Good Before, During, & After

We’re beginning the new year. Everybody is wishing everyone else “Happy New Year.” You have to stop and think for a bit: Where does happiness come from? From the Buddha’s point of view, it comes from what you do. So when you say, “Happy New Year,” you’re basically saying, “May you act skillfully all throughout the year,” because if you want happiness, you have to create the causes for it. There is, of course, happiness that comes from your past karma. But you don’t want to just be eating up your good past karma. You want to be producing good new karma.

So you think about the different ways you can find happiness. The Buddha sets out three: generosity, virtue, meditation. We have to reflect on the fact that these are all skills. Generosity seem to be the easiest of them, but it’s actually not all that easy to do it well. When the Buddha was asked where should you give a gift, he said give where you feel inspired. In other words, you have freedom of choice. And that’s a good part of the generosity: that you’re free to give.

This is one of the reasons why the monks have rules that, when someone comes and asks us, “Where should I give this gift?” we basically say, “Give where you feel inspired or you feel it would be well used.” In other words, it’s up to the donor. The goodness is generated inside by your sense of inspiration. But you have to think about it beforehand when you’re giving something—how happy it is that you have the opportunity to give something, that you have the opportunity to share. You’re wealthy enough to share. By your giving, you see the recipient taking what you’ve got, and you make yourself happy with that. Your plan for doing good now has succeeded. The gift has gone to someone else.

Just what they do with it is up to them. Which means that, afterwards, if they do things that you don’t like with it, you have to ask yourself: Is it because they’re actually doing something wrong with it? If they’re doing something wrong, choose another recipient for your next gift. But sometimes you bring some food, and the monks don’t eat the food. They choose not to. Well you’ve gotten the merit of the generous gift. But then you say, “Well, I don’t want to give them anything, anymore, because they don’t like my stuff.” That spoils the merit of your first gift. You want to be happy before, happy during, and happy afterwards. Happy that you’ve got this opportunity to be generous. You’ve been able to act on it. You were able to overcome any stingy motivations inside. Now you’ve succeeded in what you planned. Think in these ways. That’s part of the skill of giving.

Virtue is also a skill. There are times when it’s convenient to break the precepts. And it’s all too easy to say, especially with the precept against lying, that, “Well, it’s for that other person’s own good that I don’t tell them the truth.” Or, “I’m being compassionate.” A lot of times, though, it just becomes convenience. You want to look good in somebody else’s eyes, so you lie a little bit. And you learn how to excuse that to yourself. So you’ve got to learn how to overcome that. When you can overcome that, there should be a sense of self-worth, a sense of self-esteem that you’ve got a precept there that’s worth more than convenience. It’s worth more than looking good in other people’s eyes. You’ve got a principle in your own heart. Again, learn how to be happy before, and during, and after, and in that way. you get the most happiness out of that gift, out of that act of virtue.

Then, of course, with the meditation, this is most obviously a skill, because it does take effort to get the mind to settle down and to stay there, and then to get good use out of the mind once it’s been trained. But again, reflect on the fact that you’ve got this opportunity. How many people in the world right now don’t have this opportunity at all? There are lots of people—suffering all kinds of problems. Even though they’re in the human realm, they just don’t have the opportunity. And you can imagine what it’s like in the lower realms. Animals don’t have the opportunity to train their minds. Beings further down have even more trouble. You’ve got this opportunity right now, so be happy you have the opportunity. Whether you meditate well, or the meditation isn’t going as you like, remember that a bad session of meditation is better than no meditation at all.

Try to take advantage of the opportunity you have. In that way, you take the goodness you’ve already developed and you learn how to expand on it. You learn how to invest it to get even more goodness in return. This way you become a connoisseur of happiness. You become skilled in happiness, a craftsperson in happiness—because it is a craft. It is a skill. So learn how to approach it that way. Put some thought into being generous, into being virtuous, and into meditation, and you find you get a lot more out of it.