Hello and welcome back to our study of the Dhammapada.
Today we continue on with verse 177, which reads as follows.
Which means,
Indeed the stingy do not go to heaven.
Fools indeed do not rejoice in, do not rejoice in gifts.
And the wise, or but the wise, who
rejoice in giving, for that they are happy in the hereafter.
So another one of these verses about going to heaven because of giving.
I want to stress that this isn't a deep teaching of the Buddha.
I don't think you could look at this and find some deep psychological or meditative lesson from it.
I'm going to get something of that sort from it but a little more from the story and we're going to talk about why it is.
I mean what's interesting for us as meditators is why is it that things like giving are, there's a claim that they lead to things like heaven.
I mean, there's a lot there and it's quite, it's a source of skepticism.
It sounds like a sort of self-serving teaching.
where you teach this, and what you're really teaching is give, and not only give, as you'll see with the story, give to me.
Give to Buddhism.
The story is talking about how people give to Buddhism, and how that's a good thing, and it leads you to heaven.
That rings warning bells, I think, with many people.
It's just the sort of thing that religious people do is ask for gifts or talk about giving.
I don't think Buddhism is innocent.
Buddhism certainly is, but the Buddhist organization as a whole, there's far too much emphasis on giving.
And so the emphasis on these sorts of stories
has to be tempered with understanding that, yes, giving is good, but
there's no reason for us to emphasize this teaching to such degree, besides a desire to get things, right?
This is the problem, is that if there's a desire, then these are the sorts of teachings that are going to be emphasized.
Now that being said, giving is good, and giving does lead to things like heaven, but heaven has never been our goal in Buddhism.
And this teaching, I'll tell the story, I won't drag this out too much, but
This story was taught to a king and that right there should tell you the sort of the level that this teaching is on.
This king wasn't even, he wasn't Bimbisara who was a Sotapanna and a meditator and a very powerful individual.
This is King Pasenadi who was a bit of a, well he wasn't, what's the word, he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer.
He was a great man and a great king in many ways, but I don't think he was entirely good and I don't think he was particularly wise.
It seems like he often blundered and did things that were often morally questionable.
But he really appreciated the Buddha and so one day he decided to, the Buddha came back from his travels and the king decided to give him a great gift, give a gift to all the monks.
And so he gave gifts and he invited all of his citizens to come and watch, to come and see, oh look what the king has done, look what I have done.
And so they all came and they saw this.
And rather than just appreciating it, which is a good thing, the appreciation of, it wasn't just a brag, you know.
I mean, inviting all of them there may have been partly to impress the citizenry.
But it also is an approved sort of practice.
Just as giving is approved, and it is a good practice, encouraging others to appreciate or giving other people the opportunity to appreciate is also a good thing.
And the answer to why that is, why these things are, why is giving good, why is even appreciation good, it does have something to do with meditation.
And that's, I think, where this story becomes quite interesting to us.
But bear with me, we've got a story to get through.
It's just all about giving, really.
So the citizens saw this and they decided, well,
If the king can give, we can give too.
And so they, the next day, invited all the monks.
But they gave better than the king.
And they invited the king to see their gift, their gifts.
And so the king came and saw that they had given more and greater than he had given.
And he was disturbed and he said, well, I can't let them outdo me.
And so the next day he invited the Buddha and gave even better gifts.
Invited the citizenry.
The citizen saw this.
Next day they invited the monks and gave even better gifts and better gifts.
And so it went back and forth like a ping pong match.
Six times, the text says.
Six times the citizens outdid the king and the king finally decided, I don't think I can outdo them.
There's just so many of them and they have such, they have actually perhaps greater resources than I do.
And so,
He felt very depressed and he lay down on his bed and he started to wonder what he could do.
And the queen came, Queen Mallika, who it seems was the smarter of the two.
She was quite a bit wiser than the king, I think.
And she asked, what's wrong?
And he told her and he said, oh, well.
What you have to do is you have to give things that they can't give.
So what she had him do, she said, the story is get these white elephants and have them each hold a parasol over the monks and get a bunch of young princesses.
And I'm not really sure why.
I think the point is to find things that the ordinary citizens don't have access to.
I just had this picture of these monks sitting there trying to meditate and all these young women around them crushing perfume, apparently, and fanning them.
Could you imagine monks being fanned by young women?
That sort of thing, I guess, happened and perhaps continues to happen.
I think there's something inappropriate in the sense that a monk certainly wouldn't encourage young women to hang out and fan them and crush perfumes around them.
Again, there's also an allowance for things that kings do.
Kings sometimes want you to do strange things or want to do these sorts of things.
Well, there's no reason to object.
I mean, it's not against the Dhamma to let people to sit there when people are doing things.
There's nothing that says you have to get up and run away or tell them to stop.
still.
It's an interesting sort of setup that they had, but very grandois, the points, and certainly the citizens didn't have access to white elephants and that sort of thing.
So they got 500 white elephants and
It turns out in the end they only had 499.
They were missing an elephant.
And so the king said to the queen, what should we do?
We're missing an elephant.
Our giving is not complete because this grandois setup is not perfect.
One of the monks doesn't have an umbrella, isn't going to have an umbrella.
So she said, okay, don't you have other elephants?
And he said, well, we have...
They have all these rogue elephants.
These elephants are not trained.
They're unpredictable and they're very hot-tempered.
So if they came close to the monks, they might stomp on them or gore them to death.
And the queen said, well, I know what to do.
She said,
bring us one of those monks, one of these rogue elephants, and have it stand over Angulimala.
Now Angulimala was this monk who had previously been a murderer, a mass murderer.
The story goes that he killed hundreds of people.
He was feared.
People were terrified.
They wouldn't go near the place, the jungle where he lived.
And I guess the animals were frightened by him as well because they brought this elephant out with the parasol and they dragged it over to where Angulimala was standing and as soon as it came close to Angulimala it just stood like this.
That's what the story says.
Now I don't know how much of this is an embellishment but that's what the story says.
And then there's a verse about that.
No, there's a part.
What's interesting to us is it relates to the verse.
The king had two ministers.
And one of the ministers stood there watching the king giving food and gifts to the monks and having these
young princesses crushing perfumes and the elephants and just everything, just how expensive it was.
And he thought to himself, what a waste of money.
How much of the king's money is going into this?
I mean, first of all, he could have just given food to them, right?
Or whatever it is that he gave to the monks.
But to do all this for no purpose.
It's not like these monks are wealthy landowners who are paying taxes or they're not farmers who are going to support the kingdom or anything like that.
These are not dignitaries who are going to
swear their allegiance and their lands to the king.
These are monks.
They go back to their rooms and they just sit there and do nothing.
I think the text says they just eat and then they go and lie down and sleep, which I suppose might be true for some monks.
But I think I generally had the wrong idea about monks.
The other minister, there are two of them, the other one who was standing beside the king watching, he said,
Look at all this grand undertaking of the king.
What effort he has put into it.
And imagine how he feels inside and the greatness of his heart at this time.
And then it says something.
If you're reading the English, if you're following along with this English text, it's a mistranslation.
And it's confusing that the mistranslation says,
Yeah, mistranslation is just confusing.
But what Dipali says is, wow, this king, no one could give like this king.
The English is correct.
But then the next sentence is that there is no king.
who does not share or give the merit or the goodness, the benefit of the gift, the benefit of the giving, the greatness of the giving, doesn't share it with all beings.
Something like that.
I think that's what the Pali is.
There's no king that doesn't do that.
So what he's saying is that absolutely this king must be sharing this with all beings because that's what kings do is the implication.
And he says, so here I am and I appreciate.
I will set my mind in appreciation for the king's good gift, the king's great gift, unequaled gift.
And so he stood there appreciating and saying sad, thinking, this is good, this is good.
And it's good for me to appreciate, right?
This was the theory.
This is the idea.
We'll talk about that.
And then the monks asked Angulimala, hey, you must have been really afraid with that rogue elephant standing over you.
And Angulimala said, no, I wasn't afraid.
And the monk said to the Buddha, Angulimala, listen to him brag.
How could he not be afraid?
And the Buddha said, oh no, no.
There's no way he's afraid.
And there's a verse there as well.
We'll skip over that because it's not really related.
It's just sort of a side story.
That's Angulimala thing.
But then the Buddha got up and left.
And the king was bitterly disappointed.
He thought, I gave so much.
I stood before the Buddha and the Buddha didn't even say thank you.
He didn't appreciate.
I mean, thank you is not a word they use, but he didn't express appreciation.
He didn't even say anything.
He just got up and left.
And he didn't get angry at the Buddha, but he thought, something must be wrong.
What did I do?
I must have failed in some way.
The Buddha is disappointed in me.
I must have given something improper or not enough.
I don't know.
Something was wrong with what I did.
So he went to the monastery, caught up with the teacher, the Buddha, and asked him, he said, what did I do wrong?
The Buddha said, you didn't do anything wrong.
Everything you gave was perfect.
In fact, that sort of gift is not something, apparently it's something that a Buddha will only get once in his lifetime.
So once, every Buddha, once in their whole life, they will get this unexcelled gift giving.
That apparently is very impressive.
But the Buddha said the community of the people there was corrupted.
There was something imperfect about it.
There was a problem there.
And the problem was this one minister.
So I think part of this is the Buddha looking to make a point and to sort of correct something for the king and for this man, this minister who had the wrong idea.
And I think broader to teach this sort of lesson.
The lesson of how important are our mind states, how significant they are.
how powerful, how efficacious they are.
And so then he told the king this and the king went back and fired the one minister and promoted the other minister and so on and so on.
And then came back to the Buddha and said, it's amazing, you know, I had this great almsgiving.
This was just the pinnacle of my goodness, my career in regards to charity.
I'll never do anything like it.
And this silly man
ruined it.
No, he hurt me with that.
He destroyed my opportunity.
Didn't blame the Buddha, which was, I think, charitable of him.
I'm not saying the Buddha, I don't think the Buddha was, the Buddha wasn't wrong in this, but
The point is that the idea is to teach a lesson.
The Buddha says, yes, this is the way it is.
Foolish people don't appreciate giving.
As a result, they never go to heaven.
They have a
Their future is not bright.
But wise people rejoice in giving and appreciate giving, even the giving of others, and therefore are happy in the hereafter.
That's what the verse says.
So again, the story and the verse are all about giving and about the goodness of giving.
And that's true.
Giving is good.
But
It behooves us again to go over this again.
It behooves us to remind ourselves that that's not the focus of Buddhism and there's a danger there as well that we as Buddhist leaders and teachers get caught up in teaching people to give to us, right?
I mean, how perverse is that?
it's great and it's true that giving is good.
And to teach people to give, that's a good thing.
Even to teach people to give to Buddhist organizations is technically a good thing.
But let's put it in context.
Giving is good.
It's good for various reasons.
And if we're going to put it in context, let's talk about why it's good.
On a very base level, it's good for the organization.
You give, it's good for Buddhism, it's a good thing.
If you think Buddhism is a good thing, then giving to Buddhism and Buddhist organizations is good.
That's a very base and mundane reasoning.
I mean, that doesn't even make it bad because, hey, I think Buddhism is good, so I think it's good to support Buddhism.
But that's not why you go to heaven, because you give.
And that's not why giving is really good.
Giving is good
I can think of three aspects that are psychologically significant, and that's really what we're focused on.
Buddhism focuses on psychology.
That's what meditation is.
It's a sort of dealing with the mind, and working with the mind, and bettering the mind.
The first one is the most basic.
Giving.
is an act that involves affirming the goodness of various things.
The goodness, first of all, of the things that you are giving.
So when you give food, for example, it's affirming in your mind that food is good.
That might seem simplistic.
I mean, that's certainly not the focus of someone who's giving, but it's a part of it.
It's an important part of why... It's a part.
It's a small part.
Not terribly important, I guess, but it's a significant part of why giving is good.
because in your mind you have an appreciation of these things.
I mean, I don't want to get into a talk about rebirth and how that works and how karma works from one life to the next, but there is a psychological impact that affects the mind that's going to have far-reaching consequences, this appreciation and affirmation of the goodness of good things.
I'm talking about good physical things.
So if you give good food, you're reaffirming your appreciation of those things.
This affirmation is really a big part of the theory behind our meditation practice because we do a lot of affirming.
But our affirming is trying to affirm the nature of things.
So we affirm that seeing is seeing.
We affirm that pain is pain.
When we say to ourselves pain, pain, it's an affirmation.
It's not the same sort of affirmation as giving, but it's a part of the same process.
What's most important is for us to learn how giving works.
Why is giving good?
Not so that we give more, per se, or necessarily, but so that we understand how the mind works.
It's interesting for us as Buddhists and it's useful for us as meditators to understand why it is or that it is that giving is good.
It's good because it affirms, first of all, good things, and that's psychologically significant.
A person who is stingy, even in this life, you'll find that they are less inclined to enjoy the things that they hold on to.
First of all, because they're always afraid of the loss.
When you enjoy it, you eat good food while you lose money because of it.
But even more so, just psychologically, they have a warped state of mind that is afraid or against good things.
And the second thing is it's an appreciation of the recipient.
So when you give to, this is why they say giving to Buddhist organizations is a good thing.
I mean it sounds so self-serving, but there's no avoiding it because it's a good thing because it brings your mind psychologically closer to the organization.
If you give to, I was going to say if you give to poor people,
if you give to poor people, there's a different psychology there.
But there could be an argument for bringing you closer to poor people.
Why?
Because it's great to give to poor people, but you're not supporting
in all circumstances, the best of society.
So it's a different psychology there.
But the psychology behind giving to a Buddhist organization is the appreciation of the organization.
It could also be because, oh, you feel sorry for these Buddhist monks who live off in the forest.
I have had that happen.
People who felt sorry for me and therefore gave me food.
But that's not usually why we give.
why we support.
It's not why we would support a university, for example, or a student.
People don't give scholarships because they feel sorry for the students, usually.
They create scholarship funds because of their belief and their appreciation of those things.
And we generally have this idea that, yes, this is real, this is psychologically significant, but we maybe don't take the time, I don't think in a mundane setting or a secular setting, we don't generally take the time to appreciate just exactly how psychologically significant it is to support something.
If you support Buddhism, of course, it brings your mind closer to, it reaffirms in your mind that Buddhism is good.
Why would you give to Buddhists?
There are other reasons, feeling sorry for poor people, feeling sorry for monks.
But the reason you give in this case is out of appreciation.
And that appreciation is an affirmation in your mind.
So what that does is keep you close to good things.
If you give to good places, if you give to corrupt and
perverse organizations then well that's an appreciation of those things and so it has those consequences.
So giving to Buddhism is good particularly because Buddhism is a good thing.
If you disagree well then you probably won't give anything to Buddhist organizations but I would say
The problem there is the lack of appreciation for something that is good.
A person who gives is doing good for themselves because they appreciate something good.
That's the second one.
The third aspect of giving that I think
all of these are significant, but this one is most significant, I think for meditative purposes, is that giving is about also giving up.
It involves an appreciation of contentment or an affirmation of the rightness of letting go.
You see, because in order to give something, you have to let it go.
If you give something that is worthless to you, it's of course far less significant, and it's far less significant for this reason, that when you give something that has value to you, you're flipping the table, so to speak.
You're changing
from the mind that clings, that wants, that is happy to have, to the mind that is happy without, the mind that is free from clinging.
And so it's a mundane act, but it's significant.
Giving is particularly useful
For this reason, out of all other good deeds, it's particularly useful because it involves letting go.
It doesn't have to be physical things, but even giving physical things is symbolically significant from a psychological point of view because it involves letting go.
You directly have to let go in order to give, and that becomes habit forming.
If you give enough, why it's part of our meditation is because it makes it easier and more familiar to us to let go of the things that we really like.
So when we start to see that they're not maybe as worth clinging as we thought,
then we're more easily able to let them go.
We've already worked on a conventional level on our attachment.
So why stingy people and people who hate the idea of giving, why they don't go to heaven?
This is why.
Their minds are corrupt.
Their minds are shrunken and miserable, really.
And there's no denying that.
A person who is generous and kind, their mind is bright, light, happy, peaceful, content.
Content because they don't need their attitude, their behavior, their outlook on life is one of letting go, one of giving up.
It's much more in line with that.
And so they become freer and they go on to be born in better places.
That's all interesting to us.
It's interesting because it encourages us to give, which is again a support for meditation.
But it's even more interesting because it involves an understanding of how the mind works.
That our behaviors, our attitudes, our actions, our outlooks, these all have a lasting effect and they accumulate.
and they become habitual, they become really a part of who we are.
And this is what we're seeing in meditation as we try and be more objective and affirm objectivity.
We also see all of our partiality, our likes and dislikes.
We see all of these things.
We see how we are stingy, jealous, conceited, how we are generous, humble.
And we learn all these things.
We learn about how much more peaceful and happy it is to give and to give up, and how stressful it is to cling and to hold on.
So again, this verse is a very simple verse about giving, but it certainly is fodder for deeper conversation about giving up and letting go.