Yudhisthira said: “I desire, O bull of Bharata’s race, to hear in detail the source from which sin proceeds and the foundation on which it rests.”

Bhishma said: “Hear, O King, what the foundation is of sin. Covetousness alone is a great destroyer of merit and goodness. From covetousness proceeds sin. It is from this source that sin and irreligiousness flow, together with great misery. This covetousness is the spring also of all the cunning and hypocrisy in the world. It is covetousness that makes men sin...”

Bhishma isn’t alone in naming greed as the pre-eminent sin. Buddhism, in essence, rests on a practiced abhorrence of the ways of desiring. The Visuddhimagga explicitly counsels: “Greed is the real dirt, not dust …the wise have shaken off this dirt, and in the dirt-free man’s religion, live.”

The Tao Teh Ching, too, tells us that, “there is no greater calamity than indulging in greed” and the Guru Granth Sahib or Adi Granth, the holy book of the Sikhs, delivers the same news: “Where there is greed, what love can there be?”

In the West, it is Judaism and, by declension, Christianity that has appointed greed as the matriarch of all other sins. Long before Sinai and the giving to Moses of the Law, there was Noah and the seven laws or mishpathim that are presented in the book of Genesis. They were the governing principles of Judaism before the Ten Commandments, and sketched in the first parameters of Jewish moral and religious thought. — Beliefnet.com