"The result from giving to charity is to gain a greater sense of goodness in yourself, that you have done something selfless.”

"The result from giving to charity is to gain a greater sense of goodness in yourself, that you have done something selfless.”

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Question: How should I train myself in order to reduce ego and to cultivate detachment from the dāna that I make?

When I donate $5 or $10, my ego is small, but when I donate $1,000 my ego gets bigger. It is also similar to when I am helping out in the temple for an hour, and my ego is smaller compared to when I spend time helping for more hours when my ego is bigger.

Tan Ajahn: When you do dāna, you must do it altruistically and not want anything in return. You just want to feel good, that is all.

People are sometimes confused; especially some Buddhists think that giving to charity will give them a happier/better life. This is not the result that you will get from giving to charity. The result from giving to charity is to gain a greater sense of well-being, of fullness, of goodness in yourself, that you have done something selfless. You want to eliminate your ego.

Giving dāna is one way of cutting down your ego. And you find doing this hard, because the more you give, the stronger your ego gets and resists your giving. But if you can win this battle over yourself, then it means you have moved forward.

In the past, if you used to give $5, then now you want to give $10, and you find it difficult to do, you must force yourself to do it. If you can do it, you will feel much better than giving the $5, and the next time you will want to give more than that.

You can do this by asking yourself, do I really need to keep this money? If the answer is no, then what do you keep it for? You are not going to use it anyway. When you die, you cannot take it with you. Why not give it away? When you give it away, you will feel proud that you have done certain things that you could not do before.

You should also think of great people like the Lord Buddha. All these people gave up everything that they had. The Buddha was a prince and was willing to give up his princely life to live like a beggar. If he hadn’t done this, he wouldn’t have become a Buddha.

If you want to be able to be successful in your meditation, you have to be willing to give up everything. By giving gradually at first. It is just a step-by-step approach to get you more accustomed to giving, to sacrificing, to letting go of your attachments, and to eliminating your ego. These are the things that are important if you want to move forward.

“Dhamma for the Asking, Dec 2, 2014”

By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
www.phrasuchart.com

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