Wealth, According to the Book of Death
Giving is the only saving.
The text’s counsel on earning, keeping and giving, with the thread pulled from Vaitarani: the only wealth that crosses is what you gave away. Modern research keeps finding that spending on others buys more wellbeing than spending on self; the verses said it in two lines.
The Escalator
The text opens its counsel on money not with a rule but with a portrait, and the portrait is of you. Read it slowly:
इच्छति शती सहस्रं सहस्री लक्षमीहते कर्तुम् । लक्षाधिपती राज्यं राजापि सकलां धरां लब्धुम् ॥
icchati śatī sahasraṃ sahasrī lakṣam īhate kartum lakṣādhipatī rājyaṃ rājāpi sakalāṃ dharāṃ labdhum
The owner of a hundred wants a thousand. The owner of a thousand strains for a hundred thousand. The lakh-holder wants a kingdom; the king wants the whole earth.
Garuda Purana, Preta Khanda 12.13
And having taken you from a hundred coins to the whole earth, the text keeps climbing, past the top of the world:
चक्रधरोऽपि सुरत्वं सुरभावे सकलसुरपतिर्भवितुम् । सुरपतिरूर्ध्वगतित्वं तथापि न निवर्तते तृष्णा ॥
cakradharo'pi suratvaṃ surabhāve sakala-surapatir bhavitum surapatir ūrdhva-gatitvaṃ tathāpi na nivartate tṛṣṇā
The emperor wants godhood. The god wants to rule the gods. The king of the gods looks higher still, and even there, the thirst does not turn back.
Garuda Purana, Preta Khanda 12.14
No modern behavioural economist has drawn the graph more cleanly. The verse identifies trishna, thirst, as a structural feature of acquisition, not a personal flaw of the greedy: satisfaction is not located at any rung of the ladder, because the wanting renews at every rung, all the way past heaven. Researchers who study lottery winners and rising salaries call the modern version the hedonic treadmill: the baseline resets, the thirst survives every raise. The text drew the treadmill fifteen centuries early, and put a god-emperor on it to make the point unmissable: if more were the cure, somebody up the ladder would have been cured by now.
The Audit From the Riverbank
So the book of death turns to money with its unique qualification: it has already shown you where the ladder ends. Recall the chapter's inheritance from the road. Wealth stops at the house. The estate is confiscated at the border, in full. And one river, Vaitarani, is crossed on exactly one currency: what was given, freely, while the sun still shone.