Immaterial Gifts

When you meditate, you’re giving of yourself. You’re giving your energy. You’re giving your attention. This is a basic principle throughout all the Buddha’s teachings. If you want anything good in life, you have to be willing to give.

Giving, of course, here doesn’t just giving material things. There are a lot of things you can give that don’t cost any money at all. You can give your forgiveness to other people. They may have done things to offend you, done things to harm you, and forgiveness, here, doesn’t mean that you’re going to have to love them. It simply means that you’re not going to go for revenge. You’re going to let the matter drop right there. In that way, both sides benefit. You benefit from the fact that you’re not going to be taking on the bad karma of having to get back at the other person. The other person benefits in seeing your good example.

You can give the gift of virtue. As the Buddha said, if your observance of the precepts is total and all around, then you’re giving safety to the whole universe. Nobody has anything to fear from you. Now, there may be dangers coming to them from other places, but the area you’re responsible for is your own activity, your own choices of what to do and say and think. You want to make those safe. When you make those safe for other people, you get a share in that universal safety.

If there are exceptions to your virtue, it’s like putting a fence around your house and leaving big holes so that trucks can drive through, elephants can walk through in the back. The fence doesn’t have much meaning. It protects you in some ways, but wherever there are holes, danger can come in.

The same when you have exceptions to your precepts: some people that you would lie to, some people that you would take things from, circumstances when you would kill something. You have to make sure that if you want to be safe, you have to give safety to everybody. That way you give the gift of protection.

So. Lots of free gifts. If you have energy to help, even though you may not have the money to help with a particular project but you have the energy to contribute, that’s an important contribution. Without the energy, the money would be meaningless.

So there are ways you can give. We all have resources that we can share, and it’s good to think about what you have that you can share. You can give your goodwill. You can give your compassion. You can give your empathetic joy. You can give your restraint. All of these are free gifts. So it’s not the case that you have to work and get wealthy before you can be generous. You can be generous all the time.

We’re born into this world and we have potentials. We have our legacy of the good things we’ve done in the past, which takes the form of different strengths that we have. So use your strengths well. Be generous with them, and more good things will come back your way.