Give Before You Get

We meditate to find happiness, but we have to bring some happiness to the meditation first if we want to get results. This is why the Buddha’s training doesn’t start with meditating. It starts with generosity. You learn how to be happy through giving. 

A king once came to see the Buddha and asked him, “Where should a gift be given?” He may have expected the Buddha to say, “Give to Buddhists,” because the Brahmins would say, “Give to the Brahmins.” Other sectarians would have said to give to their sects. But the Buddha said something different. He said, “Give where you feel inspired, where you feel the gift would be well used.” 

That gives you freedom. This is one of the reasons the Buddha would start mundane right view with the statement, “There is giving.” It sounds obvious, but there were people at that time who said that giving had no meaning at all, either because the people you gave things to would be annihilated at death—so nothing in terms of long-term consequences could be expected—or because you had no free will. If you gave something, it was because the stars or some other outside force made you do it. But the Buddha said something else. He said, in effect, “It’s your free choice, and when you make the free choice to give, that’s a good choice.” 

When you were a child, this was probably how you first realized that you had that power of choice and could use it in a good way. You had something that you could use, and there was no compulsion to give it away, but you felt that it would be good to give it to somebody else. You weren’t driven by your appetites. That was your first taste of freedom and the benefits of freedom.

But then the king asked, “A gift given where gives the best results?” That, the Buddha said, was a different question. It required a different answer. This was where he talked about how to approach the act of giving as a skill. There’s a certain pleasure that comes with having freedom to choose where and what to give. But there’s a higher level of happiness that comes when you realize that you can put some thought into what you want to give and how you want to give it, and that increases its benefits. 

There are several things that would make a difference in the results. 

One of them has to do with the recipient: You want to choose someone who’s free of greed, aversion, and delusion, or who’s on the path of trying to achieve freedom from greed, aversion, and delusion.

You learn how to be happy through giving.

As for the gift itself, it’s interesting—the Buddha never talks about the material value of the gift as being important. It’s more, “Is this a gift that’s in season? Will it harm either you or the person who’s going to receive it?” 

Then there’s the attitude you adopt while you’re giving it. You have to believe that something important will come from this—you’re not just throwing it away.

And there is your motivation: What do you want to gain from giving a gift? For the Buddha, the best motivations are those that focus on training the mind. The lowest motivation, he says, is in line with the teaching on karma, that you basically get back what you’ve given. This was very common in India, and it’s been common throughout the Buddhist world ever since: You give x and you hope that in the next lifetime, you’ll get it back, one hopes, with interest. It’s not a bad motivation—it’s better than not giving at all—but it’s not the best. The higher motivations have to do with how giving is inherently good, or how it’s not right when you have more than enough—and there are the people who don’t have enough—that you don’t give something to them. If you belong to a family with a long tradition of being generous, you want to maintain the family tradition. Or you find that it makes the mind serene: It’s a source of happiness simply to give. And finally, it’s an ornament for the mind. You’re doing it because it’s a natural expression of your inner goodness. 

These are higher motivations, and the higher motivations get better results.

So you can see that approaching the act of generosity as a skill is aimed mainly at the mind. When you give to others, you want to give attentively, you want to give with respect, you want to give out of compassion. And the best motivation, of course, is that you want to benefit your mind. 

You see this clearly when you sit down and meditate. There are times when you’re trying to stay with the breath, and the mind just won’t stay. It’s got other issues. The thought comes to you, “Maybe I’m not cut out to be a meditator. Maybe I don’t have the merit.” At times like that, you can think back on the times you’ve been generous, the times you’ve been virtuous—generous when you didn’t have to be, or generous when you really put some thought into it. You weren’t just going through the motions.

In Thailand, they have ready-made packages for Sanghadana, when you want to give to the sangha. You go down to a store, and the items are already wrapped for you. That kind of gift doesn’t go into the heart nearly as much as when you stop to think, “What do the monks need? What would be something special for them that would really be in line with their needs?” The more thought you put into a gift, the more happiness comes when you reflect on that act of giving. And when you reflect that it was given out of the goodness of your heart, for the sake of making your heart serene, that gives you even more happiness. You have a strong sense of your own worth, that you’re not dead weight on the earth. You’ve actually given something. You’ve contributed something to the goodness of the world. And the world needs a lot of goodness. The fires of greed, aversion, and delusion always threaten to burn it up. With your act of generosity, it’s like putting water on the fires.

When you have that background, and when you’ve learned the lesson from giving that there’s a greater happiness that comes from giving rather than from consuming, it puts you in the right frame of mind to meditate—not only when you meet with obstacles but also when you approach meditation as a whole.

The world needs a lot of goodness. The fires of greed, aversion, and delusion always threaten to burn it up. With your act of generosity, it’s like putting water on the fires.

All too often, when people start meditating, they say, “What can I get out of this?” But if you come to it from the act of giving, your first thought should be, “What can I give here?” You can give your time. You can give your energy. The three qualities the Buddha says are necessary for getting the mind into concentration are mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. The ardency requires that you give energy, that you’re going to give before you can get. It’s through your ardency that you develop more mindfulness—in other words, the ability to keep in mind the fact that you’re going to try to stay here with the breath—and more alertness, because it takes energy to be alert. There’s a part of the mind that’s aware without any effort, but that’s not what the Buddha is talking about when he talks about alertness. Alertness means clearly knowing what you’re doing and the results you’re getting from your actions. You have to put energy into paying attention, because all too often we do things without paying full attention to what we’re doing. We’ve got our mind on something else. As a result, we can’t really connect our actions with the results of those actions, because we weren’t paying attention. That’s why we don’t learn much from our actions.

So you have to be resolute in being mindful, ardent, and alert. You give before you get. You start giving with the practice of mindfulness, with the practice of right effort, and those two factors help to develop your concentration. The concentration is the reward, but then the concentration itself requires effort to maintain the sense of well-being that comes with getting the mind to settle down and let go of all of its other preoccupations. 

That’s the other aspect of mindfulness. You’re mindful to stay with your one object, but you’re also mindful to put aside all thoughts about the world that are not related to staying with that object. As you give up outside preoccupations, you find that the mind is wealthier as a result. We tend to think that the more opinions we have, the more ideas we have, the richer our mind. But the Buddha is showing us that the mind reveals its luminous nature—what goodness it’s capable of—when you let go through the act of being generous, through the act of giving things up and seeing the good qualities of alertness, of mindfulness, and of awareness that develop as a result when the mind is not weighed down with a lot of opinions, not weighed down with a lot of possessions.

So come to the meditation with the right attitude. You give before you get, and whatever you get, you’re going to give that away, too, but it’s like a trade. Keep trading up and you finally get to the point where there’s no further “up.” In other words, you’ve reached the ultimate happiness, which the Buddha said is also the ultimate emptiness. It’s empty of disturbance, empty of defilement, but it’s full of well-being. There is that potential in the mind, but we’re not going to know it until we learn how to give up the things that hold us back.

Luang Pu Dune, one of the masters of the forest, was visiting Ajaan Suwat one time, and when he left, he made a comment that “The world is all about things that come in pairs, but the dhamma is one thing clear through.” He didn’t say what that one thing was, but the attitude of generosity is a good candidate.

♦

This article was adapted from a talk given on September 29, 2024, and originally appeared on dhammatalks.org.