let go of something.

Not “I’ve decided I don’t want money.” Something deeper. Something more like: I finally see the
game clearly, and I don’t want to play any version of it anymore. I had spent my whole life moving
from one game to the next — good student, good school, financial success, social impact, spiritual

influence. Each game more refined than the last. But the underlying feeling was always the same:
a low hum of not enough, an anxious comparing, a searching.
The only game where that feeling dissolved was the one I’m playing now.
So I stopped performing abundance. I ran my retreats on a dana model — pay what you can, offer what feels true. I stopped thinking about money as an objective. I genuinely didn’t know what would happen financially.

During those months, a friend appeared and offered to manage some of my investments. I wasn’t particularly attached to the money, so I said yes without much thought. The market moved. He
chose well. My net worth more than doubled.
I had done nothing to make that happen. I wasn’t even thinking about it.
This was not the first time something like this had occurred. But it was the first time I had the
language to describe it:

How much money I have has nothing to do with how hard I try to make it. The more I devote
myself to practice — to truth, to genuine service, to watching the quality of my own intention —
the more abundance finds me, without my chasing it.

Here is what I believe to be true, integrating everything above:

The merit you’ve accumulated across lifetimes sets a baseline — a rough range of what’s
available to you in this life. This is what the old monk was reading on the steps of Jing’an Temple.

Your authentic virtue in this lifetime determines whether your vessel is expanding or
contracting. Not performed virtue. Not public goodness. The quality of your intention when
you’re alone.

The clarity of your consciousness determines whether the channel is open. Grasping blocks it —
whether you’re grasping toward money or grasping away from it. The “spiritual person who
doesn’t care about money” can be just as blocked as the anxious accumulator. Clarity opens it.

The friend who appears to help you invest, the opportunity that lands without effort, the door
that opens when you weren’t even knocking — these are the universe using whatever channel is
available. The abundance was always yours. It was just waiting for you to stop blocking it.

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I don’t think personal effort is irrelevant. I’ve lived too much life to believe that. But I’ve come to

understand what effort actually does — and what it doesn’t.

The way I think about it now: you are responsible for building the basin. The shape of it, the
depth of it, the quality of the material. Your effort to understand yourself, to clear your
distortions, to choose a position aligned with your actual nature rather than what you think you
should want — all of that goes into building the basin. The wisdom you bring to your positioning,
the willingness to work honestly rather than compulsively, that genuinely matters.

But how much gold falls from the sky, and when — that’s 大运. It’s the ten-year luck cycles that
the BaZi tradition has mapped with remarkable precision for centuries: the way the cosmic
weather of a particular period either aligns or doesn’t align with the elemental structure of who
you are. You were born into a particular configuration of heaven and earth. Some windows open
in their own time. The gold falls when it falls. How much lands in your basin is the meeting of
those two things: what you built, and what the time allows.

The Indian tradition has sat with this question for a very long time. It distinguishes prarabdha —
the karma already in motion, already bearing fruit, the destiny of this lifetime — from
purushartha, the effort and will you exercise now. And it reaches a conclusion that initially
sounds paradoxical: the self-effort of today becomes the destiny of tomorrow. At the deepest
level, effort and fate are the same thing.

What you build now seeds what becomes fated later.

And then it goes one step further, into territory I find both humbling and strangely freeing. The
capacity to make good effort, the wisdom to position well, the drive to align rather than force —
these too arise from what was already written.

Only a good prarabdha allows higher effort, the
rise of genuine knowledge, the natural cessation of compulsive striving.

Which means: even the quality of your seeking is itself a form of ripened fruit.

I used to find that thought defeating. If even my capacity to choose wisely is part of what was
already seeded, what exactly am I doing? But I’ve come to hold it differently. It doesn’t mean
nothing is yours.

It means the one genuine thing that belongs to you in this lifetime is the quality of your alignment. Not the size of the harvest, not the timing of the rain, not even the wisdom you were born carrying. Just this: whether you work with the current or against it.

Whether you build the basin carefully and then release your grip on what falls into it. Whether you use this particular window — this particular meeting of circumstance and readiness — to do something true.

That’s what feels most like mine. Not the results. The quality of the meeting.

I don’t have a system for attracting wealth. I’m suspicious of those.

But I have some questions I’ve learned to sit with. I offer them to you:

Is your relationship with money honest? Are you using “I’m spiritual, I don’t care about money”
to dress up a fear of not being enough? Are you using “I want to change the world” to cover a
need to prove yourself?

Does your generosity come from fullness or from performance? When you give, is it because
something in you is genuinely overflowing — or because you want to be seen as someone who
gives?

When has money flowed most easily in your life? What was your inner state then? When has it
felt most blocked? What were you gripping?

And perhaps most importantly: when abundance does find you, do you let it move? Do you let it
flow back out — toward others, toward what matters — or do you hold it, hoard it, make it mean
something about your security?

These questions don’t have right answers. But if you’re willing to look honestly, you’ll find your
own pattern.

Because the universe is a perfect mirror. It doesn’t lie, it doesn’t play favorites, and it can’t be
gamed. It simply reflects your actual consciousness back to you.

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The friend who walked with me on Jiuhua Mountain said, after years of watching:”In you, this
holds.”

I believe it holds in you too. You may just not have looked carefully yet.
The money that’s meant for you has never left.

Sometimes, you leave it.

And the way back is never to chase harder.

It’s to return — to honesty, to the Tao, to truth — to align yourself with something larger than the
game.

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