What is the moral of the story "The Bet" by Anton Chekhov?

proves that if a person achieved the highest wisdom he wouldnt care about money or material
things at all. He would be like Buddha or Jesus, both of whom owned nothing and wanted nothing.
This moral seems to be enhanced by the fact that the banker, whose whole life is devoted to
handling money and accumulating wealth, is not happy or enviable but has deteriorated morally
over the years.

When it comes time for him to pay the two million roubles, he
is so attached to his dwindling capital that he is actually contemplating murdering the prisoner
to get out of paying him for enduring fifteen years of solitary confinement. The story is told
from the banker's point of view, so he may not realize how low he has sunk in that period of
time, even though he was rich and had complete freedom.

Desperate gambling on the Stock Exchange, wild speculation and the excitability which
he could not get over even in advancing years, had by degrees led to the decline of his fortune
and the proud, fearless, self-confident millionaire had become a banker of middling rank,
trembling at every rise and fall in his investments. "Cursed bet!" muttered the old
man, clutching his head in despair. "Why didn't the man die? He is only forty now. He will
take my last penny from me, he will marry, will enjoy life, will gamble on the Exchange; while I
shall look at him with envy like a beggar, and hear from him every day the same sentence: 'I am
indebted to you for the happiness of my life, let me help you!' No, it is too much! The one
means of being saved from bankruptcy and disgrace is the death of that man!"

Not only is the banker seriously thinking of killing his prisoner,
but he is actually considering having the watchman implicated in the crime and possibly executed
for it or sent to Siberia.

"If I had the pluck to
carry out my intention," thought the old man, "suspicion would fall first upon the
watchman."

Fortunately for the banker, he finds a
note describing what his prisoner has learned in studying books in solitary confinement, as well
as what conclusions he has arrived at through his own meditations. Part of the note contains
this indictment:

"You have lost your reason and taken
the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty."

The most important part of the note, as far as the banker is
concerned, comes at the end:

"To prove to you in
action how I despise all that you live by, I renounce the two million of which I once dreamed as
of paradise and which I now despise. To deprive myself of the right to the money I shall go out
from here five hours before the time fixed, and so break the compact ..."

A complementary moral to the principal moral regarding the vanity
of materialism is that life imprisonment is a more humane form of punishment than the death
sentence. It was the young lawyer who argued in favor of life imprisonment fifteen years earlier
and the banker who said:

"I don't agree with you. . .
. I have not tried either the death penalry or imprisonment for life, but if one may judge
a priori, the death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment
for life."

The lawyer has not only proved that he
could endure fifteen years of solitary confinement, but he has proved that life imprisonment is
indeed more humane because it permits study and meditation, thereby enabling at least some
criminals to develop completely new characters.