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Scott Snibbe: This episode is a meditation on generosity. It has an emphasis on the generosity that we may or may not show to homeless people, as well as other forms of generosity.

It’s part of a year-long series on what we call the Six Perfections, six practices of Mahayana Buddhism that lead one to, they say, a state of limitless happiness. The meditation is done in a way that you don’t need to be a Buddhist or have any Buddhist beliefs, just like all the others in our program.

These six perfections are altruistic practices that they say perfect our love and our compassion and our ability to benefit others. They’re based on a tradition that’s more than a thousand years old, and generosity is the first one. We’ll be doing the other five over the course of the rest of the year.

Settling into the meditation

Okay, so settle yourself into a meditation posture.

If you’re on the floor, you can sit cross-legged and then elevate your seat a little bit. Straighten your spine, leave a little space between your arms and your torso. You put your right hand over the left, which actually represents emphasizing compassion, and then also on top of wisdom, the other hand, your left hand, touching your thumbs, which improves focus.

Tilting down your head to look about four or five feet in front of you. Then almost closing your eyes, which helps you go inward without falling asleep. Then touching your tongue to the roof of your mouth, which diminishes saliva as you meditate. Most of all, straightening your spine.

Relaxing tight muscles like your shoulders. You can scrunch them up and let them go. Just that affects your mind, helps you to concentrate a little more.

Equalizing

Then we go into our motivation. It’s the first stage of a meditation practice. In this one we’re going to have this motivation of equalizing our relationship between ourself and others, because for most of us our usual attitude is focusing on ourself, and maybe our circle of family, friends, might extend to your town, your country.

But what His Holiness the Dalai Lama says is that there are so many more others than me, so shouldn’t the needs of the majority be more important?

The usual way to correct this attitude is to meditate how oneself and others are basically the same. That their heart and their mind are like mine. They wish not to suffer. They all want to be happy. That we’re all the same in this way.

Now, of course, we all might say we believe that, but try here for a moment just to really feel that.

The harm that comes from selfishness

Then it can be helpful to think about all the pain and harm that comes from selfishness, which is different from self-compassion. We want to take care of ourselves, and you can’t really take care of anyone else until you take care of yourself. But selfishness is different, thinking that oneself is more important than others, trying to accumulate a lot of things for oneself rather than others.

Just think about the drawbacks of selfishness, how you may have seen it in yourself from time to time. Also other people, if you know other people or have observed other people who behave selfishly, are they happy or are they miserable?

Then also consider this idea that all benefit comes from benefiting others. All your own benefit. Now, is this true? Think, when have I been happiest? Has it been when I was pursuing something selfishly, or when I was sharing with others, helping with others, being kind, generous, loving? It might have been two-way, being loving with one another.

But isn’t that true? That really all the good times, all the good experiences we have are those that stem from kindness, benefiting others. Then you cultivate this attitude by imagining everyone in the world around you and thinking, does it really make sense that they’re all for me? Everything they do, everything I could extract and gain from them that I would take from myself.

Or does it make more sense that I’m for them? Whatever I can do in this life to benefit others, the people close to me, the people I encounter. Doesn’t that make more sense?

To try to cultivate this mind of exchanging self for other.

The qualities of a bodhisattva

Then it can help in cultivating these heroic qualities of what we call a bodhisattva, someone who has perfected altruism. To think about somebody who embodies them for you. You can think of the most generous person that you know of.

Bring that person to mind. It could be someone famous like the Dalai Lama, or some philanthropist, or someone in your everyday life.

Think how happy are they. What has generosity done for their life?

Then think they weren’t just born that way. They deliberately cultivated those feelings, cultivated generosity, let go of miserliness when it came to mind. That’s what we’re doing too.

Focus on the breath

Then for one minute we’re going to focus on our breath.

You can either bring to mind the breath at your nostrils, which helps with concentration. Or the breath at your chest, which helps with openness. Or the breath at your diaphragm, your belly, which helps with groundedness.

Choose one, and then determine to focus for one minute. Even that is quite difficult. When you get distracted you’ll just gently steer back to your breath and let whatever it is passing through your mind or body just pass. It’s the nature of thoughts and feelings experiences to pass on their own if you don’t engage with them.

For one minute focus on the breath.

The first type of generosity: material

Then we move into reflecting on generosity.

First we’re going to look at material generosity.

Giving away things: money, possessions.

We’ll look specifically with respect to homeless people. If you can remember a homeless person you saw recently, that can be very beneficial. But if not, just imagine one.

Imagine that this person you’re going to see soon, that they’ll be the next homeless person you see.

Imagine as you’re walking by that you reach into your pocket and take out twenty dollars from your wallet and give it to them freely, without condition. Imagine how they might respond, how many other people walked by without offering anything.

And how it’s a kind act. Out of the ordinary for the person receiving your money. But at the same time, it isn’t that big of a deal because we were just born into better circumstances than this person likely was.

They say the zip code you were born into is the greatest determiner of your material success in life. On another level, you can think that this is really just redistributing wealth from an inequitable society.

Then imagine not just doing that, but stopping, asking this person how they are, having a long conversation, listening, showing care, getting to know their name and how they came to be where they are today. Also getting to know their aspirations, their dreams, where they are on the arc of their life and where they want to be later.

Now in your imagination, and I want to emphasize this is just in your imagination, imagine taking out the keys to your house, your apartment, wherever you live, and imagine handing them to this person and saying, Take it. Take the place where I live. I’ll transfer ownership to you or I’ll keep paying the rent. You live there.

Imagine how they might respond.

Imagine this going well, that the person moves in and has a safe, comfortable, warm place to live for the rest of their life.

If you feel some resistance in your mind, just become aware of that too, without judging yourself. I’m just realizing that even though this is only happening in my imagination, even there I have some miserliness, stinginess, difficulty with generosity, and that’s why we practice it in meditation like this.

Now let that image dissolve.

The second type of generosity: protection

We move on to the second type of generosity that they talk about in perfecting generosity, which is protection, genuinely protecting others from danger.

Think of people you know who are in danger, people homeless on the street, I’m sure you’ve seen some, maybe even many today or in the last week, if you live in a city. Think of people in war zones. Think of people in unsafe relationships or abusive families, and imagine offering them protection.

Imagine giving the homeless people homes in safe neighborhoods. Imagine ending the wars and those people going home to safe lives, nice meals, love from their friends and family.

Imagine those in difficult relationships or abusive families, that those relationships are healed, or that they get away from them, that they’re safe too.

Think about helping others overcome their fear and anxiety. You can think of people you know who are relatively safe and healthy, but they still suffer from fear and anxiety. Sometimes justified, but often exaggerated, unrealistic.

Then imagine sending out light from your heart, offering them fearlessness, confidence, mental ease.

Imagine they’re completely free from their fear and anxiety. Imagine all the help that people get from medicine and healthcare. Imagine all the sick people who don’t have access to medical care. Homeless people, people in extreme poverty, countries at war or where there’s great corruption.

Imagine sending all of these people free healthcare, well trained doctors, dentists, medications. Also, psychological care, everything they need, and imagine it all works. All their physical and mental ailments are healed.

Imagine the last type of protection, which is offering healthy ways of living, like exercise, healthy meals, healthy ways of living. You can bring to mind relatively prosperous or even wealthy people, who may not treat themselves very well. The things they eat, the drugs and substances they take, how they treat their body or neglect their body.

Imagine sending them good food, healthy exercise, healthy habits, whatever it is they might benefit from, yoga, meditation, time in nature, whatever they would enjoy would make them healthy.

Imagine kids in school with behavioral problems and offering them all of these healthy ways of living: healthy food, healthy habits, healthy ways of spending their free time.

Imagine the poor people without access or funds for healthy food, exercise, and nature. Imagine homeless people too, offering them all these healthy ways of living.

The third type of generosity: Dharma

Then another type of generosity, the third type they talk about in Buddhism is giving what we call the Dharma.

Imagine again all of these different people that you can be generous to, who suffer in various ways.

Imagine sharing, in a very skillful way, what you know about the causes of happiness and suffering at the right time, with the right words. Not proselytizing, preachy.

Imagine you say things in just the right way so that it’s beneficial, that it helps.

Also imagine listening too: listening to good advice, listening to authentic teachers, listening to friends, your partner, all the good advice they have for you about how to live a good life.

The fourth type of generosity: love

The last type of generosity is called giving love. Recall the beginning of the meditation, how everyone wants to be happy, no one wants to suffer.

Love from the Buddhist perspective isn’t thinking someone’s particularly special or admirable, but simply acknowledging their fundamental need for happiness, and that suffering hurts for them, all the different forms of suffering. Wishing to give them all the causes of happiness. Love is just wishing others to be happy.

That’s how you can love everyone. See if you can cultivate that mind right now of wishing everyone all the causes of happiness.

Now, when generosity is perfected according to these teachings, it means that we give without expecting anything in return.

Picture this now in your mind. Picture giving even to people who are ungrateful, spiteful, insatiable, you may have some memories of this when you were generous and kind and you were repaid with just the opposite.

But try to cultivate the attitude that it doesn’t matter how they respond. Imagine giving everyone everything they need without expecting even thanks or acknowledgement or kind words.

The antidote to stinginess

Now in perfecting generosity it’s not necessary to actually eliminate the poverty of all beings because it’s impossible. The perfection of generosity is in the mind more than the body and the speech. You can only perfect it in your mind.

It’s a willingness to give everything you possess in both body and mind. From the depths of your heart, to benefit others.

See if you can cultivate that mind right now. If you’re still feeling some resistance to generosity, there are a few antidotes. One is to remember impermanence, and even the impermanence at the end of our life, our death. Because we lose everything anyway, one way or another, so it’s better to use things to help others.

Something one of my very wise teachers taught me about giving to perfect generosity is to mix it with what we call emptiness or understanding the interdependence of all things, especially ourselves and others.

When you give a gift, you imagine the emptiness of the gift, the giver, and the action of giving. Which means that when you search for each of those things, you never quite find it. Search for the giver. Where is the person giving the 20 to the homeless person? Is it your body? Is it your hand? Your fingertips? Your brain?

Just search. Is it the thought to give them the money? Is it all your accumulated experience? Your genetics? Search and search and search. Try to find the essence of the giver. It’s quite likely you won’t find it.

Do the same thing with the receiver. This person you label as a homeless person. You realize you have certain assumptions, stereotypes, conventions. Try to break through those, searching for that person through all their life’s experience, the culture they were raised in, the zip code they were born into, all the various causes and conditions that they depend upon to be that person you label a homeless person in front of you at the moment.

Then imagine the emptiness, the dependent arising of the 20 you’re handing over, It’s just a piece of paper with the numbers 2 and 0 on it. It has no intrinsic worth. A certain type of paper, a certain type of ink. Where is it? Where’s the 20? Why does it have value? Is it the government that stands behind it?

Is it just a fiction we all believe in? Search and search and search. Is it the banks that store money as paper and numbers?

Search and search and search, but you can’t find the twenty dollars. And yet, it functions. A person can go get a meal, buy some warm clothing, with that piece of paper.

These are how things exist, like sand sifting through our hands. They’re not really there in the solid, separate way that we tend to see them. It’s also why things can change, why we can give, why we can benefit, why we can change. This is the ultimate antidote to stinginess, miserliness: understanding emptiness, interdependence, searching, searching and not finding the solid, separate, independent, giver, receiver, and object, action of giving.

Dedication

Now at the end of the meditation is a dedication. When you do your meditation, you dedicate the good that might come from your meditation so that it doesn’t just stay on your cushion, so that it becomes a cause for you to benefit all other beings, including yourself.

It’s what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “engaged Buddhism.”

We can dedicate that this meditation steers our minds to a more generous attitude, where there’s no resistance when we imagine giving away even our home, all our possessions to a homeless person you see on the street. Where this thought exercise becomes easy.

Again, you don’t really do this. You don’t actually give away your home. That’s not what we’re saying. But that the thought of doing it becomes easy, effortless, inspiring. That it warms your heart and it opens you up to others.

We dedicate that our speech might become more generous speech, that we’re able to give others our time and attention, listening, giving advice when it’s asked for or warranted.

Also, we dedicate that our actions become generous, to the right extent, the amount that we can afford them, not to excess or ruin or would cause great distress with our families, friends. But to the extent that each of us are able, we dedicate toward becoming more generous and giving things away.

Then finally dedicating to specifically homeless people, to try stopping and really trying to get to know a homeless person sometime soon. Aspire, if you’ve never have tried this, and if you can afford it, to give 20 bucks to a homeless person or whatever that is in your country, 20 pounds.

Also smile and stop and hear their story, look them in the eye. Acknowledge your shared humanity.

Credits