Giving Paramita
Photo by Michal Janek
Giving or dana paramita invites us to move outside of our conditioning, which primes us toward scarcity and individualism, and into an understanding that we are actually living in the midst of abundance. That’s why dana paramita is the first of the perfections—it is something that all of us can do, and the gift we offer touches not only others, but also ourselves.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
Giving Paramita
I want to speak today about Dāna, Paramita, the perfection of giving, which is the first of the six or the ten perfections. But in the series of talks that I've been giving, I actually put it at the end. I chose to speak of it last because although in the Sutras it is said to be the easiest of virtue to practice, it is said to be common to all beings. I find it to be otherwise. In fact, in the commentary, the Kariya Piṭaka, the commentary on the perfections, is the one with the longest commentary. Maybe it isn't as simple as it seems. Because I think giving, selfless giving, doesn't come that easily to us. You know, I'll speak for myself—it doesn't come easily to me.
Two weeks ago at the temple, I quoted a story that's been attributed to Gandhi. I'm not sure if it’s actually true; nobody knows. But the story says that there was a woman who was worried that her son was eating too much sugar and that it wasn't good for his health. She knew that he really admired the Mahatma, so she decided that she would take him to see Gandhi and would ask Gandhi to tell her son not to eat so much sugar. She went and took her son, explained the situation, and Gandhi listened. He thought about it for a moment and said, “Well, just come back next week.” They turned around and left. A week later, they came back, and the boy was standing just right in front of him. Gandhi looked at him and said, “You know, you shouldn't eat so much sugar because it's really bad for you.” The boy just looked at him with his face and said, “Okay, I won't,” and he turned and walked out. The mother was really puzzled and said to Gandhiji, “Well, why didn't you just say that to him last week?” Gandhi said, “Because last week I too was eating too much sugar.”
I thought about that story when I was considering writing this talk originally, and I thought, well, if I follow his example, I might have to wait another year or two to give this talk. I am giving it, acknowledging there's still work to do. I think maybe, especially in a context like this, in a setting like this, it is easier to throw ourselves into zazen, to develop or at least try to develop concentration, to, with some relative ease, renounce. You're choosing what you're going to eat, what your schedule is, your free time, and how you will use it. To be truthful, at least most of the time, to practice patience, especially again in the midst of sangha, because we are all doing the same thing. We know we're moving; we're trying to move in the same direction.
Giving Beyond Convenience
Although each of the Paramitas has its own challenges, I think this one is challenging because we're not a particularly giving culture. We give when it's prescribed, right—during the holidays. We know the angst that surrounds that time. We give around birthdays, and we give at weddings. But really, mostly we give when it's convenient for us. We give when it doesn't put us out too much. Very few of us truly give unconditionally. Very few of us give ourselves freely, which, as Bodhidharma said, is the greatest gift of all. Giving has the characteristic of relinquishing—relinquishing grasping, relinquishing stinginess, relinquishing our fear of lack. In practicing Dāna Paramita, we relinquish the fear that there won't be enough for me. We practice seeing and knowing in our bones that there is enough—more than enough, more than enough. The times when there isn't enough are because of what we've done. It's because of our understanding or lack of it. It's because of how we see ourselves, how we see each other, how we see this planet, and therefore how we act.
When we do something like Dāna dinner, for example, our community holiday dinner, it feels good. It feels good as you're doing it. It feels good afterward. The families who came this time for the first time definitely said it felt good—that in that time of frenzy, of craziness, for their children to see that it doesn't have to be that way, that there is such a thing as giving just for the sake of giving. In fact, it is quite natural; it is not a stretch, it is not putting us out, but quite the contrary. This is how things work in life when they are working.
We read this article in the angle we've been focusing on—Earth awareness. Those of you who are here for the Mondo probably read it—by Mary Catherine Bateson, who is Margaret Mead's daughter and an anthropologist in her own right. She was speaking of our role, human beings’ role, in the preservation of our planet. She first asked this question: Why should you or I as individuals inconvenience ourselves or limit our consumption when others are not doing so? Our separate impacts are such a small part of the whole. It's a reasonable question from the perspective of the self. Why should I give when it's uncomfortable to give, when it especially means not taking, when it means renouncing, when others around me are not doing the same? It's not fair. We don't do this just with the Earth. We do it with everything. We look at each other and wonder, “Why is X getting more attention from the teacher?” or “Why is Y getting away with that? Why is she able to do this and I can't?” In that mind of lack—I speak of it often because I think it is so strong in us—we are so afraid that there won't be enough.
Bateson answers her own question quite similarly to the way the Buddha would. She says this is the wrong question because it is predicated on the notion of an individual—me—which is separate, independent from any relationship to you and to the rest of the world. It is based on the belief that my rights as an individual are the most important thing, certainly more important than anything else. If that is true, and if our individual rights are truly paramount, if they are in fact what give us the most pleasure, the most fulfillment, then why is it that it just doesn't feel that way? We should be the happiest country on the planet, even if individualism were real, if it were true.
A couple of years ago, I read about an experiment that psychologists were doing to measure happiness and fulfillment. People had to carry a beeper that would go off at random times during the day, and they had to rate their level of fulfillment at that moment with what they were doing. Not surprisingly, people were most content, most fulfilled, during sex—although you have to wonder how that worked. Not too surprisingly, people were reported being more fulfilled when they were working, especially when their work was some form of service, more than when they were during their leisure time, when they were really doing nothing much at all. What was surprising is that when they were asked what they would rather be doing, nine times out of ten, people said they would rather be at home, relaxing and doing not much at all. Isn't that puzzling? We know what makes us happy and we choose otherwise. Maybe it's not so puzzling. As somebody said during the Mondo, our thirst for comfort runs so deep. Yet, when it comes down to it, comfort is not what makes us happiest.
Mother Teresa is saying, when you give, do it not because you have too much, but because you know what it is to want.
The function of Dāna Paramita is to dispel greed for things that can be given away. This begins, of course, with material things, but also with the giving of oneself. There is a story by O. Henry called The Gift of the Magi. I won’t do a full telling, but I’ll give a very condensed version. Because of the way he uses language, it’s worth looking at the original. One dollar and eighty-seven cents—sixty cents of it in pennies, saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer, the vegetable man, and the butcher, until one's cheeks burned with a silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents, and the next day would be Christmas. There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating. While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home: a furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad. Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with a powder rag. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim, her Jim.
There was a pure glass between the windows of the room. Suddenly Della whirled from the window and stood before it. Her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color. Rapidly, she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length. There were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that had been his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair. On went Della's old brown jacket. On went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts, she flooded out the door and down the stairs to the street, twenty dollars in her pocket, and the next two hours stripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present. She found that at last, it was a platinum fob chain, simple and chased in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone, and not by meretricious ornamentation, as all good things should do. For twenty-one dollars, it was even worthy of the watch.
When Della reached home, her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons, lighted the gas, and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love, which is always a tremendous task, a mammoth task. Within forty minutes, her head was covered with tiny curls that made her look wonderfully like a true and schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically. "If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?"
At seven o'clock sharp, a thin and serious Jim stopped inside the door as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face. "You've cut off your hair?" Jim said laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact, yet even after the hardest mental labor. "Cut off and sold it," said Della. "Don't you like me just as well anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?" Jim looked about the room curiously. "You say your hair is gone?" he said with an air almost of idiocy. "You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's sold, I tell you. Sold and gone too. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered, but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put out the chops, Jim?"
Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table. White and nimble fingers tore at the string and paper, then an ecstatic scream of joy, and then, alas, a quick feminine change to historical tears and wails. For there lay the combs—the set of combs side and back that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell with jeweled rims, just a shade to wear in the beautiful, vanished hair. But Jim had not yet opened his beautiful present. Wiping her tears, Della held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. "You'll have to look at the time a hundred times a day," she said. "Give me a watch. I want to see how it looks on it." Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled. "Della," he said, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep them a while. They're too nice to use, just a present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs."
Suppose you put the chops on. It is called The Gift of the Magi because the last paragraph says this: The Magi, as you know, were wise men, wonderfully wise men who brought gifts to the babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. In a last word to the wise of these days, let it be said that of all who give gifts, these too were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere, they are wisest. They are the Magi.
Mother Teresa once said, "I don't want you to give me from what you have left over. I want you to give me from your want, until you really feel it." Maybe that's the difference—that when we give from our want, not just of money, but of time, of energy, of desire even, that when we do so, we are saying, "Myself and my comfort are not the most important thing. I recognize that I am part of this web of life, and I choose to honor it by giving it something of myself, even a little bit."
A few years ago, one of our students passed away, Hoshin Ritter, and she had been a student for many years, probably twenty, twenty-five years. I remember spending time with her as she was dying. She had cancer. One day, I went to see her, and she had been saying, "You know, I know that people say, this is such a gift, you know, this cancer, and I've learned so much from it." She said, "You know, that's always the survivors." She was very direct and unapologetic. She said, "I don't think this is a gift. I don't want it. I'd rather be healed. I'd rather be well." I remember thinking, because it's not the Zen answer, if you will, how refreshing. She was being completely honest. Later, when she was close to death, I went to see her again. She was in bed by that point, and she had oxygen. I stepped closer to hug her, and she just went, "You're stopping on my oxygen." I jumped back as if I'd been electrocuted. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Then she just laughed. When I realized what she was doing, I started laughing too. Her face—I still see the expression on her face as she saw mine. As I left her house, I thought to myself, may I be that alive when I'm dying. May I be that unconcerned with myself that I'm willing to just make someone laugh in a moment like that. I thought, even in our death and in our dying, we can be that giving. We can be that giving.
The Willing Heart of Generosity
Master Dogen says, "The Buddha said, when a person who practices giving goes to an assembly, people take notice. Know that the mind of such a person communicates subtly with others. This being so, give even a phrase or verse of the truth. It will be a wholesome seed for this and other lifetimes. Give your valuables, even a penny or a blade of grass. The truth can turn into valuables, valuables can turn into the truth." This is all because the giver is willing. Of course, we can all give something. Mother Teresa is saying, when you give, do it not because you have too much, but because you know what it is to want. Do it because you know, ultimately, there's no difference between the one who gives and the one who receives. Knowing that this is Bodhisattva activity, that this is the perfection of giving, that this is relieving the suffering of all living beings.
As with the Earth awareness practice that we've been doing in the Sangha, these Paramitas require that we look closely, that we look at our lives, and ask very openly, what else can I do? How can I serve? What can I give? From the perspective of the self, we will always find reasons not to, and there will be good reasons—limits of time, limit of energy, of capacity. I was talking to a couple of people who were just discussing the overwhelming nature of the environmental crisis. You read some of this stuff, and it is overwhelming. How do you take in what you need to take in and not turn away, not be paralyzed, not be afraid of the magnitude of the problem? Of course, we can always just shut down, which we know how to do very well. We can say, "Well, it's hopeless anyway, so I won't do anything." If we're here, if we practice, we know, well, that's not quite enough. It's not quite enough for my life. It's not quite enough for life, period.
What can I do? I only have a certain number of hours in the day. I heard about an exercise that Jimpu had you do yesterday, for those of you doing the retreat on death and dying, about looking at your day and putting smiling faces next to those activities you considered make you happy or fulfilled. What a simple thing to do, where you can quite starkly see how you're spending your day. We don't know how much time we have, right? We hope we have time. There are really just a limited number of hours in the day. How do we choose to spend them?
There was another story about Mother Teresa where she said there was a woman who came to her and said, "You know, I really want to share in your work." She was wealthy. She also confessed to her that she had a weakness for expensive saris. Mother Teresa said, "Well, how much money do you normally spend for a sari?" The woman said, "800 rupees." Mother Teresa said, "Okay, when you go next to buy one, buy one for 600 and use the other 200 and buy saris for the poor." The woman did that. She kept working with her, and Mother Teresa kept saying, "Okay, can you do 500 or 550? Can you do 400?" They got to a point, actually the woman did on her own, where she was buying $100 saris and using the rest of the money to give away to the poor.
Given our privilege, is there anything that we can give? Because again, if we look at it from the perspective of me, of myself, and my rights and my comfort, it will always be uncomfortable and inconvenient. What if we shift the perspective? I know in my bones that this is the only way, and I still fight it. I very much fight it. Sometimes I think my first words must have been, "Well, you can't make me." The only good thing about my stubbornness is that it reaches everywhere. It is both: I fight to get my way, but I also fight to get out of my way. I don't know what it would be like if I wasn't here. I'd rather not think about it. I figured eventually, I'll wear myself down.
The proximate cause of giving is an object that can be relinquished. The commentary says there are four shackles to the perfection of giving, and they are: not being accustomed to giving in the past; the inferiority of the object to be given, or the excellence and beauty of the object, and therefore our worry over the loss of that object. Not being accustomed to giving in the past makes it difficult to give in the present. How do you break the shackle? By beginning. By giving something. Actually, the key to all of the shackles, to opening all of the shackles, is to just give, no matter how small or insignificant it seems to me.
This is important because when we're overwhelmed, it's easy to think, "I can't give at all," or "This is my limit," or "I'm not worth it," or "What I'm giving is not worth it," or "I'm above giving in this way," or "This is too good to give." It's much too easy to worry about what I will lose, what I will miss if I give my time, energy, or attention to something other than me and mine. This sense of relinquishing really is all-encompassing. To relinquish the fear that I will, by giving this, lose, that I will have less myself, that somebody else will then be ahead. The thing is, of course, we will lose everything when we die. Yet we're using all of our time and energy now worrying about it.
Living with an Open Hand
We were talking this morning about the five remembrances: I am of the nature to grow old. I am of the nature to get sick. Everything that I have, that I own, that all my relationships, I will lose. I'm missing one—oh, I am of the nature to die. Get sick, grow old, die. All my relationships, I will lose. They will change. They will go away. Therefore, the only thing that I have is my actions.
This is a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. It's called Making a Fist: "We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men." This is Jorge Luis Borges: "For the first time on the road north of Tampico, I felt the life sliding out of me, a drum in the desert harder and harder to hear. I was seven. I lay in the car watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass. My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin. How do you know if you're going to die? I begged my mother. We had been traveling for days. With strange confidence, she answered, 'When you can no longer make a fist.'"
Years later, I smiled to think of that journey, the borders we must cross separately, stamped with our unanswerable woes. I, who did not die, who am still living, still lying in the back seat behind all my questions, clenching and opening one small hand. Thank you for watching. We can clench that hand, and in fact, we can live with our hands clenched, both hands, in fact. Or we can open. In that pain, because it is pain, of that giving away of something that is mine, I think the only way it can subside is through repetition. You do it once. Imagine the woman with the saris. The first time she had to wear the 500-rupee one, thinking, "This isn't right." From this perspective, it isn't right. You have to be willing to remember that there's a bigger picture, that there is always more to see and more to take into account.
I forget who it was—I read it recently—and it was a teacher who was basically saying, "When you see the whole world hidden within the world." In other words, when there is no place to hide anything, to tuck away anything, to save anything for a later time, then that fear that I will not have enough doesn't even make sense anymore. In the beginning, we tighten and clench around the tiniest things. Then the more we practice, hopefully that grip begins to relax, and our responsibility, or what I as an individual am able to do, then has the opportunity to arise. Because it is in the midst of so much that needs to be done. The question becomes, how do I choose to spend this time that I have? What is my capacity? What is my field of influence? How do I choose to use it?
We were talking the other day about dharma communications, the work that we do there. People were bringing up questions that come up often, about looking at the world and asking, "Why are we selling malas? The world is burning. Why are we spending our time in this way?" I asked that question of my teacher not long ago, in fact. Actually, it wasn't even a question—I was begging him. I was saying, "The world is burning. Why am I spending my time choosing malas?" People were asking that question again, very directly. At the time, I didn't answer it well. I didn't feel. I said a couple of times, in different contexts, that I would rather be doing something else than selling things. Afterwards, I thought, that's kind of disingenuous because it's not completely true. It's not that I like selling. It's not that I dislike selling. There are times when I would rather be doing something else with my days here.
Really, when it comes down to it, what I would really like is to meet what is in front of me with me out of the way, so that I can, in fact, meet what is in front of me and see what is needed. No, I mean, more malas aren't really needed. It would be good for us to continue to look at how we're spending our days and see if they can be shifted. But my work, being here, is really to see as clearly as I can, without my prejudice, without my opinion, without taking my opinions into account, what is really needed so that I can, in fact, respond. That is really what I would like to do.
If I'm working, I'm in front of the computer, or I'm working in the garden, it's not that I don't have preferences. To be able to meet each task completely, to have my wish and my desire not be the most important thing, then I think that would be a life well lived. Perhaps then I could say, "Well, that was a life in which I was able to give, in which I was able to live for more than just me."
Giving Paramita, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Audio podcast and transcript available.