Generosity First

　　Thanissaro Bhikkhu

　　March, 2003

　　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 serious, 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 Buddhism 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 a sense of confidence that will get them through the hard parts of the meditation.

　　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 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, lifting them up, and helping them put a spoonful of rice into the monk”s bowl. Over time, 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 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 that there”s a deeper happiness that comes from giving, there”s a 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 develo…

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