In the spirit of this still being a relatively new year, I thought that I would talk about what are perhaps the most essential teachings of the Buddha: the beginning teachings. I was wondering, where do you start?
So I researched the way the Buddha taught, and found that he taught according to this gradual path. They say that he would come into a new community, and then with his Dharma eye, or psychic powers, he would assess the level of the students, and what teaching they were prepared for. But in the absence of that, the very first thing in this gradual path is the teachings on generosity.
The Buddha really emphasized generosity as a quality that makes it easier to navigate what it is to be a human being. He said that if people knew the results of giving in the way that I know them, even their last morsel of food, they would share, if there was someone to share it with.
There’s a story of a little girl who’s on a school bus. She comes to the front of the school bus, and hands the driver a handful of peanuts. He says thank you, and he enjoys eating the peanuts. A few minutes later, the girl offers the driver another handful of peanuts, and the he thanks her. The third time the little girl comes up with peanuts, the bus driver says no thanks, you enjoy those with your friends, dear, I’ve had enough. And the little girl says, we just like sucking the chocolate off of them.
So this is not generosity. When you’re practicing generosity, to paraphrase Kahlil Gibran, you should feel the little pinch. And that pinch is your stinginess protesting.
If you give away your old worn-out coat you wouldn’t be caught dead in, that’s not generosity. You’re doing nothing to overcome your stinginess, you’re just cleaning out your closet and calling it something else. Giving away your coat might keep someone warm, but it doesn’t address the problem we face as spiritual practitioners to free ourselves from grasping.
This is one of the reasons that the Buddha made the teaching of dana, giving, letting go, so primary. Because the heart of the path is letting go. And when we are generous, we’re practicing letting go. And generosity is one of the few things that brings immediate happiness.
I think about how good it feels to give a gift to someone. Or give your time, or support a cause that you care about. It’s like an instant happiness loop.
And we’re sitting here in this uninterrupted stream of 2,500 years of generosity. For 500 years, these teachings were memorized by people because they hadn’t been written down. One version of the Pali Canon is 45 volumes, ranging from 500 to 700 pages in length. Because of the enormity of the text, to commit these teachings to memory basically required that you dedicate your life to doing so. It meant a life of renunciation, a life of simplicity. Those teachings were handed down mouth to ear for 500 years; eventually written down, and somehow through wars, famines, and all the things that have happened in humanity, they made their way here to us. Only because of the generosity of those people that preserved it.
So there are many ways to practice generosity. We can practice generosity with our financial resources, with our things, but also our time, our energy, our attention, our care.
One form of generosity that I’m trying to cultivate in my own life is the generosity of attention. The way that practice works for me is that if someone’s talking to me, I will put down whatever I’m doing, literally and figuratively, to give them the fullness of my attention. And it’s strange. Just the other day, I was on my computer, when my colleague came into the room. I closed my computer, and looked at her. She was like, what? What are you looking at? What’s going on? It really took her by surprise that I did that.
But this practice of giving attention has enhanced all my relationships in immeasurable ways. Being generous is an active expression of loving-kindness, and it brings us more into the relational field. Even science nowadays is telling us that having strong relational supports correlates very highly with lifespan and healthspan. Generosity kind of waters this soil of interconnectedness.
There’s a barber who decided he was going to practice generosity. He said the first customer who comes in, I’m gonna give them free whatever service they want. So the first day, it was a florist. When it came time to pay, the barber said, it’s okay, this is on me, I’m practicing generosity. And the next day, there were a dozen roses at his door. Reciprocity of generosity. The second day, it was a baker. The next day, he got a dozen muffins. And then the third day, it was a politician that came in. And the next day, there were a dozen politicians lined up to get their free haircuts.
So when generosity is offered, the question is not just what’s given, but how do we receive? For many of us, it’s hard to receive. The gift, however, is not diminished by how others respond. It’s our own spirit of letting go, our own appreciation, our own reciprocity of heart.
How we receive becomes a kind of diagnostic. Does the heart move toward gratitude or entitlement?
The recipe that society gives for happiness, well-being, contentment, satisfaction, belonging, is acquisitional. So we can be happy when… fill in the blank. The right job, the right partner, the right status, the right amount of money, right education, whatever it might be. But it’s very hard to arrange life in that sort of perfect way, where we got all the things that we want and we don’t get any of the things that we don’t want.
As the great sage Mick Jagger said, we can’t always get what we want.
Joseph Goldstein says, the practice of generosity is the beginning of letting go. Every act of giving is a moment of non-clinging, a moment of freedom. In this way, generosity becomes the whole of the path. There’s a famous quote from Ajahn Chah: “If you let go a little, you’ll have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you’ll have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you’ll have complete peace.”
Generosity often comes with the sense of there being enough, or even abundance, which I’ve learned doesn’t actually depend on your bank balance or your net worth.
An anthropologist was interviewing an Appalachian woman living very remotely, in a dirt shack, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. And in the course of the interview, he asked her what she would do if she came into a lot of money. She thought about it for a while, and then she said, “I guess I’d give it to the poor.”
Well, I’ll end with this. I am very inspired by this quote from Mark Morford. He used to write for the San Francisco Chronicle. “Realize that for every ongoing war and religious outrage, environmental devastation, and bogus war plan, there are a thousand million counterbalancing acts of staggering generosity and humanity and art and beauty happening all over the world right now, on a breathtaking scale, from flower box to cathedral.”
I think it’s noteworthy that he wrote this in 2001. We always feel like every generation, it’s the worst. I was talking to some boomers the other day, and they were like, it’s a cakewalk compared to what we did in the 60s. And I’m sure if you talked to the older generation, it would have been World War II. There’s no comparison. So I always like to widen the view.
Warmly,
Gullu
__________________________________________________________________________
Bring your practice into community and deepen your practice of mindfulness:
Join Next Week’s Community Dharma Nights – Experience guided meditation, teachings, and connection with fellow practitioners. Register Here
Explore Weekly Sits & Group Events – Find a regular practice space to support your mindfulness journey. Upcoming Classes