My First Bottom Line

We are less than two weeks from Bernie’s memorial. It will be seven years that he’s gone, a long time and no time at all. Planning for this year’s remembering, we’ve been talking about Bernie the Social Entrepreneur and looking at some of the old videos. Old lessons have come back to me.

By the time, I met him, Bernie was already quite the social entrepreneur, embracing business as a vehicle for doing good for others. The Greyston Bakery was a flourishing enterprise – they baked our wedding cake when Dee and I got married – and the profits from the bakery were propelling housing, a medical clinic, and childcare for homeless families. It was one element in Bernie’s mandala, The Greyston Foundation, of for-profit and not-for-profit entities.  The Zen Community of New York was its core spiritual practice element. 

Bernie embraced what was being called “the double bottom line.” The first bottom line is the bottom line of the standard accounting balance sheet, the profit or, if things haven’t worked out so well, the loss for the year. The second bottom line is social benefit.

The social bottom line was always my first bottom line. Doing good for others, the third of the Buddha’s three pure precept, was always my first precept. Profit was anathema. My good guys were the Robin Hoods, aligned with the poor and the downtrodden. The bad guys were the rich people, the capitalists, making money off the backs of the poor, for whom the only bottom line was profit.

I went to social work because I wanted to be a good guy. I marched and protested because I was a good guy. Early on, Bernie started pushing me out of my comfort zone. Without being explicit about it, he gave me a koan to struggle with for years. “You need to develop compassion for those more fortunate than yourself,” he said. Quite a twist on my mother’s favorite moral lesson.

Most of Bernie’s Zen students were spiritual seekers who he was pushing to embrace social action as a core practice component. I was one of the few, social activists seeking spiritual balance. I had no trouble understanding why his practice wasn’t limited to the zendo. As I set out on my peacemaker path, seeking to see where my mix of spirituality and social action would take me, what Bernie had built at Greyston was my beacon.

As we wrote our first charter, I still hadn’t grokked the business side of Greyston, the whole mandala, was a business as well as a social action project, not just the for-profit bakery. There was a lesson there still to be learned. I didn’t get that until we were about to open our first charter school.

We’ll pick up our story there next time.