A Pocket for Your Merit

We’ve come to the monastery to make merit, which basically means to do good. You do good by being generous, do good by being virtuous—in other words, avoiding harmful actions, and you do good by training your mind.

Try to develop some thoughts of goodwill inside. Think how you’d like to have a happiness that doesn’t harm anybody—doesn’t harm you, doesn’t harm anybody else—a happiness that lasts. You’re going to have to find that by training the mind.

You think about the happiness of other people, too: May they be happy. You don’t want to harm them, but at the same time, you realize that your simply not harming them is not going to make them happy. They have to create the causes for happiness within themselves as well.

So when you think of other people—people close to you in your family, people further away—if you want them to be happy, make your determination that they would understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them. In other words, may they create good karma, too. That’s a wish you can have for anybody, even people who’ve been behaving really horribly in the past. If they could change their ways, you’d be satisfied.

Now, some people say, “I’d like to have a little bit of revenge first.” Or they might dress it up as “justice,” done first, for people who’ve been doing horrible things. But, oftentimes, when people are being punished, they don’t see that they’re the ones at fault. They don’t connect their misdeeds with their punishment. So there’s no need to wish for anybody to be punished, anybody to get, as we say, “their just desserts.” Just say, “May they change their ways and become more skillful.”

That’s a happy thought. It’s a happy thought that allows your mind to settle down. You feel good about yourself; you feel good about other people. You realize that not everybody is going to change their ways, if their ways are bad, but at least you don’t wish any harm on anybody.

With that, you can focus in on your breath. The breath’s coming in, going out. Let it come in and go out in a way that feels good. You could try longer breathing, shorter breathing. Faster, slower. Heavier, lighter. Just be with the breath coming in, breath coming out. And think of the whole body breathing. This way, you give your mind a home here in the present moment. And it’s a good place to stay, a good place to see what’s going on inside the mind as well.

So when you come to do good, you want to make sure the good is all around, and that it goes deep into the heart. After all, the heart is where you keep all your goodness. If your heart is leaking out your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body all the time, it’s like a pocket that has holes in it. You put money in the pocket, and it goes right through the holes. Are you going to blame the money? It’s not the fault of the money; it’s the fault of the pocket. The pocket’s got a lot of holes. So you sew it up. Patch it up so that there are no holes.

The same way with your mind: You train your mind to find some happiness inside, where it can be at home right here. That way, it has a good place to keep all of its goodness. When you need it, it’s there. It’s not going to go leaking out anywhere.

So. Make sure that your goodness is all around, and especially that you develop the goodness that comes from training the heart and mind. That’s the source of all goodness, and that’s where all goodness is kept.