Giving

Close your eyes. Take a couple of long, good in-and-out breaths. Where do you feel the breathing in the body? Focus your attention there. Then ask yourself: Does long breathing feel good? Watch it for a while, and if it feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change. You can make it short, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Pay attention to see what breathing feels good right now. As for any other thoughts you may have at the moment, just let them go, let them go. You’ve got more important work to do, which is training your mind to give rise to inner worth, inner wealth.

We live in a strange world, where they think that people with a lot of money and a lot of things are wealthy. Actually it’s the people with good qualities of the mind: Those are the ones who are wealthy. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha encourages generosity. When you give something away, it has to be voluntary. The Buddha doesn’t force people to give or encourage forcing people to give. You give where and when you feel inspired. But when you do feel inspired to give, you realize that you’re making a trade. The material object goes, but your mind expands.

You know, of course, there are lots of other ways of being generous. Besides material objects you can be generous with your time, generous with your strength, generous with your forgiveness, generous with what you know of the Dhamma. All these things count as generosity. The more you give away, the more you get in return.

In terms of the good qualities of your mind, you don’t have to wait till you die to see the results of this. They’re right here, right now. When you’re able to give something away, there’s a sense of your wealth—that you have more than enough. People who just hold on and hold on and hold on, are poor. No matter how many things they have, they’re still poor. But those of us who see that by giving away, the mind expands: We see that it’s a much better trade.

Ajaan Lee compares it to squeezing juice out of some fruit. When you give a gift, what you’re giving is actually the leftover remains of the fruit. What you keep with you is the juice, the good part of the material thing—because what’s good about material things is that you can share them. In and of themselves, they don’t provide that much happiness. But when you give something away, that goes deep into the heart.

The Buddha said so many aspects of the Dhamma, so many levels of the Dhamma were based on giving away. Which is why when he taught the Dhamma the very first topic would be generosity. The first point of right view is: There is giving. “Of course,” you may think. “Of course there’s giving.” But what he meant was that there’s something important that happens when you give a gift, in that you have the choice to give or not to give, and in the fact that you made the choice to give. That’s something that’s worthwhile. The recipient is also worthwhile. It means there’s value in the act of giving.

So you learn how to appreciate it. Because as the Buddha pointed out, when you give, you can feel good about it before hand, that you have let go of some stinginess. You feel good while you’re giving it, and then you feel good afterwards. There are so many types of happiness in the world where you’re happy in anticipation but not all that happy in actually doing it, and then there are bad results that come down the line afterwards. Whereas with voluntary giving, it’s good all the way: good in the thought, good in the intention, good in the giving, and good in the reflection afterwards. This is why so many of the teachings in addition to right view—the perfections, the types of merit—all begin with giving.

When the Buddha was going to teach people about how to gain awakening, he started with the talk on giving. When the mind is willing to give, it’s a mind that’s willing to give up its defilements. The problem is that when you hold onto material things, then you end up holding onto all kinds of things. But when you see the benefit that comes with voluntarily giving something up, then you’re more likely to give up things that are closer and closer to your heart: things like your greed, your aversion, and your delusion. These are things we’re very possessive of. Yet what do they do for us? They pull us down.

So as you’re seeking happiness now and on into the future, think about things you can give away. And be happy to give away, be happy that you have the opportunity to do that. So many people in the world just don’t have enough to share. But when a lot of people who on the outside look like they have very little to share, are nevertheless still able to share, it shows that they’re wealthy.

When I was in Thailand there was a young couple. All they had was a tiny little shack just big enough for the two of them to lie down in, a little tiny kitchen behind that, and that was it. Yet they would put food in my bowl. They felt they had enough to share, so they were wealthy in that sense. Think about it: You have many more things than they have, but if you can’t give them away, you should be embarrassed. They saw the value of generosity, that as human beings living with one another we have to be generous with one another. This is what makes human society a good place to live.

You create your environment by your choices to give or not give. So when you have the opportunity to give, take it. You’ll benefit now and on into the future.