Generosity First

Generosity First

Several years ago, when Ajaan Suwat was teaching a retreat at IMS, I was his interpreter. 

After the second or third day of the retreat he turned to me and said, "I notice that when these people meditate they're awfully grim." 

You'd look out across the room and all the people were sitting there very seriously, their faces tense, their eyes closed tight. It was almost as if they had Nirvana or Bust written across their foreheads.

He attributed their grimness to the fact that most people here in the West come to Buddhist meditation without any preparation in other Buddhist teachings. They haven't had any experience in being generous in line with the Buddha's teachings on giving. They haven't had any experience in developing virtue in line with the Buddhist precepts. They come to the Buddha's teachings without having tested them in daily life, so they don't have the sense of confidence they need to get them through the hard parts of the meditation. They feel they have to rely on sheer determination instead.

If you look at the way meditation, virtue, and generosity are taught here, it's the exact opposite of the order in which they're taught in Asia. 

Here, people sign up for a retreat to learn some meditation, and only when they show up at the retreat center do they learn they're going to have to observe some precepts during the retreat. And then at the very end of the retreat they learn that before they'll be allowed to go home they're going to have to be generous. It's all backwards.

Over in Thailand, children's first exposure to Buddhism, after they've learned the gesture of respect, is in giving. You see parents taking their children by the hand as a monk comes past on his alms round, lifting them up, and helping them put a spoonful of rice into the monk's bowl. Over time, as the children start doing it themselves, the process becomes less and less mechanical, and after a while they begin to take pleasure in giving.

At first this pleasure may seem counterintuitive. The idea that you gain happiness by giving things away doesn't come automatically to a young child's mind. But with practice you find that it's true. After all, when you give, you put yourself in a position of wealth. The gift is proof that you have more than enough. At the same time it gives you a sense of your worth as a person. You're able to help other people. The act of giving also creates a sense of spaciousness in the mind, because the world we live in is created by our actions, and the act of giving creates a spacious world: a world where generosity is an operating principle, a world where people have more than enough, enough to share. 

And it creates a good feeling in the mind.

From there, the children are exposed to virtue: the practice of the precepts. 

And again, from a child's point of view it's counterintuitive that you're going to be happy by not doing certain things you want to do — as when you want to take something, or when you want to lie to cover up your embarrassment or to protect yourself from criticism and punishment. But over time you begin to discover that, yes, there is a sense of happiness, there is a sense of wellbeing that comes from being principled, from not having to cover up for any lies, from avoiding unskillful actions, from having a sense that unskillful actions are beneath you.

So by the time you come to meditation through the route of giving and being virtuous, you've already had experience in learning that there are counterintuitive forms of happiness in the world. When you've been trained through exposure to the Buddha's teachings, you've learned the deeper happiness that comes from giving, the deeper happiness that comes from restraining yourself from unskillful actions, no matter how much you might want to do them. 

By the time you come to the meditation you've developed a certain sense of confidence that so far the Buddha has been right, so you give him the benefit of the doubt on meditation.

This confidence is what allows you to overcome a lot of the initial difficulties: the distractions, the pain. 

At the same time, the spaciousness that comes from generosity gives you the right mindset for the concentration practice, gives you the right mindset for insight practice — because when you sit down and focus on the breath, what kind of mind do you have? The mind you've been creating through your generous and virtuous actions. A spacious mind, not the narrow mind of a person who doesn't have enough. It's the spacious mind of a person who has more than enough to share, the mind of a person who has no regrets or denial over past actions. In short, it's the mind of a person who realizes that true happiness doesn't see a sharp dichotomy between your own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others.

The whole idea that happiness has to consist either in doing things only for your own selfish motives or for other people to the sacrifice of yourself — the dichotomy between the two — is something very Western, but it's antithetical to the Buddha's teachings. According to the Buddha's teachings, true happiness is something that, by its nature, gets spread around. By working for your own true benefit, you're working for the benefit of others. And by working for the benefit of others, you're working for your own. In the act of giving to others you gain rewards. In the act of holding fast to the precepts, holding fast to your principles, protecting others from your unskillful behavior, you gain as well. You gain in mindfulness; you gain in your own sense of worth as a person, your own self-esteem. You protect yourself.

So you come to the meditation ready to apply the same principles to training in tranquillity and insight. You realize that the meditation is not a selfish project. You're sitting here trying to understand your greed, anger, and delusion, trying to bring them under control — which means that you're not the only person who's going to benefit from the meditation. 

Other people will benefit — are benefiting — as well. As you become more mindful, more alert, more skillful in undercutting the hindrances in your mind, other people are less subject to those hindrances as well. Less greed, anger, and delusion come out in your actions, and so the people around you suffer less. Your meditating is a gift to them.

The quality of generosity, what they call caga in Pali, is included in many sets of Dhamma teachings. One is the set of practices leading to a fortunate rebirth. This doesn't apply only to the rebirth that comes after death, but also to the states of being, the states of mind you create for yourself moment to moment, that you move into with each moment. You create the world in which you live through your actions. By being generous — not only with material things but also with your time, your energy, your forgiveness, your willingness to be fair and just with other people — you create a good world in which to live. If your habits tend more toward being stingy, they create a very confining world, because there's never enough. 

There's always a lack of this, or a lack of that, or a fear that something is going to slip away or get taken away from you. So it's a narrow, fearful world you create when you're not generous, as opposed to the confident and wide-open world you create through acts of generosity.

Generosity also counts as one of the forms of Noble Wealth, because what is wealth aside from a sense of having more than enough? 

Many people who are materially poor are, in terms of their attitude, very wealthy. And many people with a lot of material wealth are extremely poor. The ones who never have enough: They're the ones who always need more security, always need more to stash away. 

Those are the people who have to build walls around their houses, who have to live in gated communities for fear that other people will take away what they've got. That's a very poor kind of life, a confined kind of life. But as you practice generosity, you realize that you can get by on less, and that there's a pleasure that comes with giving to people. Right there is a sense of wealth. You have more than enough.

At the same time you break down barriers. Monetary transactions create barriers. 

Somebody hands you something, you have to hand them money back, so there's a barrier right there. Otherwise, if you didn't pay, the object wouldn't come to you over the barrier. 

But if something is freely given, it breaks down a barrier. You become part of that person's extended family. In Thailand the terms of address that monks use with their lay supporters are the same they use with relatives. 

The gift of support creates a sense of relatedness. The monastery where I stayed — and this includes the lay supporters as well as the monks — was like a large extended family. 

This is true of many of the monasteries in Thailand. 

There's a sense of relatedness, a lack of boundary.

We hear so much talk on "interconnectedness." 

Many times it's explained in terms of the teaching on dependent co-arising, which is really an inappropriate use of the teaching. 

Dependent co-arising teaches the connectedness of ignorance to suffering, the connectedness of craving to suffering. That's a connectedness within the mind, and it's a connectedness that we need to cut, because it keeps suffering going on and on and on, over and over again, in many, many cycles. But there's another kind of connectedness, an intentional connectedness, that comes through our actions. These are kamma connections. 

Now, we in the West often have problems with the teachings on kamma, which may be why we want the teachings on connectedness without the kamma. 

So we go looking elsewhere in the Buddha's teachings to find a rationale or a basis for a teaching on connectedness, but the real basis for a sense of connectedness comes through kamma. When you interact with another person, a connection is made.

Now, it can be a positive or a negative connection, depending on the intention. With generosity you create a positive connection, a helpful connection, a connection where you're glad that the boundary is down, a connection where good things can flow back and forth. If it's unskillful kamma, you're creating a connection, you're creating an opening that sooner or later you're going to regret. There's a saying in the Dhammapada that a hand without a wound can hold poison and not be harmed. In other words, if you don't have any bad kamma, the results of bad kamma won't come to you. 

But if you have a wound on your hand, then if you hold poison it will seep through the wound and kill you. Unskillful kamma is just that, a wound. It's an opening for poisonous things to come in.

The opposite principle also works. If there's a connection of skillful behavior, a good connection is formed. This sort of positive connection starts with generosity, and grows with the gift of virtue. As the Buddha said, when you hold to your precepts no matter what, with no exceptions, it's a gift of security to all beings. You give unlimited security to everyone, and so you have a share in that unlimited security as well. With the gift of meditation, you protect other people from the effects of your greed, anger, and delusion. And you get protected as well.

So this is what generosity does: It makes your mind more spacious and creates good connections with the people around you. It dissolves the boundaries that otherwise would keep the happiness from spreading around.

When you come to the meditation with that state of mind, it totally changes the way you approach meditating. So many people come to meditation with the question, "What am I going to get out of this time I spend meditating?" Particularly in the modern world, time is something we're very poor in. So the question of getting, getting, getting out of the meditation is always there in the background. 

We're advised to erase this idea of getting, yet you can't erase it if you've been cultivating it as a habitual part of your mind. But if you come to the meditation with experience in being generous, the question becomes "What do I give to the meditation?" You give it your full attention. You give it the effort, you're happy to put in the effort, because you've learned from experience that good effort put into the practice of the Dhamma brings good results. 

And so that internal poverty of "What am I getting out of this meditation?" gets erased. 

You come to the meditation with a sense of wealth: "What can I give to this practice?"

You find, of course, that you end up getting a lot more if you start with the attitude of giving. 

The mind is more up for challenges: "How about if I give it more time? How about meditating later into the night than I usually do? 

 How about getting up earlier in the morning?

 How about giving more constant attention to what I'm doing? 

How about sitting longer through pain?" The meditation then becomes a process of giving, and of course you still get the results. When you're not so grudging of your efforts or time, you place fewer and fewer limitations on the process of meditation. That way the results are sure to be less grudging, more unlimited, as well. So it's important that we develop the Noble Wealth of generosity to bring to our meditation.

The texts mention that when you get discouraged in your meditation, when the meditation gets dry, you should look back on past generosity. This gives you a sense of self-esteem, a sense of encouragement. Of course, what generosity are you going to look back on if there is none? This is why it's important that you approach the meditation having practiced generosity very consciously.

Many times we ask, "How do I take the meditation back into the world?" 

But it's also important that you bring good qualities of the world into your meditation, good qualities of your day-to-day life, and that you develop them regularly. Thinking back on past acts of generosity gets dry after a while if there's only been one act of generosity that happened a long time ago. You need fresh generosity to give you encouragement.

So this is why, when the Buddha talked about the forms of merit, he said, "Don't be afraid of merit, for merit is another word for happiness." 

The first of the three main forms of merit is dana, giving, which is the expression of generosity. The gift of being virtuous builds on the simple act of giving, and the gift of meditation builds on both.

Of course, a large part of the meditation is letting go: letting go of distractions, letting go of unskillful thoughts. If you're used to letting go of material things, it comes a lot easier to begin experimenting with letting go of unskillful mental attitudes — things that you've held on to for so long that you think you need them, but when you really look at them you find you don't. In fact, you see that they're an unnecessary burden that causes suffering. When you see the suffering, and the fact that it's needless, you can let go. In this way, the momentum of giving carries all the way through the practice, and you realize that it's not depriving you of anything. It's more like a trade. You give away a material object and you gain in generous qualities of mind. 

You give away your defilements, and you gain freedom.

Out of: "Meditations 1: Forty Dhamma Talks", by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/meditations.html

Disenchantment by Phra Ajahn Suwat Suvaco Translated from the Thai by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Disenchantment by Phra Ajahn Suwat Suvaco
Translated from the Thai by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

We'll now start meditating, just as we've been doing every day. We have to look at this as an important opportunity. Even though our practice hasn't yet reached the Dhamma to our satisfaction, at the very least it's a beginning, an important beginning, in gathering the strength of the mind so that our mindfulness, concentration, and discernment will become healthy and mature. 

We should try to gather these qualities together so that they can reinforce one another in washing away the stains, the defilements, in our minds -- for when defilements arise, they don't lead to peace, purity, or respite for the mind. Just the opposite: they lead to suffering, unrest, and disturbance. 

They block any discernment that would know or see the Dhamma. 

There's no defilement that encourages us to practice the Dhamma, to know or see the Dhamma. They simply get in the way of our practice.

So whatever mental state gets in the way of our practice we should regard as a defilement -- for defilements don't come floating along on their own. They have to depend on the mind. Any mental state that's sleepy or lazy, any mental state that's restless, angry, or irritable: these are all defilements. They're mental states under the influence of defilement, overcome by defilement.

If any of these mental states arise within us, we should be aware of them. When the mind is sleepy, we should get it to keep buddho in mind so that it will wake up and shake off its sleepiness. When the mind is restless and irritable, we should use our discernment to reflect on things to see that these states of mind serve no purpose. Then we should quickly turn back to our concentration practice, planting the mind firmly in our meditation theme, not letting the mind get restless and distracted again.

We focus the mind on being aware of its meditation word, buddho -- what's aware, what's awake. We keep it in mind as if it were a post planted firmly in the ground. Don't let the mind wander from the foundation post on which you've focused. But whatever your focus, don't let your focus be tense. You have to keep the mind in a good mood while it's focused. Do this with an attitude of mindfulness and discernment, not one of delusion, wanting to know this or to see that or to force things to fall in line with your thoughts. If that's the way you meditate, your mood will grow tense and you won't be able to meditate for long. In no time at all you'll start getting irritable.

So if you want to meditate for a long time, you have to be neutral, with equanimity as your foundation. If you want knowledge, focus firmly on what you're already aware of. Keep your mind firmly in place. Find an approach that will help you stay focused without slipping away. For example, make an effort to keep your mind firmly intent and apply your powers of observation and evaluation to the basis of your buddho. All of these things have to be brought together at the same spot, along with whatever thinking you need to do so that mindfulness won't lapse, letting unskillful outside issues come barging in, or leaving an opening for internal preoccupations to arise in the heart, or letting yourself get disturbed by thoughts of the past -- things you knew or saw or said or did earlier today, or many days, many months, many years ago. You have to focus exclusively on the present.

If you've taken buddho as your meditation theme, keep coming back to it over and over again. Buddho stands for awareness. If you can maintain awareness without lapse, this will make an important difference. 

If you've taken the breath as your theme, you have to be aware each time the breath comes in and out. You can't let yourself wander off. You have to take nothing but the breath as the focal point for mindfulness. The same principles hold in either case. You do the same things, the only difference is the theme of your awareness.

Why does the Buddha teach us to focus on the breath? Because we don't have to look for it, don't have to guess about it, don't have to think it into being. It's a present phenomenon. 

There's no such thing as a past breath or a future breath. 

There's simply the breath coming in and out in the present. That's why it's appropriate for exercising our mindfulness, for gathering our mindfulness and awareness in a single place, for firmly establishing concentration.

So you can focus on either theme -- whichever one you've already meditated on and found that mindfulness can quickly get established without lapsing and can quickly produce a sense of stillness and peace. Set that theme up as your foundation. When you're starting out, focus on keeping that theme in mind.

Once the mind has had enough stillness, if you simply want it to become more still, the mind will get into a state where it isn't doing any work because it's not distracted in any way. If this happens, you have to start contemplating. 

In the foundations of mindfulness we're taught to contemplate the various aspects of the body in and of themselves. We don't have to contemplate anything else. If you want to contemplate from the angle of inconstancy, it's here in this body. 

If you want to contemplate from the angle of stress, it's here in this body. 

You can contemplate it from any angle at all. If you want to contemplate from the angle of eliminating passion and craving, you can look at things that are dirty and disgusting -- and you find that they fill the body. This is something that requires you to use your own intelligence. Whatever angle you use, you have to look into things so that they get more subtle and refined. Contemplate them again and again until you see things clearly in a way that gives rise to nibbida, or disenchantment, so that you aren't deluded into latching onto things and giving them meanings the way you used to.

Turn over a new mind, turning your views into new views. You no longer want your old mistaken views. Turning from your old views, give rise to right views. Turning from your old ways of thinking, give rise to right resolves -- to see the body as repulsive and unattractive. 

This is nekkhama-sankappa, the resolve for renunciation, the resolve to escape from sensual passion. We don't go thinking in other directions, or go roaming off in other directions. 

We try to go in the direction of escaping from the view that the body is beautiful. What the eye sees of the body is just the outer skin. It's never seen the filthy things inside. Even though it may have seen them from time to time, as when someone dies in an accident or when a patient is opened for surgery, there's something in the mind that keeps us from taking it to heart and giving rise to discernment. There's something that keeps us from contemplating things down to a level more subtle than what the eye sees. We see these things and then pass right over them. We don't get to a level profound enough to give rise to disenchantment.

So contemplate the body. If the mind has developed a strong enough foundation, it shouldn't stay stuck just at the level of stillness. 

But if you haven't yet reached that level of stillness, you can't skip over it. You first have to make the mind still, because a firm foundation of stillness is absolutely essential. 

If you try to contemplate before the mind has grown still, you'll give rise to knowledge that lasts only as long as you're in meditation. 

When you leave meditation and the mind is no longer firm, your new understandings will disappear. Your old understandings will come back, just as if you had never meditated. 

Whatever way you've been deluded in the past, that's how you'll be deluded again. 

Whatever views you've had before won't change into anything else. 

Whatever ways you've thought, you'll end up deluded just as before as long as your new ways of thinking aren't based on a foundation of stillness.

This is why stillness is so essential. 

We have to get the mind to gain strength from stillness and then let it contemplate the body in and of itself in terms of its 32 parts. You can choose any one of the parts, focusing on it until it's clear. Or you can focus on the parts in sets of five. When you reach the liquid parts, you can focus on them in sets of six, for there are 12 of them in all. You can contemplate them back and forth -- if your mindfulness hasn't yet been exercised to the point were it's firm, contemplate these things back and forth just as a preceptor teaches a new ordinand: kesa, loma, nakha, danta, taco (hair of the head, hair of the body, nails, teeth, skin), and the turning them around to taco, danta, nakha, loma, kesa. 

Then you can go onto the next set of five -- mansam, nharu, atthi, atthimiñjam, vakkam (muscle, tendons, bones, bone marrow, spleen). 

This is called contemplating them in sets of five.

This is how we start out exercising mindfulness. If, while you're practicing mindfulness in this way, a visual image of any of these five parts appears, catch hold of it and contemplate it so that it grows deeper and more refined. Contemplate it until you can divide the body into its parts, seeing that each part is just like this. 

Get so that you know the body inside and out, that you realize that other living beings are just like this, too. If you're looking to see what's unclean, you'll find it here. 

If you're looking to see what's not-self, you'll find it here. Turn these things over in your mind and question yourself as to whether they're constant. What kind of pleasure is there in these things? Is it worthwhile or not? Focus on these issues often, look at them often until you're adept, and the mind will finally be willing to accept the truth, changing from its old wrong ways of seeing things, and seeing them instead in line with the Dhamma as taught by the Buddha.

When your views change often in this way, the mind will experience a new kind of stillness and peace. It will turn away from the fevers of the fires of passion, aversion, and delusion; and turn into mindfulness, concentration, and discernment instead. Its knowledge and views will become clear. It will no longer waver. It will become brave and no longer afraid in the way it used to be -- for it has come to know the truth: that nothing gets pained aside from the aggregates; nothing dies aside from the elements. The mind gets firmly planted. It can meditate with a snug sense of confidence, with no fear of pain or illness or anything at all. You can separate things out all the way down. Even if death were to come at that point, you'd be content, for even though death doesn't come, these things have separated out of their own accord. You've contemplated them and seen them for what they are, each and every one.

So I ask that we all have firm principles in our contemplation. Be genuine in doing it -- don't just go through the motions -- for all these things are genuine. If we don't meditate, defilements will inhabit our thoughts, deceiving us so that we don't see things as they genuinely are. If we depend just on our eyes, they can fool us. The eye can see only the outside of things. 

It sees skin, and the skin can be made up to deceives us. It sees hair of the head, and hair can be made up to deceives us. It sees hair of the body -- things like eyebrows and beards, which can be dressed to deceive us. It sees fingernails and toenails, which can be made up to deceive us. It sees teeth, which can be treated to deceive us, so that we make all sorts of assumptions about them. The eye has no discernment. It lets us get deceived -- but it isn't what does the deceiving. The mind is what deceives itself. Once it deceives itself, it makes all sorts of assumptions about itself and falls for itself. When it makes itself suffer in this way, there's no help for it. This is the genuine truth. 

Know clearly that the mind is what deceives itself. When it doesn't have a refuge, it can deceive itself all the time.

So we have to develop qualities that the mind can hold to and take refuge in, so that defilements won't be able to keep on deceiving it. Look so that you can see more deeply through things. Try to analyze things to see what's not genuine, what's dressed and disguised. Then as soon as you look at anything, you'll see what's fake and made up. 

You'll know: "The real thing doesn't have this color, this smell, this shape." You'll see how things are always changing. 

This is called having the qualities of the Dhamma as your refuge, as something to hold to as you look, hear, smell, taste, and make contact with things. You'll have the qualities that know and see things as they actually are -- so they won't be able to deceive you. You won't be able to deceive yourself, for you'd be ashamed to. The heart grows disenchanted with itself, with its old ways -- and why would it want to deceive itself any more? It's seen that it doesn't gain any benefit from that kind of behavior.

Instead, you'll see that it really benefits from its new views. They make the mind still. Clear. 

Set free with a sense of well-being. All its heavy old burdens fall away. It has no greed for gaining a lot of things, for there's no more indulging. It doesn't use anything to indulge itself. All it needs is the four necessities to keep life going -- that's enough. It doesn't have to invest in anything. It finds its happiness and well-being in the stillness that comes from meditating. 

The things around it that it used to fall for and build up into ignorance without realizing it: when it focuses on really knowing these things, its delusions disband. Ignorance disappears. 

The mind gains knowledge from these things in line with what they actually are. It wises up and doesn't fall for these things as it used to, doesn't misunderstand them as it used to.

And that's the end of its problems.

Copyright © 2001 Thanissaro Bhikkhu

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