Gullu Singh: Reflections on Danā

I'm going to talk about the practice of dhana, which means giving, sometimes translated as generosity. And it is in some ways the most seminal teaching of the Buddha. After the Buddha had his awakening experience and had collected a monastic community, they would spend much of the year traveling from place to place, sharing the teachings with different communities. And then they spent about three months of the year doing the monstons in one place on retreat. And wherever they went, the Buddha had a curriculum with different modules called the gradual path. And the first module in that curriculum is the teaching on generosity, so foundational that before you get to anything else, you talk about generosity. And just for the sake of completeness, I'll give you the rest of the gradual path. First, it's dhana giving. Second is sila, virtue, integrity, good moral conduct. The third is contemplating the results of good conduct, how that has karmic impacts that happen when we behave ethically. Then the drawback of sense pleasures, another foundational thing that we're just, as much as we might seek satisfaction in an experience or a thing or a person or a status or whatever it might be, they won't lead to any kind of lasting satisfaction. Then nikama, renunciation, simplification, letting go of that which doesn't serve us. And then the sixth thing is the Four Noble Truths, which we, you know, like in this culture, we often begin with skipping over all the preliminaries. There's a sense that there's a lot of, you know, cultivation that has to be developed for the deeper teachings to have a place to land and take hold and flower. And I like to think of, you know, different aspects of practice. So one is developing the wisdom to know where to rest the attention. So many things competing for our attention in this world. What's worthy of our attention? What do we want to tend to in this moment? You could say attention, you could say rest the mind, you could even say rest the heart. Where do we want to rest the heart? Where do we want to bring our whole heartedness in what's happening around us? And, you know, the premise is that there are ways of using the attention that lead to our well-being, the practice we just did, inevitably, however you experience the meditation, whether it was peaceful or whether it was restless, takes us in the direction of freedom, less suffering. And so many ways we can use the attention that compound our suffering. Doomscrolling, basically any kind of device that has an endless feed. Now they've got kind of like an endless feed on the New York Times app, so you just can keep going more and more bad news. We use the way, if we use the mind in a way where we're tracking a lot of different things moving from topic to topic, that creates a mind that is fragmented. And when we practice what we just did, steadying the mind, we create a mind that is less fragmented, less distracted. So developing the wisdom to know where to rest the heart moment by moment. And then actually having the ability to do it. I'll know the experience, some beautiful event, a celebration, a party, whatever that you'd really like to be present for, but the mind is somewhere else. This training to steady the mind, give us more and more capacity to actually rest the heart in places that nourish us. So that's one sort of aspect of practice. Another aspect of practice is, I would say I would call it vipassana, which means to see through, to cut through, to see the true nature of things in a very visceral way. And if I say everything is process, everything is in flux, nothing stays the same, nothing is permanent, nothing is constant. This is not a controversial statement. The ordinary run of the mill person on the street would agree with that proposition. And yet there's a way in which we don't organize our life around that knowing. It's still destabilizing and shocking when things change and they change not in our favor. Vipassana practice, we also see that there's this thread of unsatisfactoriness that if you're looking for the thing in experience that's going to produce happiness is not to be found. This is the nature of this realm that we're in. Everything's changing, the body is subject to aging, sickness, death, separation from everything that is dear to us. And everything that we say, think or do has impacts. More and more we learn where to rest the heart and how to direct the attention, the more and more we can cultivate beneficial qualities of being. The question that the Buddha left his life of comfort to answer, like how does one live well in a realm that is characterized by all this unsatisfactoriness? And then to these are things we see in our meditation experience. You can see the pervasiveness of ongoing change. How many thoughts do you have in 10 minutes or an hour or a day? It's just thousands coming and going. And we can sense into this dissatisfactoriness of because it's kind of the first thing that happens when you sit down to meditate, body's a little achy or there's just the restlessness and anxiety of a world that's on fire. So that's what shows up. The hum of anxiety that might be the through line of moving through this world and when we come into quiet and stillness, it's suddenly a roar until it's not, until we allow that to settle or until we become less impacted by the roar. And then the third kind of insight into the past is that, you know, it's not all about me. As much as it feels like I'm the center of the universe because all experience is coming in from all places to this thing I call me, that there's some suffering in that meanness that arises. There's some activity of clinging that leads to the sense of me, myself, mine. That makes us miserable. And so we begin to identify it to notice it more and more in our daily experience. And then to soften. The ongoing project of Dhamma practice to develop this attitude of not quarreling with anything or anyone, not letting external conditions rob us of our peace, not being dependent on the world lining up to meet our expectations because it very rarely does. And when it does, it usually doesn't last very long. And then the third thing, which is what I wanted to focus on the most in my remaining time is the third aspect of practice. So we have where to rest the heart, developing the skill to do that, seeing through the new true nature of this world. And the third one is the cultivation of qualities that make it possible to be in harmony with this kind of difficult world. But it's not, it's actually in the later, it's in the commentaries, but there's a list of 10 spiritual strengths that are shared. And again, generosity is the first on the list. A lot of this idea actually, that there are spiritual qualities or ways of being ways of going through the world that we can actually cultivate. I think when I came to this practice, 20 some odd years ago, I just had a paradigm that was really unexamined, which was that person's kind and that they kind of have an innate amount of kindness and that person's patient, this other person's generous as if it were some sort of like, and maybe to some extent, a trait that shows up from biology and how you're brought up and all that. But the idea that it could actually, we can develop more of whatever we need to navigate this world. This generosity, integrity, patience, forbearance, kind of determination or resolve. And the way this is talked about for the Buddha is like, eons of lifetimes to get enough cultivation until he was ready to be the Buddha awake. And I kind of like this, I'm not sure if I actually believe in reincarnation, I may have no evidence in my experience to support it. A lot of people, whose judgment I trust, believe it wholeheartedly. But I find it comforting that there's like some sort of long game that's being played. Friend of Mine is a Hindu. And whenever somebody complains about the political situation or, you know, what's happening in the world, he just reminds everyone that we're in the age of Kali Yug, according to their cosmology, and not to worry, because in 400,000 years, everything would act normal. And there's something about that. I'm silly, but there's something about that that I feel is like resets the frame a little bit. And even if you talk to, you know, we have generations of people in the room, you talk to people who are coming of age in the 60s, and the kind of turmoil that they experienced in society, and then people who went through a war too. You know, I once had a conversation with like four generations of a family, and each was convinced that their time was the worst. And each, you know, had cultivated some way of like being with the harsh reality that the reality that sometimes seems harsh. So we're in a stream of uninterrupted generosity, just by having these teachings available. For 2500 years, these teachings have been passed down freely. People for three to 500 years, the teachings were memorized. The version of the Pali Canon, I've seen that 17,000 pages, so dedicated practitioners like left the worldly life of, you know, family and possessions and work and just dedicated themselves wholeheartedly to remembering these teachings and primarily monastic, renunciate communities. So they didn't have any stuff. They relied on the communities to provide food and shelter and clothing and medicine. There's something so beautiful about that that, you know, I think the teachings would have made it to us, but for the sacrifice and generosity of all those people for all these many centuries. And this is a real cultural thing. My parents are from India, and the concept of generosity is so much more woven into the fabric of the culture. You wouldn't think of, you know, where I had the last morsel of food you'd offered up to ever came in the room. So, you know, it's a way of connecting people. I once gave a talk like this, a little longer, it was a 45 minute talk on Dana and that inside LA and, you know, and there are people in the room and I heard someone in the front row saying, what's Dana again? And their friend said, it means free. I just wanted to like, you know, like that's what that was your takeaway from 45 minutes of, you know, it's hard to get out of our fee for services mentality that many of us have, especially in the United States, you know, pay a certain amount of money, you get a thing. So the Buddha always began the teachings with generosity and only when the mind was sort of malleable and ready and free from hindrances. It's not a small thing to be just unhindered and kind of okay with how things are. And then he would go into the teachings of the Four Noble Truths. And he describes why this is the case, why generosity is so foundational. And the first one is it brings immediate mental joy and gladness. I mean, this is something I think we all know, like when you give something to someone, a thoughtful item that you thought out or you give your time or your energy to something that you care about, it just naturally uplifts the heart. It's like, the easiest thing we can do to begin to experience some well-being, some uplift, some joy as an antidote to a turbulent world and as a support to our ability to actually calm the mind. I said at the beginning, joy is a supporting condition for tranquility. And there's some research now that, you know, they take random people on the street and they give them a certain amount of money. They've done this across the world, different cultures, and they say you can either spend this one group says you could spend the money on whatever you want. And the other group is told that they have to spend the money on someone else. And then when they regroup at the end of the day, the people who were generous report a greater sense of well-being and satisfaction. Well, it's surprising, but it's like there's hard data for that too. The second reason that it gives for practicing generosity is the way it's that is written as being loved and respected by others. But I like to think of it as just improving the relational field. You know, when we all have, maybe we're that person for someone, but we all have people we know we can count on when we need something and they'll be there to support us. And that was the Buddhist vision for the monastic community and the lay people that the monastics would steward the teachings and then share them with lay people so that there'd be like a reciprocity and strong relationships, spiritual models before that were often still aren't cultures like the practitioners would go often to remote caves and this kind of managed subsistence farming and there was no reciprocity with the community. So the thought that was really important. The third reason that's given for practicing generosity is that it's preparation for renunciation and liberation. So when we're generous, we have to let go. There's something, our time, our energy, our tension, whatever it is that we are not, it shows up most with resources, but sometimes with time, we're not just sort of like keeping it all to ourselves. And the heart of the practice is letting go. So more and more moments we have to practice letting go, the more and more our practice comes to fruition. And then there's the ones that are maybe less, it depends on your belief system, but happy rebirth, favorable destinations after death. As I said, I'm sort of undecided on rebirth, but you can be reborn in a moment after you've been generous and experienced that joy of that new moment and then prosperity and support in future lives. Like some idea that there are karmic forces get put into place and to have some impact. That's the view. So little girl is on a bus and she comes to the front of the school bus, comes to the front of the bus and hands the driver a handful of peanuts. And she says, thank you, bus driver says thank you and enjoys the peanuts. And then a few minutes later, another handful of peanuts and driver says thank you and enjoying them, crunching on them. And then third time when the little girl offers peanuts, the driver says, okay, why don't you just enjoy them with your friends? I've had enough. One girl says, we only like to suck the chocolate off of them. So this is not generosity. Keila Grimpoche says when you practice generosity, you should feel a little pinch. And the pinch is your stinginess protesting. And giving away something that we don't need or something that we don't want doesn't address the problem of that we face as spiritual practitioners to free ourselves from this self preoccupation and self centeredness that kind of like can often be the default state. With simple ways I like to practice generosity. It's ongoing, I find it hard to do, but anytime someone's talking to me, I have this aspiration that I would put down whatever I'm doing both literally and figuratively. Now close the laptop, put down the pen, turn away from the screen and give them the gift of the fullness of my attention. And when I can remember to do this, the results are quite startling. Like it's more than once somebody has been confused like what's happening here, what are you doing? And my takeaway is just that we're not used to that kind of wholehearted attention anymore. Being generous is an active way that we can express our loving kindness. And then the flip side of generosity, some of us are very generous, but how do we receive? The story of the Dalai Lama who was going somewhere and was very chaotic and a woman wanted to give him some silks. And in the chaos he sort of said, rejected them. And then later in a conversation with his translator, he said, that was not kind. Somebody was trying to express their appreciation and I didn't allow them to do it. I think I could probably stop here. Let me just say, see if there's anything else that seems... Okay, here's a good ending quote. The practice of generosity is the beginning of letting go. This is Joseph Goldstein. The practice of generosity is the beginning of letting go. Every act of giving is a moment of non-clinging. And so in this way, generosity is the foundation of the whole path. So just let those words settle for a moment. And then I would love to hear comments, reflections, questions. Thank you for listening. To learn how you can support the teachers and Dharma Seed, please visit dharmaseed.org.