The Diamond Cutter

The Buddha on Strategies for Managing Your Business and Your Life
by Geshe Michael Roach | Anchor © 1991 · 293 pages

The wise Michael Roach was an undercover Buddhist monk who used a classic sutra from Buddhism (called The Diamond Cutter) to build a diamond business. In his book, he describes how he successfully applied this classic wisdom to his modern business and in the Note, we'll take a look at some of my favorite Big Ideas—including the fact that the world is "empty" of meaning and we always have the ability to see its hidden potential.


So now we’re down to the brass tacks. Admit it. You want to be good in business, you want to be a success in your life, but you also have a strong instinct that tells you life wouldn’t be much unless it had a spiritual side to it. You would like to make a million and meditate, too.
Geshe Michael Roach

“To summarize, the goal of business, and of ancient Tibetan wisdom, and in fact all human endeavor, is to enrich ourselves—to achieve prosperity, both outer and inner. We can enjoy this prosperity only if we maintain a high degree of physical and mental health. And over the length of our lives we must seek ways to make this prosperity meaningful in a larger sense… we should see that we have conducted ourselves and our business in a way that had some lasting meaning, that left some good mark in our world.”

~ Geshe Michael Roach from The Diamond Cutter

The Diamond Cutter. Great book by a cool guy.good

Imagine yourself as an American, Tibetan Buddhist monk living in a monastery in New Jersey going to work for a diamond business in New York where you’re systematically applying the truths of one of the classic sutras of Tibetan Buddhism called, sure enough, The Diamond Cutter. Every day you wake up early, do your meditation and prayers, then you hop on a bus to rock your job as head of sales at a quickly growing diamond enterprise before returning home to your little room at the monastery… without ever telling the peeps you work with that you’re a monk!

That’s the back story to this book by Geshe Michael Roach—a scholar of Tibetan, Sanskrit and Russian who, after twenty two years of study, became the first Westerner to qualify for the Geshe degree at Sera Monastery in India. The book’s *packed* with Big Ideas as Roach walks us through The Diamond Cutter Sutra and shows us how to apply these ancient Buddhist truths to our modern lives. Very cool. Let’s start with a quick look at why the book’s called “The Diamond Cutter”:

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About the author

Authors

Geshe Michael Roach

American teacher of Tibetan Buddhism