During a question-and-answer session Warren Buffett held with his company’s shareholders in 2008, a young man asked him a bold question: “Do you know and believe in Jesus Christ, and have a personal relationship with him?”
“No. I’m an agnostic,” the billionaire replied. “And I grew up in a religious household, and if you asked that question of my mother or father, you’d have gotten a different answer. I’m a true agnostic. I’m not closer to either a theist or an atheist. I simply don’t know, and maybe someday I’ll know and maybe someday I won’t. But that’s the nature of being an agnostic.”
Buffett may not be religious, but he has invested in plenty of spiritual stock throughout his life. As the 95-year-old prepares to step down as CEO of conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway at the end of this year, many are hailing his financial wizardry. He has been described as one of the most successful investors in history, with an estimated fortune of $150 billion.
But Buffett also leaves behind a body of spiritual wisdom that can help people with more than their money. He’s tapped into insights from Zen Buddhism, Confucius, Stoic philosophers and even the New Testament to show people how to cope — not just with market fluctuations but with life’s downturns as well.
Buffett is not just a business icon — he’s a Zen master, say scholars and practitioners of religious traditions who study his work.
The aura of spirituality that surrounds Buffett has radiated for years. To many of his followers, he’s the “oracle of Omaha.” They don’t make appointments with him; they make pilgrimages from as far away as China and Australia to his modest Omaha home and attend Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meetings to meet the man one money manager called “the God of investing.”
And authors write business books about him that segue into sermonettes, with titles like “The New Tao of Warren Buffett” and “Investment Mantras of Warren Buffett.”
But the best source for Buffett’s spiritual guidance is the man himself. He’s created his own body of spiritual wisdom. Investors and non-investors alike pore over his parables and proverbs such as, “Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” Or “It (wealth) lets you be in more interesting environments, but it can’t change how many people love you or how healthy you are.”
These are the kinds of Buffett spiritual truth bombs that convinced Leo Babauta, a Zen Buddhist, that Buffett has a Zen-like sensibility.
“He’s one of the richest men in the world, and yet I really don’t feel like he has made that a central part of who he is,” Babauta, author of “The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life,” tells CNN.
“He’s surrounded by people who are focused on making money, and he sees how people are deluded (by that). That’s one of the central ideas of Zen: We’re all living these illusions of what’s going to make us happy.”
For Buffett, being a good investor and a good person are intertwined. A person will always live in a bull market if they remember these three spiritual principles, as expressed in his own words:
“Thou shall not covet” is one of the Ten Commandments. Envy is one of the seven deadly sins. And yet much of capitalism — and social media engagement — is driven by envy. We often want what someone else has — and we want more than we need.
Buffett may be a man of great wealth, but there are no stories of him chasing after the toys many billionaires splurge on. He still lives in a five-bedroom, two-bathroom Nebraska home he bought in 1958 for $31,500. He still eats at McDonalds and once drove a 20-year-old car with a license plate that read “THRIFTY.” One famous story involves Buffett treating fellow billionaire Bill Gates to lunch at McDonalds and offering to foot the bill after pulling coupons out of his pocket.
Buffett has described envy as the only one of the seven deadliest sins that’s not fun to experience.
“Being envious of someone else is pretty stupid,” he once said. “Wishing them badly, or wishing you did as well as they did — all it does is ruin your day. Doesn’t hurt them at all, and there’s zero upside to it. If you’re going to pick a sin, go with something like lust or gluttony. That way at least you’ll have something to remember the weekend for.”
This attitude reflects another Zen principle: embracing the power of contentment, Babauta, the Zen author, tells CNN. Comparing yourself to others is a delusion because it only leads to more suffering, he says.
It can also lead to bad investing choices. In an essay he wrote on Buffett’s Zen sensibility, Babauta noted that Buffett is a conservative investor who never gets seduced by The Next Hot Thing. He knows his limitations. He rarely invests in tech companies because he doesn’t understand them well enough, Babauta says.
“You would never find him chasing after cryptocurrency or the latest AI thing,” Babauta says. “He looks for things that are fundamentally sound and that kind of discipline can only happen if he didn’t need to chase after things because of his contentment. That contentment, in his case, led to a lot of discipline.”
In June of 2006, Buffett made an extraordinary public announcement. In a series of letters, he said he would give the bulk of his fortune away to various foundations and charities. That charitable impulse was also reflected in his final letter to shareholders last month. He acknowledged he has little time left and said he would accelerate his giving by donating about a billion dollars to four of his family’s foundations.
Few wealthy people in America embody the New Testament adage, “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” more than Buffett. That kind of generosity is what inspired Robert L. Bloch, son of the founder of H&R Block, to write a book, “The Warren Buffett Book of Investing Wisdom: 350 Quotes from the World’s Most Successful Investor,” which collects many of the investor’s most inspiring quotes. Bloch tells CNN that Buffett’s gratitude and generosity are “bedrock spiritual principles.”
He (Buffett) really cares about the down and out and the average person, and he wants to give back to society,” Bloch says. “That’s very spiritual. Not many billionaires are like that.”
Buffett’s generosity also reflects the Stoic philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome, others say. Stoic philosophers such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius believed that it was impossible to have a happy life without living virtuously. Attachment to possessions like wealth, they thought, interfered with self-mastery. Aurelius, the Roman emperor, sold many of his palaces’ furnishings to pay down debt for the empire and ease the burden on Roman citizens, wrote Ryan Holiday, an author of best-selling books on Stoic philosophy.
Buffett’s lack of attachment to things gives him a moral clarity that ensures he would still be happy even if the market collapses, Holiday wrote in an essay on Buffett’s Stoic sensibilities.
“The more things we desire and the more we have to do to earn or maintain those achievements, the less we actually enjoy our lives — and the less free we are,” Holiday wrote.
It’s been a tough year for many Americans. Nearly half say they struggle to meet basic needs such as groceries and health care, according to a recent poll published by Politico. Numerous other polls show more than half of Americans feel like the country’s best days are behind them.
And yet Buffett has faith — in America. Faith is another quality that is central to Christianity, a religion he rejects. Faith, according to most revered figure in Christianity, can move mountains. It’s defined as “confidence in what we hope for and assurance of what we do not see,” according to another New Testament writer.
Warren Buffett’s life in pictures
Warren Buffett’s life in pictures
Buffett is the country’s biggest evangelist. Through stomach-churning economic downturns and political instability, he’s responded with affirmations such as, “For 240 years, it’s been a terrible mistake to bet against America, and now is no time to start.” And: “We always live in an uncertain world. What is certain is that the United States will go forward over time.”
That faith is also what inspired Bloch, the author, to delve into Buffett’s quotations.
“You got to have faith that it’s going to get better and we will come out of this,” Bloch tells CNN, alluding to the sour political and economic mood in the US. “Look at 1776, 1820, and the Great Depression. America just got bigger and better throughout history.”
Buffett’s faith is perhaps what has enabled him to consistently display a sunny disposition. That folksy Midwestern optimism is reflected in a line from his retirement letter: “Kindness is costless, but also priceless.”
We are accustomed to billionaires who bestride the landscape with the imperial arrogance of Roman emperors. Yet Buffett is known for treating even rude dissenters at shareholder meetings with respect and refuses to do business with people of questionable character. He once said, “You can’t make a good deal with a bad person.”
He even talks about a subject that’s not normally associated with the ruthless world of investing: love.
He once said, “The only way to get love is to be lovable” because a person can’t write a check to get a million dollars’ worth of love. Love only yields greater returns when it is met with its counterpart. “The more you give love away, the more you get,” he has said.
Perhaps that — and not the stock he invested in Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo and Kraft Heinz – is Buffett’s greatest legacy. He’s one of the few figures universally respected in America not just because of his accumulation of wealth but because of how he’s treated people along the way.
Love, it turns out, may have been Buffett’s best investment of all.
John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”