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Guided Meditation: Being Generous

Good evening, welcome. Welcome, it's nice to be here with you all. Here we are practicing on Memorial Day. So, happy Memorial Day. What a beautiful thing it is to bring to mind all those who have served us, served this country, to open our hearts and to acknowledge that we are not completely self-made here. We're a big part of a community. Lots of people making big sacrifices, lots of families making big sacrifices. So, happy Memorial Day. If there's some tenderness or sadness in this day for you, may you hold it with care and warmth.

So we'll start with a guided meditation.

Taking our meditation posture. Seated upright, and feeling the uprightness. Like how the body is oriented in space. Uprightness as well as some ease, some dignity, as well as some relaxation. Finding this posture can be a practice in itself that reflects both our intention to pay attention, but without straining, without striving, without grasping, but with ease.

So to sit and know you're sitting, feeling the pressure of the chair, or cushion, couch, bed, whatever you might be sitting on. And whether you're sitting literally or metaphorically, feel whatever the body is contacting. Feeling the pressure against the body. You're here now.

And then to notice that the body is breathing. Tuning into the movement of the chest, the movement of the abdomen, or maybe the feeling of air going in and out of the nose. And just noticing the sensations of breathing.

Nothing in particular needs to be happening. We're just noticing the sensations of breathing. And when the mind wanders, which it is likely to do, we just very simply, gently begin again.

Can we let go of any idea that the breath needs to be controlled? The body knows how to breathe. Can we just allow it to breathe the way that is comfortable, feels natural, not constrained or contrived?

Can we let go of any idea that things have to be different than how they are right now? Can we allow them to be how they are? They actually are the way they are. Can we align ourselves with the reality of the moment?

When we do mindfulness of breathing and we find ourselves lost in thought, we don't have to make it a problem. We let go of the thoughts and turn towards the breathing again, in a way that has a generous attitude towards ourselves. Of course we're thinking. Chances are you've been thinking all day and there's this momentum. What would it be like to have a generous attitude towards yourself and your practice?

Can we have an attitude of generosity towards ourselves, towards our experience? The spirit of giving away rather than holding on tightly, clinging rather than demanding, "this is mine, it has to be this way." Can we hold things lightly, allowing the experiences to come and go?

Having this attitude of generosity towards ourselves when meditating, of course, can come alive or be expressed when we're not meditating. Generosity not only towards ourselves but towards others. That is giving the benefit of the doubt, letting go of insisting that things be a particular way, and being open-hearted and open-minded.

So in this way, generosity can support our mindfulness practice. If we allow the inner critic to quiet, and instead we have a generous attitude towards ourselves, and also support our intention to be generous towards others. So that our meditation practice benefits not only ourselves but everyone that we come in contact with. So that we might give them the benefit of the doubt and be open-hearted. So in this way, may our practice be for the benefit of all beings everywhere.

Letting go and Connecting

Good evening, welcome. Welcome. I want to say it's nice to see you all, but of course I don't actually see you all, but I'm imagining that we're all practicing together. It's very nice for me to be practicing with others, even if we're not physically in the same room.

A number of years ago I was at the Asian Art Museum just here in San Francisco, and I saw this beautiful statue of the Buddha. I read the inscription that was underneath the statue, and it had a piece of scripture that I had never seen before, never heard about, and I was quite confused by it. This beautiful statue was maybe the same size as this one, and is in the same position as this one, that is, with the right hand down and the left hand in their lap. So I was a little bit curious. What is this? This museum, I thought, of course the curator must be mistaken because I had never heard of this. This was quite a few years ago and I didn't know all the suttas^[1] or all the stories, but I had never heard that story that was associated with it.

Well, since then I have discovered this story and I'd like to share it with you, about the Buddha that's in this position. It's a common one that we see. I forgot the name in Pali or Sanskrit of the mudra, the gesture of the hands, but with one hand pointing down and the other hand in the lap.

And it has to do with the night of the Buddha's awakening. The Buddha, before he became the Buddha, was called the bodhisattva^[2]. And I think probably all of you know the story is that after a childhood of these princely pleasures and comfort, he had some disillusionment and he fled home. He did six years of meditation and ascetic practices, including nearly starving himself to death. And then he abandoned his ascetic practices, started to eat again, and then sat down underneath the Bodhi tree, vowing that he wasn't going to get up until he achieved awakening. So I just said there in one or two minutes what often is a really long, complicated, beautiful story.

And then what happens next? There's a bunch of different versions of the story and I like to think of it as, just like every good story, it gets retold and retold, and different tellings have different emphases or maybe different interpretations, different embellishments. Here's one version that we find in the Nidanakatha^[3], which is not commonly read. It's in the Canon, but it's the introduction to the Jataka^[4] tales. But that's just a little aside.

The story is that Mara^[5], who is that personification of obstacles—that's one way that we could understand this character, Mara—realized that the bodhisattva was sitting underneath the tree and was determined to become awakened. Mara likes to keep people not awakened, in what we would call samsara^[6], because Mara can influence individuals, beings who are here in samsara, who are in this realm of existence, unawakened. Maybe that's one way that we translate samsara, that are unawakened. And Mara is perfectly happy if everybody's having a wonderful time and even practices diligently, Mara just doesn't want them to become awakened. So when he realized that the bodhisattva was really determined to become awakened, he wanted to put a stop to it.

So he approached the Buddha, and he was riding on this big giant elephant. There's a description of how big this elephant is. You can imagine at that time in ancient India, the elephant is probably one of the biggest, most powerful things that's known. Of course, they don't have any motors or anything like this, so an elephant is the most powerful thing, and this is a big elephant. So not only is Mara riding on this elephant, but he has this giant army that's accompanying him. And the intention is to get the bodhisattva to move and disrupt his concentration, or disrupt his vow to get awake, or whatever they can do.

So they have this rain, this deluge on the bodhisattva, and the rain of different objects. Maybe some of you know this story. So at first, Mara raised a tornado, and had these winds that, the story says, would have shattered mountain peaks. These are some incredible winds. But then, the text goes, by the virtue and majesty of the bodhisattva, the winds lost their force and on reaching him they were not able to shake even the hem of his robe. So it's quite something to go from shaking mountaintops to not even rustling one's clothing.

In the same way, Mara causes this downpour of rain, actual rain, and this great flood came because the rain was so much, and the flood was submerging an entire forest. But then when it gets to the bodhisattva, it doesn't even dampen his robes as much as a dewdrop would. So I kind of love these greatly exaggerated stories, but you get a sense of the power of Mara and the power of the bodhisattva. And Mara is trying to do whatever he can to get the bodhisattva to get up.

And there's a total of ten different things that get rained on, spewed upon the bodhisattva. A shower of rocks, weapons, coals, hot ashes, sandstorms, mud, all these things, gloom, this darkness. And all these later things, when the weapons and the coals and the ashes are thrown towards the bodhisattva, they all turn into flowers or garlands or perfume or these beautiful things. So pretty soon the bodhisattva has all these flowers surrounding him. And still he sits, determined to become awakened.

And then Mara demanded that the bodhisattva leave his seat, claiming it as his own. He says, "Rise, Siddhartha^[7], from that seat. It is not meant for you, it goes to me." A little twist to the story that Mara is saying, well, if anybody's going to become awakened it's going to be me, not you. And Siddhartha, that's the name of the bodhisattva, they give a name in this version of the story, he replies, "Mara, this seat is not meant for you. I alone have the right to it," claiming his right to sit there in that seat.

And then he goes on, and this part is what is kind of interesting, it's often a part of the story that we don't hear about. So then the bodhisattva says, "Mara, who will testify to your having been generous?" I can imagine maybe Mara is scratching his head a little bit, but then he replies by stretching out his arms and looking to all the armies that he has, all these beings that are with him. And he says, "All of these are my witnesses." So Siddhartha, who will testify for you being generous? The bodhisattva is sitting there by himself underneath the tree.

And Siddhartha responds by saying, "For your generosity, you have sentient witnesses, but I have no sentient witnesses." Looking around, there's nobody else there, it's just Mara and his armies. And then the bodhisattva says, "This solid earth, though not sentient, bears witness." He took his right hand from under his robe and extended it towards the great earth, as we see here, saying, "In my life as Vessantara^[8], I made the great gift of the seven hundreds. Do you bear witness to that or not?" So he's talking to the earth. And the earth responds and roars, "I was your witness, yes!" And then Mara's elephant kneels before the bodhisattva, and then Mara and all of his army turn around and run away.

So it's this recollection of his generosity. The bodhisattva brings to mind some generosity that he had done. There's a whole story around that, we won't go into that now, but it's quite something. This is what made the elephant kneel and Mara to run away. We might be a little bit surprised. We might expect some magnificent insights or some knowledge or some supernormal feats or something like this, but it's his recalling his generosity that created the conditions that caused Mara to leave, obstacles to leave, and then he becomes awakened and becomes the Buddha, the awakened one.

So he's calling the earth as witness to his generosity. And this is one of the favorite subjects in Buddhist art. As you can see here, it's common for statues but also in all kinds of art throughout Southeast Asia. Why generosity? Of all the topics that could have been talked about then, or some great wisdom or something, why generosity?

Well, we could say that generosity is foundational to Buddhist practice in so many ways. It's really foundational. It's out of generosity so many things flower and blossom that are a support for practice and are practice. And one is generosity is a type of letting go. It's a type of giving. And in a way, all of our practices come down to letting go. We let go of our attachments, we let go of clinging, we let go of our underlying compulsion to cling to our desires, to cling to our opinions. Instead, we have some open-heartedness and open-mindedness. We allow things to be as they are, as well as putting effort to work towards making things wholesome and abandoning the unwholesome. But we don't do that by clinging and grabbing, we're doing it by letting go.

We also let go of a sense of self. That is, this idea that there's a me, this all-important me that's at the center of everything. We let go of that. This often doesn't really make sense until people have that experience. It's definitely an experience rather than just a logical idea or a belief you have to adopt. Instead, it's more of an experience of noticing when there isn't a strong sense of self, maybe like when there's a sense of flow when you're doing one of your favorite activities. Dancing, hobbies, playing music, listening to music—these are often times when there isn't a strong sense of self. It's kind of a pointer towards that.

So this practice is about letting go. It's not about acquiring, getting. I'm kind of grasping my fingers, it's not about grasping. So we can let go of an actual object or the grasping of that object, because this practice isn't that we have to let go of everything. We just let go of those things that aren't helpful, unskillful, unwholesome, and those things that are skillful and wholesome, we just let go of the clinging to them, but we still hold them. So maybe just do this right, Gil^[9] does this, which is so helpful. It's that we can still hold things with an outstretched palm as opposed to clinging, holding onto them.

But it's one thing to talk about it, to hear about it. But to have the confidence and the trust to open the palm of the hand, this is a practice to gain this confidence. This trust to know that the way forward is that movement, is that gesture of opening the hand. And generosity, generosity is the powerful practice that can really help us to feel the beauty, to feel the freedom. It's implicit whenever there's this opening of the hands, the opening of the heart, and generosity by definition is a letting go, is an opening. So that's one way in which generosity is foundational to Buddhist practice, is that it really supports a sense of letting go. Whether we're actually giving objects, material things, money, gifts, or whether we're giving our attention, our expertise, our energy, giving the benefit of the doubt, whatever it might be. In this way, generosity helps cultivate and develop just this movement, this gesture of letting go.

But generosity also has the opposite impact, in that it connects us. It connects us to other people, recognizing that we can't walk this path all by ourselves. Sometimes we might wish to, and there might be seasons of our practice in which we spend a lot of time practicing on our own, meditating. But there will also need to be seasons in which we practice with others, are supported by practice with others, and have the wisdom of others to guide us and to support us and maybe help us find our way.

So we might be giving our time and our attention. So again, it's not only things, but sometimes giving feels a little bit awkward or we don't really know how to be generous in that way. I'm inspired by this writing by David Whyte^[10]. He's a poet and essayist. And here's an excerpt from an essay that he wrote that it's not exactly about generosity, but you'll see how it's connected to generosity. I'll say that when I heard this, I felt inspired to be generous. And that's part of what this practice is also, is to be connected to what is inspiring, what inspires us to be the best versions of ourselves.

Okay, so here's this passage from David Whyte. It's an essay, but you can tell he's a poet a little bit by his writing:

"It may be that the ability to know the necessity for help; to know how to look for that help and then most importantly, how to ask for it, is one of the primary transformative dynamics that allows us to emancipate ourselves into each new epoch of our lives. Without the understanding that we need a particular form of aid at every crucial threshold in our lives, and without the robust vulnerability in asking for that help, we cannot pass through the door that bars us from the next dispensation of our lives. We cannot birth ourselves. Every transformation has at its heart the need to ask for the right kind of generosity."

So David Whyte is writing from the perspective of asking for generosity. But just hearing this, it feels like, oh yes, giving generosity, giving help, so that we can assist, be part of, support these transformations he writes with the next epoch in our lives, and "to emancipate ourselves into each new epoch of our lives."

I think every crucial threshold in our lives requires some help, and for us to ask for that help, and the vulnerability of asking for that help. What a privilege it is to help others. What a beautiful, meaningful thing it is to be generous. So that we can help others with their transformations, whatever that might be, wherever they are in their life. Whether it's a young person, an older person, an in-between age person. Whether this transformation is going from singlehood to being married, from maybe being married back to single again, maybe from becoming a—I don't know, there's so many different transformations we do in our lives, right? And some of them are just a very gentle slide in, and some of them are really abrupt, and there's diagnoses, deaths in the family, these types of things.

So one way to frame generosity is to help others, but help others help themselves. Not because we have all the answers or because we somehow are superior in some kind of way, but just in whatever way that we can, to help these transformations that all of us go through. They're not easy. So that's one part of generosity, is to connect us with others and to help others when they need it in a way that's appropriate.

But also generosity supports our relationships in other ways too. And the Buddha noticed this and he knew this, and here's a quote from one of the suttas:

"Generosity, kind words, doing a good turn for others, and treating all people alike. These means of sustaining a favorable relationship are like the linchpin of a rolling chariot."

I'll read it again:

"Generosity, kind words, doing a good turn for others, and treating all people alike. These means of sustaining a favorable relationship are like the linchpin of a rolling chariot."

So they're vital. If we don't have this linchpin, then the wheel gets disconnected from the chariot and off it goes, and the chariot doesn't go anywhere, right?

Generosity, kind words, doing a good turn for others—that is, helping them out—is a way that can really support our relationships. So generosity, and thinking about others, what would be helpful for them, what would they like, not in a way that we abandon ourselves and not in the way that we allow boundaries to be crossed or barriers to be crossed that are inappropriate, but just to recognize how generosity can really be a support for relationships, in whatever way it is.

One time I was on a walk with a friend of mine who was another Buddhist practitioner, and it's lovely to walk in the neighborhood and see some of the people have beautiful landscaping. Sometimes there's roses, and we were walking and there was this beautiful rose bush, just really beautiful that you wanted to stop and admire and smell the roses, of course, right? But then I felt really touched when my walking partner said, "Here, I'd like to offer this rose to you," without picking the rose or anything like this, but just kind of like the generous spirit. It was so great because that rose... I felt so happy that it stayed on the bush where it could be fresh for longer and other people walking by could see it. Sometimes generosity is just a simple gesture like that, but it made me realize, oh, this person really cares about me. It was a very tender, lovely gesture.

So generosity connects us also because it supports our relationships. And then also generosity is related to the brahma-viharas^[11]. That is these four qualities of the heart, probably all of you are familiar with them. But at the moment of giving, at the moment when we're being generous, we're letting go. We're letting go of desire and grasping, and we're also letting go of ill will, letting go of aversion. At that moment when we're giving, whether it's a material object or not, there's these beautiful qualities of the heart that are present. So there might be some loving-kindness. We might feel some goodwill towards the person who is receiving our generosity, we might feel a connection with them rather than some alienation. Our being generous is an expression of we want them to be happy. So loving-kindness and generosity.

Generosity and compassion. We wish the person to be free from suffering, maybe that's why we are helping, to help them with some difficulty. And we also... when there's compassion, there's a certain tenderness, there's an openness of the heart, and generosity often has that too, right? This sharing, this tenderness in the heart.

And generosity also is associated with sympathetic joy, the third brahma-vihara. That is that we delight in their happiness, their happiness in receiving whatever it is we're being generous about. This is why it's so wonderful to go to birthday parties, right? To see people receive gifts and to see how the recipient is happy. We like to make people happy in that way and to see their happiness, for us to be happy in their happiness in receiving, and we want their happiness to increase. This is why we're giving them a gift.

And generosity is also associated with equanimity. That is, that means that we have an object that we're willing to let go of, or maybe it's not an object, it's a view or a stance that we're not holding too tightly, we're willing to let go of. That is, we have a balanced relationship with it, and that we are willing, we're capable to be without it, and we're allowing others to be with it if necessary.

So in this way, generosity also connects us to others through the brahma-viharas, through helping and just supports our relationships. And then as I started to say, that generosity is also about letting go, this kind of movement of letting go. So in some ways we could see how generosity... why the Buddha, right before his awakening, and what kind of frightens Mara and has him run away, even though he's so powerful with these big armies, powerful armies, is generosity. It's foundational to so many practices, and anybody can do it. It doesn't require a meditation practice, it doesn't require that you know some Buddhist teachings. We can be generous in our daily life. We can be generous towards ourselves and the attitude we have towards ourselves, or the way that we show up in the world.

So my invitation is, when you have this inclination to be generous, when the thought arises in your mind to be generous, go ahead and be generous. Don't hesitate. Don't maybe talk yourself out of it or rationalize it away. I heard Joseph Goldstein, one of the kind of the senior members of our community, talk about how he had this as a practice, to always be generous. And I figured, well, if it's good enough for Joseph Goldstein, it's good enough for me. And I have to say, I have never regretted it when I've been generous. And I have regretted those times when I thought, oh, it'll be a little bit awkward, I'm not sure if I want to give this to this person. I've always regretted that I didn't.

So generosity supports letting go and also supports connecting to others. So may your generosity be a support for your practice and be a support for others around you, so that all beings without exception can be free from suffering. Thank you.