Getting to the real root

Most people know that money is not the root of all evil. Instead, the correct quotation from the New Testament is: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” This puts a different spin on the whole thing because now we’re talking about a human interaction or relationship with a currency of exchange.

But wait, before the invention of money there was only the mechanism of barter for acquiring stuff. One person had lots of goats, the other was a carpenter, and they traded goods for services — and vice versa — by exchanging, say, a couple of animals for a new dining table .

It was almost the same thing — perceived valuation . So, could 1 Timothy 6:10 have been written then as: “for the love of barter is a root of all kinds of evil” ? Sounds absurd. Because what kind of human interaction or relationship are we talking about here when someone hoards thousands of goats for the heck of it or someone else makes hundreds of chairs with no takers?

Obviously, not even the corrected “love” of money (which is just another form of barter) can really be the root of all evil. But if Paul the Apostle didn’t have a material concept in mind or even anything money-like at all, then what we’re left with is the remainder of his statement: Love is the root of all kinds of evil. Now we’re talking.

Replace “love” with “attachment” and “all kinds of evil” with “suffering” and we come to what the Buddha had said hundreds of years earlier: Attachment is the root of all suffering. It’s the second Noble Truth.