Sometimes, there is a streak of imperiousness in me. It can come to the surface, for example, when I spot such transgressions as bicycles blocking the sidewalks, dogs off leash, beer cans thrown from cars, and much more. It’s been a longstanding habit of mine to complain loudly, as if that alone is all that is needed to fix things. My friends have politely endured my umbrage. But not so long ago they began to realize that something had happened. I was changing. Here’s how.

For the past five years, I’ve lived in affordable housing for seniors in one of three hundred apartments in a twenty-six-story building. There is so much to love about it, with one big exception: the community laundry room is a mess. 

Every week, I’d head down to the laundry room, in the dead of night. I didn’t want to run into any of the culprits that were responsible for the mess. I’d raise my eyebrows and notice how disheveled and dirty it could be. Often, of the ten washing machines, there would be piles of laundry left in broken machines, sometimes for days. Many of the machines would be sporting rivulets of spilled detergent running down their front. Often, there would be somebody who thought they could crush two loads into one, bringing the cycle to a halt. Dryers mysteriously sent out cold air. And through it all, I did nothing but complain, mostly to myself.

But, wait, there’s more: clothes left and forgotten, taking up space in the few carts; dryers choked with lint, in spite of a sign that asks all to clean it after use; floors flooded because of a faulty machine.

One day, an actual crime was committed. Someone dealt with a broken washing machine by ripping off its door, presumably by sheer strength, and throwing it across the room. I pictured a discus thrower. I opined confidently that it was probably someone’s visiting grandchild, perhaps a college student on spring break. None of us had that kind of muscle. 

All of this, I’m ashamed to say, just produced more fodder for complaining. And, still, I did nothing.

Then, one night, out of the blue, I finally took one little step. I was fed up with the way the detergent dispensers were often clogged and overflowing. Angrily, I found a way to disengage the detergent dispenser on my washing machine. Unlike that imaginary college student, all I needed was plenty of patience. After trial and error, I found the right pressure and the exact spot to free it. I was proud of myself, as if I’d just cracked a safe.

Now I could take each of the dispensers to the sink and wash all the excess away. For weeks, I happily disengaged a dispenser and washed it in the sink. Over time, I found that I’d pulled out all of them from the ten washing machines. And that’s when I realized, without my intending to do so, and in one revelatory moment, that I’d tricked myself into doing service for all my neighbors. The very ones I loved to complain about. 

I started cleaning all ten of the dispensers each week. But I didn’t stop there. I found so much more that needed cleaning. The white tops of all the dryers and machines needed to be wiped. It was amazing how much lint accumulated. I cleaned the front of the machines as well. One day I noticed that the seals on the washing machines were loose, and were becoming receptacles for all kinds of grunge, much of it organic material! This was not healthy. I put on industrial gloves and started pulling the grunge out. Now, what to do with the clothes that had been left for several days in a couple of carts? I didn’t want to be presumptuous, but I folded the clothes and put them on the folding table. I was no longer thinking only of my laundry, but the various needs we all had. Yes, I was actually thinking of “us,” not just me. I began to recognize a feeling of interdependence in a matter-of-fact way. I became curious, and rather than complaining about the mess, thought about more ways to make it better. 

The more I cleaned, the more I enjoyed it. The few times someone happened by in the middle of the night, they never acknowledged me. Perhaps they didn’t want to interrupt my work. It makes me feel good that my dana is given freely and just as freely, silently accepted. 

One night, two chatty residents appeared. They could see that I had a spray bottle in one hand, and a cloth in the other, and was stretching to reach the tops of the machines. One of the women asked if I worked there. The other said the place was never cleaner. And they both agreed that it was kind of spooky to clean at this late hour. Then like a magician, I pulled a feather duster out from behind me. Merriment ensued. 

Buddhism emphasizes that egos aren’t static. We have many selves. I’ve found a self I’d not known before, who shows up to care for the laundry room and the tenants who use it. I’ve even caught him whistling while he worked! 

My compassion for my neighbors has blossomed. I began to realize how difficult doing laundry is for many of them. How is it that, in this senior apartment building, I hadn’t paid much attention? Neighbors were in wheelchairs, for example, trying to reach up to fill the dispenser, or doing a balancing act while maneuvering a walker. That’s why the spills were there. Dozens of dryer sheets floated like tumbleweeds across the floor. I can stoop to sweep them up. Perhaps those errant clothes are still in the carts because someone became ill. Maybe they’d been taken to the hospital, a common event in senior living. Maybe they simply forgot. Or maybe they were just pissed off. I began to imagine all the things that could happen, then my complaints began to melt away. 

Zen teaches us that each and every one of us is a Buddha. I like to imagine all of the three hundred Buddhas in the building, each tucked away in their own apartment, and how it was buddhanature that had pulled me in the right direction, to do what was right.

I love picturing the early birds coming down to the laundry room in the morning, and finding everything sparkling clean. They might tell each other there’s a ghost afoot. But it’s not a hungry one. Just hard-working me. With no complaints. 

The post The Ghost in the Laundry Room appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Quick—what’s the most adapted work of literature in the English language? That’s right: Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. By 1844, eight competing theatrical versions were playing in London, and soon Dickens himself was giving staged readings in England and the United States, complete with character voices. He continued until the year he died. 

Since then, there have been literally hundreds of adaptations, including musicals, ballets, movies, TV shows, graphic novels, and video games. (Here’s a supercut of 400 of them, featuring, among others, Scooby-Doo, The Jetsons, My Little Pony, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force.) There have been book sequels and adaptations in the styles of Hemingway and Ayn Rand, and Christmas Carol–themed ads for Nyquil, La-Z-Boy Loungers, and Honey Nut Cheerios. The iconic miser Ebenezer Scrooge has been portrayed by such master thespians as Alastair Sim (in the peerless 1951 film version), Alec Guinness, Orson Welles, George C. Scott, and Michael Caine, as well as Oscar the Grouch, Mr. Magoo, Fred Flintstone, Super Mario, and, of course, Scrooge McDuck.

Why? 

For starters, it’s an irresistibly great story. Its life-affirming message is deeply inspiring; reading it helped van Gogh overcome his suicidal impulses, at least for a while. But there must be something more than that. Any time a work has such enduring, universal appeal, we suspect that something in it speaks to our deep sense of what’s what—the same what’s what that we explore in the dharma. 

Dickens’s tale offers profound insight into dana paramita, sublime generosity. Now, the word virtue can suggest an unpalatable duty that we take on in the hope of some future reward; we’re grudgingly good now to gain some kind of heaven later. But Buddhist psychology is shrewder than that. The paramitas are actually skillful meditative approaches to the business of daily living. They’re ways of realizing nirvana right here in samsara, of finding heaven in the very moment of our right behavior. 

In the classical sequence, dana (pronounced DAH-na) is the first of the paramitas, a best first step on the path of awakening. Moment by moment, we’re given fresh opportunities to take and retake that step. Tipping your server? Maybe add another dollar to the tip. Feel a little freer, more expansive? Add another dollar. See how free you can afford to feel. 

Scrooge, who overworks and underpays his clerk, Bob Cratchit, begrudging him even a few coals for the fire to keep off the winter cold, embodies the absence of dana paramita. Cratchit is the stand-in for all our fellow beings, whom we may choose to treat well or shabbily. Scrooge, of course, is us—the unenlightened us, in our futile attempts to achieve happiness through accumulation. Whether we accumulate money or fame or knowledge or cool toys or sexual conquests or TikTok views, the idea is that if we heap up enough, we’ll be happy at last. We’ll finally fill our jar with jelly beans, and then we’ll win. But sooner or later, gently or painfully, we learn that this doesn’t work; it’s an unskillful strategy. We may even (like Scrooge) forget that happiness was the original goal. All we’re left with is a calcified habit pattern, which, as if there’s no other choice, we cram ourselves into.

Thus, in pinching pennies, Scrooge has pinched himself. He has become “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, … secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue. … He carried his own low temperature always about with him.” Virtue, as it turns out, really is its own reward, and vice is its own punishment. Miser is the root of the word miserable.

But even from the depths of his self-made misery, there are subtle signs that Scrooge seeks a way out, as all sentient beings do, consciously or not. When his nephew, Fred, wishes him a merry Christmas, he responds with an angry, dismissive “Bah! Humbug. … What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.” Clearly, this is meant as a bitter rhetorical question. But from a place that’s deeper than his bitterness—a place Scrooge can’t consciously access yet—perhaps it comes as a sincere, even plaintive plea. What reason might we have to be merry, even if we’re poor? How might we be happy for no reason?

To access that place, if we’re as calcified as Scrooge, we may require the strong medicine of an encounter with mortality—a vision of death. That’s where the story begins. The first sentence is “Marley was dead.” Boom. It’s the ghost of Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s late business partner and fellow miser, who begins the intervention. He appears to Scrooge bound in a heavy chain made of “cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.” Marley explains: “I wear the chain I forged in life. … I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.” 

This is precisely how we become the victims of our own stinginess (or any other nonvirtue), bound and burdened by it. Every time we skimp on the server’s tip, or grab the big piece of cake before the next guy can get it, or are selfish with our time, our help, or our empathy, we become more tightly stuck in the notion that we’re a constricted separate self. The sense that we’re an isolated, finite little wave on the surface of the ocean of existence is reinforced by all our efforts to enlarge our wave by scooping up and hoarding every drop of water we can get, even at the expense of our fellow waves. Conversely, generosity helps free us to see that we were never just a wave. We’re the ocean.

The specter of Scrooge’s old partner appears on Christmas Eve with a warning not to end up like him. When, in keeping with Marley’s promise, the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come visit Scrooge for his edification, they whisk him through time and space to give him a broader view of life and death, suffering and happiness, as lived by himself and a multitude of others—all in the context of Christmas, the one day dedicated to the spirit of selflessness, “the only time in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” We’re on this one big bus with all our fellow beings. It would behoove us to acknowledge that always, but one day a year is a start.

Generosity helps free us to see that we were never just a wave. We’re the ocean.

Most of us remember most vividly the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come: the mute, hooded, faceless figure that points with a bony finger to the grave. But the forms of the two prior Ghosts are also telling. The Ghost of Christmas Past is an anthropomorphized candle—“from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light”—that whisks Scrooge through scenes of his childhood and youth, illuminating the painful estrangements and isolations that distorted his character into its present state. When traumatic material surfaces in meditation or therapy, we may try to suppress the dawning light, and so does Scrooge. The Ghost carries a cap under its arm, in the form of an extinguisher. “Scrooge … seized the extinguisher-cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down upon its head. The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher covered its whole form; but though Scrooge pressed it down with all his force, he could not hide the light: which streamed from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground.” Suppression doesn’t work. Sooner or later, we have to face the light … fortunately.

The Ghost of Christmas Present is another strange figure, a colossal monarch of abundance. “Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch, there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see.” As a sort of scepter of his power, the Giant holds a torch shaped like a horn of plenty, with which he sprinkles blessings on all those he and Scrooge encounter in their journeys through London and the wider world. When we clearly experience the actuality of the present (the only actuality there is), we discover that it’s rich, with a richness that’s the nature of existence itself, whether we live in a palace or a hut. Here Dickens is in accord with all the sages, who report that samsara is nirvana, that the kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth if only people could see it. It’s all a big present, a generous gift. Our job is to enjoy it, to gracefully accept the present. 

Then our natural response will be dana paramita. When life is experienced as overflowing, like a sprawling throne of mince-pies and plum puddings, it’s only natural to share the wealth. So nirvana inspires dana, even as dana supports nirvana. (All the paramitas work this way. Being good helps you see you’re in heaven; when you see you’re in heaven, naturally you’re good.) How to achieve this kind of seeing? To start, we can simply relax our unwinnable fight against actuality. When it rains, enjoy the rain, and leave off wishing for sunshine; when the neighbor’s dog barks through your meditation, leave off wishing for it to stop. Dickens understands this profound connection between the enjoyment of the present and the abandonment of hostilities: “Girded round [the Giant’s] middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.”

When Scrooge awakens on Christmas morning from the vision of the three Ghosts, he is awake in the fullest sense. In the first moments of his expansive new vision, as commonly happens, he’s bliss-intoxicated: 

“I don’t know what to do!” cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath … . “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world. … I don’t know what day of the month it is! … I don’t know how long I’ve been among the Spirits. I don’t know anything. I’m quite a baby. Never mind. I don’t care. I’d rather be a baby. Hallo! Whoop! Hallo here!” 

Clearly, this baby has been born again, fresh, his awareness radiantly empty. This is a declaration of beginner’s mind as Buddha-mind if ever there was one. At this point, most film Scrooges do a wild happy-dance. The best is Alastair Sim, who skips and leaps about in his nightshirt and, riffing on Dickens’s text, sings:

I don’t know anything!
I never did know anything!
But now I know that I don’t know
All on a Christmas morning!

Scrooge has the biggest turkey in the poulterer’s shop sent to the home of Bob Cratchit—anonymously, so that the pure happiness of dana paramita isn’t tainted by the selfish wish to receive credit. He gives Cratchit a big raise, he becomes “a second father” to Cratchit’s disabled son, Tiny Tim, and he’s transformed into the very embodiment of joyous generosity. Dickens’s summation of Scrooge’s metamorphosis suggests how an expansive spirit radiates outward from the light-filled individual to the farthest horizons. “He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.” 

Near the end, there’s a lovely vignette of Scrooge that may feel familiar to those who have tasted such awakening. The initial giddy, happy-dance bliss has now settled and mellowed, and Scrooge goes for a Christmas-morning walk through town. “The people were by this time pouring forth, … and walking with his hands behind him, Scrooge regarded every one with a delighted smile.” The position of his hands is a nice, subtle touch: a mudra of nongrasping, of pleasant, beneficent detachment. “He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure.”

The first beneficiary of our generosity, as of all the virtues, is ourselves. When we at last give up trying to hoard our way to happiness, we find that wherever we go, whatever we do, it yields us pleasure, even if we’re just walking down the street with our hands behind us. We’re happy for no reason. May that be your gift to yourself—and everyone’s gift to themselves—this holiday season. 

“And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!”

The post Coming Unscrooged appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When I finally swallowed a small blue pill that smelled like an odd mint for the first time last year, I cried. Taking Estradiol and Spironolactone for hormone replacement therapy (HRT) helped me feel a sense of worthiness I had never been offered before, either by society or by myself. But it hasn’t been easy.

I recently celebrated my one year anniversary of starting the medical and social transition as a transgender woman. Though medical transition through HRT, which is also called Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy, does not make my transgender identity more legit, I have never given myself something so important. And it is through practicing the Buddhist principles of dana (generosity), sila (commitment to nonharming), and bhavana (cultivation of a wholesome mind) that I have started to trust that I might, in fact, be worthy of such a gift.  

This last year has been a mixture of doubt, joy, depression, acceptance, desire, grieving, confusion, disillusionment… Intense would be one word to describe it all. Though I’m a trans woman, I do not present hyperfeminine, nor do I subscribe to the typical aesthetics of “man” or “woman.” But because I make my livelihood as a meditation teacher and Broadway performer, my appearance is public, and I have felt constant internal and external pressure to “look like a woman” by wearing certain clothes, hairstyles, and makeup. It’s not so simple. When Broadway opened up after an almost-two-year COVID-19 shutdown, going back to rehearsals was a big moment for me. I was able to have conversations with the producers and creative team about what changes I might need to feel aligned with my newly reclaimed identity. Outside of the show, I slowly started to audition for female, transgender, or gender nonconforming roles. Though that came with infinite doubts, my artistry expanded further as I played roles that felt more like me.

I didn’t realize how exhausted I was from all of this until I sat at an online weekend retreat. Or rather, I lay down and slept during it. The pressure of my life had been cooking, and I finally found a pause to let off some of the steam. I fell asleep during almost all of the sitting sessions and took naps on breaks, then slept through the night for the first day. I felt the heaviness and delirious sensation of sloth and torpor, one of the five hindrances of meditation practice, where there was enough mindfulness present. My intention to do the retreat this time was to rest, not to deepen my practice, though these things go hand-in-hand—in order to go deeper, one might need to rest deeply. I appreciated that my system knew what to do and shut down, and I accepted it as a gift.

This retreat helped me recognize the severe intensity of my internal and external conditions while medically and socially transitioning. It allowed me to put down the intensity just for a while to remember the aspiration for starting HRT: as a practice of generosity toward myself.

Dana in the Buddhist context is the cultivation of generosity. It means giving without expectation, or unconditionally. Traditionally, it’s practiced through giving food and medicine to renunciates, or contributing to nunneries or monasteries. Dharma teachers are often supported by people’s donations. My understanding is that it’s possible to contextualize dana for modern life, although there is beauty in the simplicity of the traditional sense of the word, which is unconditional offering. I practice dana by sharing my artistry and knowledge as accessibly as possible. Organizations might pay me to teach meditation, but they offer the program free of charge to participants, and I have also organized free dance and meditation classes. Broadway shows pay me the most and cost the most for people to attend. Regardless of my performance and teaching salary for both dance and mindfulness, I do not alter what I offer—one million dollars an hour would not be enough for me and free of charge would be more than enough. This is my practice of generosity as a working artist in New York City.  

I also practice sila, the cultivation of ethical conduct and commitment to nonharming. This notion of ethical conduct is part of the eightfold path, and includes the five precepts that lay Buddhists might adhere to: refraining from taking life, from taking what is not freely given, from harming with sexual activity, from wrong speech, and from taking intoxicants that could lead to carelesness. With sila, too, there is a benefit in the traditional sense of pure renunciation, especially during retreat, and modern life may not make it easy for everyone to be disciplined. Recognizing the perfectionist in myself, I take the precepts not as absolute rules but as one of many frameworks for navigating daily life that is less harmful and for building wholesome relationships; these guidelines provide a sense of comfort and trust, not rigidity and blame.

My personal practice of sila varies and has shifted many times, both on retreats and in daily life. I try to release mosquitos after they’ve been caught. I have stopped eating animal products. I do this with the knowledge that I will harm many beings knowingly or unknowingly. Trying not to steal anyone’s time and efforts, I make sure I am respecting and listening to others with a lovingkindness attitude as much as possible. I continue to learn about the many forms of oppression that could steal the essence of someone’s humanity. My husband and I practice ethical nonmonogamous (ENM) queer marriage through communicating our sexuality and desires, exploring nonhierarchical polyamory. I check in with how heedless the mind becomes with a glass of wine and edibles. I often fail to be generous and nonharming, but continuously exploring dana and sila makes me humble. 

Traditionally, dana and sila are the foundation for bhavana: the cultivation of a wholesome mind through meditation practice. Besides my regular practice of Vipassana and the brahma-viharas, I often come back to the Four Guardian Meditations. Michele McDonald, one of my teachers, sometimes tells stories of the influential late Burmese monk Mya Taung Sayadaw (1916-2015), who had a deep connection with these four practices that specifically develop bhavana. They are:  

1. Recalling the virtues of the Buddha

2. Contemplating 32 parts of the body

3. Lovingkindness 

4. Reflection on death

Though the Four Guardian Meditations are not widely taught in the United States—perhaps, Michele imagines, because they might sound elementary to some—I have found the practices very nurturing and as protective as the “guardian” name implies. They have the balancing factors between wisdom and love. There is an inevitable vulnerability in human life with the dying body and wild mind, yet there is also the possibility to care for the fragile body and understand the mind. Anyone has the capacity for awakening, everyone is worthy. That’s what these practices show me. Michele says she tries to see worthiness in herself and others even when waiting for the cashier at the grocery store, and I have tried this myself on the subway in New York. But I really needed to practice “worthiness” intentionally and patiently toward myself because I had never felt worthy of my existence as a woman, which comes up often as insecure attachment in my adult life. Through these practices I have learned to reparent myself on a nonconceptual level. 

All the practices described above helped me realize that I wanted to begin HRT, although I knew the pills—which nontrans people might take for things like severe acne, hair loss, and menopause—would bring much uncertainty to my life. My doctor told me the possible side effects but made sure to inform me that they all vary from person to person. Remembering that the practice of dana is to give without expectation, but not recklessly, and feeling informed by my therapist and doctor, I knew I would always be protected. I could always come back to the tenderness and equanimity of dana. 

The side effects were prominent for me. During the first week, I was exhausted and stayed in bed longer because my hormone levels were readjusting. A year later, my stamina and endurance are still significantly lower than they were before; my testosterone level is a tenth of its previous level. I kept noting the unpleasantness of tension and pain in the body as well as doubts and disappointment in the mind. What if I can’t dance anymore? Depression and despair often crept in. As I talked about my experience with friends who menstruate, we realized that transitioning is like having PMS every day by choice. With the Broadway reopening rehearsals, the changes became much more obvious, since I had done the same show for a few years prior. I could not get up from the floor for 20 minutes after the first run-through. 

I think of the increased media attention on transgender women and gender nonconforming athletes and kids who are also going through HRT. Who in their right mind would go through physical, mental, and social struggles for temporary fame and success, not to mention having to go through the gatekeeping of gender-affirming healthcare? I wonder if those who write legislation and rules around transgender and gender-nonconforming athletes have ever had firsthand experience as a professional athlete on HRT. Limiting rights for transgender and gender-nonconforming athletes and young people is violent and harmful, and taking away the rights of gender identity and expression could end up killing them. I wonder if this applies to the five precepts. 

Though the intensity of internal and external conditions kept rising over the year, I know HRT saved my life. 

These days, two paradoxical experiences exist in my mind. One is tremendous gratitude that I can get gender-affirming medical care, and the other is fear of my humanity being violated, as my gender identity is questioned daily on the street, on social media, and in my internal voice. I know, however, that I can feel joy that I have never experienced before, and that I didn’t even know how cruel I had been to myself. I did not even realize the oppression that became second nature and painted my life a few shades darker. HRT was not a cure for everything, but it affirmed how I had felt about myself since I was 3 years old. This feeling of fundamental worthiness that should not be questioned for any human being had not been there for me. It was denied to me long ago when I was naively assigned male at birth by a doctor (though this is not to blame). Now I take pills twice a day, every day, giving kindness toward myself unconditionally. It is the greatest love letter to myself. It just doesn’t have words. I feel it. I will continue the practice of dana, sila, and bhavana through transition. These practices are never solid rules and goals. I understand them as an experience of rest and exploration. 

The post Practicing Dana, Sila, and Bhavana as I Transition appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

How can we find the courage to have alobha, to give freely without attachment; adosa, to let go of aversion and punitive actions and live with integrity; and amoha, to gain insight into the nature of things without delusion? In this Tharma Talk, we will learn to practice the three beautiful branches of dana (giving), sila (moral integrity), and bhavana (cultivation, meditation), and to live as heart-centrically as we can.

Joshua Bee Alafia’s meditation practice began in 1989 when his mother gave him a mantra to work with. This sparked a rich journey through many different meditation styles from the Hindu, Hawaiian Shamanic, Ifa, Sufi, Dzogchen, Taoist, and Vipassana traditions. Alafia is a graduate of Community Dharma Leaders, and has taught at NY Insight, The Brooklyn Zen Center, MNDFL, Dhamma Dina, East Bay Meditation Center, and the Garrison Institute. He also taught mindfulness practice to incarcerated, court involved, and system vulnerable youth through New York’s Lineage Project in 2010. Alafia founded Liberation Center Worldwide in 2020, a nonprofit dedicated to building meditation wellness centers internationally. Currently he teaches at South Side Insight, South Side Liberation Center, and Immortal Arts Chicago.

The post The Three Beautiful Roots: Cultivating the Three Wholesome Qualities in Unwholesome Times appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In Tricycle’s Summer 2020 issue, religious studies professor and Shin Buddhist priest Jeff Wilson discussed “The Merit Economy,” which has sustained Buddhist institutions for centuries, and examined how it faces new challenges in the Western world. Generated through ethical deeds, merit is the karmic ingredient that leads to one’s favorable rebirth and overall good fortune. Because of their commitment to Buddhist practice, monks and nuns have more opportunities to accrue merit than laypeople, whose lifestyles leave less time for spiritual cultivation. For the laity, the best way to generate merit is through dana (Pali, Skt., “giving”), especially in the form of donations to monastic communities.

In effect, this establishes a system in which laypeople materially support monastics and monastics spiritually support laypeople. But in the West, where merit and rebirth are not as central to practitioners’ beliefs as they are in traditionally Buddhist cultures, many dharma groups have had to find new ways to sustain themselves. This change, Wilson stressed, is monumental in Buddhism’s history.

Some readers shared their objections to Wilson’s characterization of the concepts of merit and dana as well as their role in Western Buddhism. Here are two responses, edited for length.

Sarah Conover, Tricycle contributor and Theravada practitioner: Jeff Wilson has chosen two ends of a transactional stick to create his thesis: the Chinese Tiantai Buddhist network, known for selling indulgences, and a Zen abbot who was a paid employee. In portraying the issue along that continuum, he has missed a whole field of real dana, generosity, and merit, in a way that damages those core Buddhist concepts and misleads the reader.

In my view, Buddhism in the West is on its way to cleaning up the “merit transaction economy” that Wilson points to and growing something very beautiful and in line with what the Buddha taught. Dana and merit—both perhaps understood as acts of goodness—in the West are yet experiments that differ between denominations. Wilson’s article explains some of that confusion. But the article is demeaning to ardent monks and nuns, especially those whose supporters do not believe in transactional merit but are inspired by the goodness they feel in their teachers’ presence and teachings.

Wilson’s article approaches a single aspect of merit, but not the original teachings or any examples of what real merit and dana might look like, leaving us with a sour taste and not much of a vision for the future.

Ajahn Dhammadharo, an Australia-based monk in the Thai Forest tradition of Theravada Buddhism: Jeff Wilson presents information about a genuine problem: the financial struggles of some Buddhist centers. But is this article descriptive or prescriptive? Is Buddhism on the way to being a fee-for-service operation or should it be? He writes: “The loss of merit substantially undermines the foundations of traditional Buddhist ethics . . . creating the need for major reconstruction.” Well, the first part was right. How about a renaissance of the original?

There are modern examples of fully dana-based Buddhist institutions, but he doesn’t mention them. The Thai Forest tradition, for instance, has survived and thrived in materially impoverished places and circumstances. We only need enough support to survive. The article shows an almost willing ignorance of this principle. An experience of my own: One of the teachers at a center told me that when they switched from charging fees to a completely donation-based model, it did not negatively impact their financial situation; another teacher told me they actually had more money coming in than before.

“True goodness is not a zero-sum game, in which one person has to lose for another to gain.”

The depiction of merit as an economy—in which monks do the labor of merit-production and selling on the one hand and laypeople do the buying on the other—is misleading in another, subtler way, too. Wilson gives this away: Although he compares merit to a kind of currency, he admits that this currency is not “totally rational,” because giving it away actually increases it. But that is the point: It isn’t money, so it need not conform with the dynamics of monetary exchange in order to be rational. Is there anything irrational about the flame of one candle being used to light another—and another, and another, and so on—without diminishing its own glow?

True goodness, unlike other commodities, is not a zero-sum game, in which one person has to lose for another to gain. The more brightness one person generates, the better for everyone around them; it can be both taught and caught without anyone losing out.

In “Broadening the Field of Buddhist Studies” (Winter 2020), Tricycle’s editorial assistant, Emily DeMaioNewton, reported on the trend of Buddhist studies departments becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, and how that trend can be traced back to the pioneering scholar Richard Robinson. Charles Prebish, a Tricycle contributor, prominent Buddhist scholar, and Robinson’s former research assistant, wrote in to share his appreciation for the “interesting and informative” article. “I do wish, however, that you would have contacted a few of Richard Robinson’s students who could have provided you with a ‘ton’ of information,” he wrote. “I’m sure your article will be very useful to Tricycle readers, but I do believe there’s so much more you could have done.” For those looking to learn more about “the scholars who have shaped the discipline of Buddhist Studies over the past fifty years,” Prebish recommended visiting the website H-Buddhism. The site’s many resources include a section titled “Generations of Buddhist Studies,” in which “there are—so far—about forty chapters of biographical reminiscence by leading Buddhist Studies scholars,” he wrote, adding, “There are about another fifty chapters to be written in the near future.”

The world is changing rapidly, as Tricycle contributor Curtis White is acutely aware. Beginning as a eulogy for the seemingly forgotten classics of Western literature and fine arts, White’s essay “Living in a World That No Longer Exists” (Winter 2020) ultimately finds that while a culture’s tastes may transform, art’s beauty endures. Reader Ryan Elizabeth commented, “This piece is absolutely beautiful—a meditation in its own right.” As an artist who studied creative writing and philosophy in college, Elizabeth found the article to be particularly resonant. “I am only 32 and find that with each passing day the world shifts immeasurably around me,” Elizabeth wrote. “Even as a child, I felt a sense of wonder at this ever-changing nature. Perhaps this is why the Buddha’s teachings always felt direct and deeply understandable. . . . Your writing is medicine for those of us who don’t believe in the concept of ‘outdated’ writing styles of yesteryear.”

An article by former Theravada Buddhist monk and journalist Matthew Gindin, titled “Opinion: Buddhists Can Be Happy Trump Lost,” generated a firestorm of feedback from readers—with nearly five hundred comments on a Facebook post for the story alone.

“The dharma teaches interdependence and the clear-eyed understanding of causality: what actually leads to what,” Gindin wrote. “Surely we should ask ourselves what political platforms and principles most accurately reflect these teachings. We should not fear asking what political trends resonate with the dharma, but we can be cautious in answering the question.”

Many readers disagreed.

Dandy Melgo asserted on Instagram that the Buddha was not “in any way” political after he gained enlightenment. “Politics is divisive—it thrives on conflict. The Buddha was the opposite,” he wrote. Stefano Notarbartolo responded that “multi-party democracy is divisive, not politics. At the time of the Buddha there were no parties but councils where those in charge discussed the laws. Similarly, in the sangha the Buddha was the leader, but he listened to what others had to say.”

Kaushinie Renuka Panditaratne, who, according to Facebook, lives in Lübeck, Germany, wrote, “Your article unfortunately sounds disrespectful, condescending, and arrogant. The view of Buddhism you portray, which has been mostly expressed here, is nothing more than cultural misappropriation.”

In response to one assertion that Buddhists have historically been nonpolitical, the Tibetan Buddhist nun Ayya Yeshe, director of the Bodhicitta and Kalyanamitra foundations, wrote, “You do know that many lamas ruled [Tibet] and had their private monk armies, right?”

Kurt Spellmeyer, a Zen priest and professor of English at Rutgers University wrote: “The long sweep of Buddhism’s social history is not well understood in the West. But I would recommend that readers who take offense at this excellent article study the role Buddhism played in India and China, a persistently anti-authoritarian role, or so many historians have argued.”

Spellmeyer, a Tricycle contributor, continued: “Although the caste system had not fully formed during the Buddha’s lifetime, Buddhism remained throughout its two millennia on the subcontinent the most effective and articulate opponent of brahmanism and the caste system it promoted, and the dharma’s view of women was highly progressive, especially compared with the patriarchy of its brahmanist opponents. In India, Buddhism was the religion of the cosmopolitan urban middle class, typically merchants and professionals, and it celebrated what we call ‘diversity’ and ‘mobility.’ By contrast, brahmanism was the religion of the rural elite, the aristocracy, and the feudal oppressors. In our time, progressives recognize the dharma as a natural ally for a good reason: it is one. The historical project of both groups is the same—liberation, in every sense of the word.”

Other readers commented on the former president specifically.

“It seems that the net amount of suffering (globally and in the US) has increased under Donald Trump’s presidency,” David Koffer wrote on Facebook. “That, more than anything, is my principal reason for joy at his election loss.”

The Question

If you could ask the Buddha one question, what would it be?

Are you happy that your teachings became a religion, or not? —Mike Calabrese

We now know that people have very different brains. Do you have any advice about practicing for those with ADHD or autism? —Justin White

Did you ever feel that your quest was unfair to your wife, Yashodhara, and your son, Rahula, who had to lead lonely lives while you were gone? —Durgesh Kasbekar

Given that psychedelics weren’t widespread in your time and given the growing body of data on their benefits for healing psychological suffering, do you see psychedelics as a help or a hindrance on the path? —Clever Creature Podcast (Jason Gots)

🙏🏾 No questions. —Patricia George Brief

Do you like Beyoncé? —@jakefullertonhemet

For the next issue:

What’s your favorite line from a Buddhist poem?

Email your brief responses to editorial@tricycle.org, post a comment on tricycle.org, or tweet us at @tricyclemag.

The post Letters to the Editor appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

At the saw-toothed edge of autumn, violent forest fires obscured the noonday sun at Green Gulch Farm. Ominous clouds of charcoal soot and thick, vermilion smoke darkened the Pacific Northwest, covering the last rows of butter lettuce with ghost-gray ash. 

Eight months ago the fields lay fallow at Green Gulch, the Soto Zen farm and practice center where my husband and I trained for 25 years before moving into our current home next door. It was early March then, the coastal headlands above the Gulch pale blue, blowing with wild lilac and late rain. California had just ordered the nation’s first shelter-in-place mandate in an attempt to staunch the rising tide of COVID-19 cases. One of the last formal ceremonies offered at Green Gulch before the sangha began sheltering in place was the annual seed-sowing ceremony, which opened this year’s agricultural season with a chant of dedication:

We offer the sowing and tending of these seeds to our great,
original teacher Shakyamuni Buddha
Whose real nature is in harmony with the mysterious process of
living and dying . . .
May we labor in love and awareness and with deep humility open to
the true nature of all being!

A few months later, the fields were arrayed in a tapestry of dark green kale, golden beets, red mustard, collards, rainbow chard, purplette onions, and multi-hued lettuce—all ready for harvest just as access to the Bay Area farmers markets closed down in May due to a surge in coronavirus cases.  

Our Zen farm quarantined and unable to go to market, we needed a new plan for our crops. So when the current Green Gulch residents entered into “no coming, no going” isolation, my farmer-husband, Peter, and I offered to mask up and load our vintage red Toyota farm truck with harvest bounty to share across the increasingly food-insecure Bay Area community. 

Our donation plan was simple. The farmers at Green Gulch would grow and harvest all the food and prepare it for distribution. Peter and I would go to the Gulch three or four times a week to load stacks of fresh produce and seedlings. We would deliver these offerings to a network of three former farm apprentices, dharma colleagues, and dedicated food activists who would distribute the food throughout the community in places where it was most needed.     

For almost fifty years of my Zen training, the linked practices of engaged dharma and deep ecology have been at the core of my practice. Deep ecology asks that we recognize the interdependent nature of all species in the living world without focusing on their potential usefulness to human beings. Grounded in meditation and enlivened by kinship with plants and the work of organic gardening, this practice in combination with engaged dharma is dynamic, nonlinear, and rooted in universal change. Because of this, when pandemic pandemonium pushed us to pivot this year, we were able, in our small, local way, to respond to rampant food insecurity.  

When I engage in this work, I look to the wisdom of my teachers. As my root teacher, the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh often said: “Mindfulness must be engaged. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise what is the use of seeing?” Bhikkhu Bodhi, the activist scholar-monk who founded Buddhist Global Relief in 2008, holds that all beings must have access to safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food and medicine. Like Bhikkhu Bodhi, I have come to see making sure that people have the food and medicine they need to sustain a healthy life full of dignity and moral clarity is essential Buddhist practice.     

In the Anguttara Nikaya the Buddha taught “In giving food, one gives five things: life, beauty, happiness, strength, and mental clarity.” This insight informs 2nd-century scholarship attributed to Indian philosopher and monk Nagarjuna. He is one of the primary sources for the teaching on the three forms of far-reaching generosity, which include the generosity of material resources, of dharma teaching, and of non-fear. Thich Nhat Hanh regularly emphasized the importance of Nagarjuna’s fundamental teachings. Material support, a form of dana, is considered the root of all good dharmas. In its worldly form of food, medicine, shelter, and clothing, true material generosity never discriminates between giver, receiver, or gift. Thich Nhat Hanh underscored the intimacy of sharing goods and material resources directly, warm hand to warm hand. The original teachings remind us that to give with faith and respect, without harming any being and without any expectation of praise or reward, brings benefit without limit and generates an abiding wealth of spirit. 

Rooted in the soil of material generosity, good dharma teaching grows. The words “dharma” and “farm” share a common etymological root, dher, meaning to uphold and support. A good farm upholds and supports the vow to feed a hungry world. This generosity turns the wheel of dharma and opens the door to its grounded teachings.

Last of all, the generosity of material support and dharma teaching generates courage for consequential times. Fearlessness is expressed in the timeless gesture of the upheld naked palm indicating the absence of weapons and a readiness to meet all that arises. Trungpa Rinpoche confirms that with this kind of spiritual courage: “Even fear is frightened by the bodhisattva’s fearlessness.” 

Many school gardens across the Bay were fallow when our guerilla team of partners began planting them with close to 20,000 organically grown seedlings donated by Green Gulch. These plants were entrusted to a range of school gardens and public community plots around the Bay, from Marin City to San Pedro public school to Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in North Berkeley (where surplus plant material was later shared with the Oakland public school district) and to several community garden projects in San Francisco and beyond. Now, in late autumn, as some children are able to return to school, they are astounded by tangled vines of Armenian cucumbers and drifts of ripe Sungold tomatoes spilling across the pathways leading to their classrooms. Some of these same schools ran active food giveaway programs all summer long to distribute surplus produce from their Zen-fed gardens.

In Marin City just six miles south of Green Gulch, the local People’s Inter-Cities Fellowship Church received at least six crates a week from May to October of fresh vegetables to cook and share with hungry parishioners. The nearby Community Services District has planted their annual senior citizen’s garden chock-full of robust collards, curly mustard, and burgundy Romaine lettuce destined for a long winter harvest. 

During the height of the growing season Peter often made two trips a week, his truck loaded to capacity with produce, to donate to Berkeley Food Network. This community-centered food hub was established in 2016 to feed the City of Berkeley, where one in five residents are food insecure. Berkeley Food Network runs an onsite pantry and many mobile food pantries, pop-up grocery giveaway sites throughout the city, and hub kitchens where more than 1,000 meals per week are prepared and served by volunteer Bay Area chefs cooking recovered and donated food for hungry citizens. One of our closest colleagues this summer was The Cultural Conservancy, a beloved place-based, indigenous-led intertribal organization that Peter and I have been working with for almost a decade. From May through October we met with Maya Harjo, who is Quapaw, Shawnee, Muskogee Creek, and Seminole and the young director of the Native Foodways project at The Cultural Conservancy, to transfer ten to twelve boxes of fresh Green Gulch produce into her truck.

At The Cultural Conservancy Maya and other young Native staff tend their traditional harvest fields of Seneca flint corn, Chimayo chile peppers, Lakota squash and Bear Paw beans. These medicine crops are supplemented with cool coastal relatives from Green Gulch: dinosaur kale, knobby fingerling potatoes, and huge bunches of savoy spinach. Every week boxes filled with this produce are distributed to feed families through the California Indian Museum, the American Indian Children’s Resource Center in Oakland, and the Sogorea Te Land Trust, a women-led urban indigenous organization that honors sacred sites and ancestral burial grounds throughout the California East Bay region.

It is past mid-autumn now, and the long California growing season has waned. Late light slants low, down to the root system of Candy Roaster winter squash ripening honey gold beneath the gaze of exhausted sunflowers. 

The US death toll from COVID-19 has topped 250,000, with more than 1.3 million deaths worldwide. The West Coast wildfires were a vivid representation of the devastation and they were far from symbolic. The ash and smoke of the California climate fires carry visible traces of countless plant and animal relatives vaporized in the blazes. The great nature of endless interdependence upholds the truths and continued aspirations of this arduous year, echoed in the meal chant from Upaya Zen Center:

Earth, air, water, fire and space
Combine to make this food
Numberless beings give their life and labor that we may eat.
May we be nourished that we may nourish life!

The post A Zen Harvest appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Southern Ontario’s Cham Shan Temple is growing again. Physically, it is one of the largest Chinese Tiantai Buddhist networks in Canada, with ten sizable temples and Buddhist educational sites in the Toronto area, and a museum housed in an imposing pagoda in Niagara Falls. Its various temples boast a large number of full-time monastics, high attendance at their services, and wide influence in the booming Chinese-based stream of Canadian Buddhism. Now an ambitious plan is underway to build four pilgrimage sites on 1,350 acres of land, with temples, eating facilities, and replicas of the four holy Buddhist mountains of China.

Four thousand kilometers away, things are not going quite so well at Zenwest on Victoria Island in British Columbia. The community has created an impressive international network of practitioners, partly through their use of new online methods for delivering teachings and building community. But after thirteen years of sustained effort, Zenwest can no longer afford to pay their abbot’s salary. They have phased him out as a paid employee, a decision that has forced him to get a parttime job to support his family. Because of this, he is no longer as available to do many of the administrative and teaching tasks needed to support the monastery and attend to the needs of students and participants.

As these snapshots suggest, the financial landscape in North American Buddhism varies widely. The uneven distribution of wealth among monasteries and training centers affects their ability to carry out their various activities. Few Buddhists would say they have chosen to pursue the dharma for monetary gain, but the brutal truth is that if Buddhist communities fail to acquire ongoing funding, they will not be able to provide many of their programs or may even be forced to close down altogether.

Buddhist activities have always been costly, of course. Monks and nuns need to eat; communities must build meditation and worship halls; and they have to produce statues, scrolls, books, paintings, beads, and robes. The lineages that have survived are those that have successfully established sufficient funding for their needs. How, precisely, have they managed to do so?

Buddhist communities have used a wide range of means to ensure their financial well-being. Yet one model that developed in the early stages of Buddhism became the primary organizing principle for most of the community’s economic activity and then persisted in nearly all subsequent communities. This model is so fundamental and widespread that it can be seen as the classical formula of Buddhist economic relations. It is the exchange of spiritual labor and financial support between the monastic sangha and the community of lay practitioners. The driving force of this model is merit (Skt., punya; Pali, punna). We may refer therefore to this historic Buddhist system as the merit economy.

Briefly stated, the merit economy is a framework in which the laity provides monastics with the funds to sustain themselves and carry out the religious services the laity needs and wants. This support has many motivations on the part of the laity, including their respect and devotion for the monastics, their wish to see the Buddha’s teachings spread and benefit others, the social pressure they feel to conform to the expected models of generosity, and even legal obligations. But above all, their motivation is to share in the store of merit produced by monastic activities.

Merit—as the currency of this merit economy—is essentially an intangible product of behavior. When an actor performs an action that is considered “good” by Buddhist tradition, this action produces some degree of merit; “bad” actions produce demerit. The resulting amount of merit or demerit depends on a complex set of factors, including the actor’s intentions and purity, adherence to the correct ritual procedure when carrying out the activity, the identity of the recipient, and so on. Merit also influences the actor’s future experience: good deeds lead to good experiences such as a better rebirth, wealth, exposure to the Buddhist teachings, and the love and devotion of family. By the same logic, bad deeds and their demerit lead to various forms of suffering—rebirth in the hell realms, loss of status or wealth, sickness, and so forth. Whether immediately or in a distant lifetime, merit affects the actor in a way that is natural, logical, and inexorable—even if its workings are often hidden.

According to this Buddhist framework, monastics are better suited to produce merit easily and successfully because their codes of behavior help them to cultivate merit and prevent them from accumulating demerit. Furthermore, most Buddhist societies believe that ordination affects a monk or nun ontologically, so that a monastic is different from and holier than the layperson he or she was before. After ordination, monastics engage in various activities that serve as mighty engines of merit production: meditation, scriptural chanting, elaborate devotional services, teaching dharma to others, and more. Indeed, this is their primary role as monastics. It is not true, then, that monks and nuns do not work. Rather, they are a specialized class of workers within Buddhist society who create and disseminate a specific, highly valuable product: merit. The work to produce this merit—the chief commodity of the merit economy—can be called merit labor.

Laypeople are also able to produce merit, but their capacity to do so is limited because their situations force them into demeritorious actions, and because they lack the time, training, and circumstances to perform the most meritorious Buddhist practices. They therefore rely primarily on the monastic sangha to perform merit labor on their behalf. An important aspect of merit is that once it is produced, it can be redistributed. It thus acts as a type of currency that “buys” the laity rebirth in the heavenly realms, physical beauty and health, happiness, and even nirvana or buddhahood. Thus merit is the most valuable Buddhist currency—far more valuable than money, because unlike merit, money cannot buy us love or happiness, and we cannot take it with us when we die. There has never been a historic Buddhist culture or subculture operating without reference to merit, and in almost all cases none has operated without the merit economy at its center.

This economic exchange in which the laity acquires merit from the monastic community is known as dana (generosity). Monastics represent for the laity a field of merit: their purity and ritual expertise are the fertile ground in which the laity sow seeds of generosity to acquire a crop of merit. In turn, the laity represents for the monastics a field of dana in which to cultivate the ideas of merit, karma, and rebirth. This trade—money for merit or the monastics’ material support for the fulfillment of the laity’s wishes—is the foundational basis of the merit economy and, historically speaking, of Buddhism itself.

As Buddhists spread their ideas and practices through Asia, they did so in relation to the merit economy, whose establishment in new societies was the key factor in allowing Buddhism to take root and thrive. Buddhists have often said, “No Buddhism without the sangha,” and one might add, “No Buddhism without the merit economy, the essential lifeblood of the monastic sangha.”

One of the first challenges that Buddhists encountered when bringing the tradition into a new culture was the necessity to confront and transform the preexisting economy. Non-Buddhist cultures operated with their own economies, which were not merit-based; these other models can be called non-merit economies. But because Buddhists could only thrive in situations where they were able to sell merit, the transformation of non-merit economies into merit economies had to be one of their primary concerns.

It is not difficult to see how monks and nuns promoted merit and convinced lay practitioners of its effectiveness in the transmission of Buddhism in a number of cultures. Buddhism’s success in China, for example, was partly due to the introduction of scriptures that extolled the benefits of making merit. One of the first of these texts, the Sutra in Forty-two Sections, taught readers to make merit by offering food to monks. A later text, the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra for Humane Kings Who Wish to Benefit Their States, dramatically upped the stakes by promising that rulers who materially supported Buddhism would be protected from disasters and revolts. When Buddhism was brought to Japan from Korea, it was with the promise that Buddha worship would bring benefits to the royal court. Similar dynamics played out across Asia.

Merit is thus one of the most successful Buddhist ideas in the long history of the religion. By comparison, some of the tradition’s core principles—like the concept of no-self—have been either largely ignored or poorly understood by significant swaths of the Buddhist population. Furthermore, merit accumulation has been the one practice that has united all Buddhists, monastic and lay. This is in contrast with activities like sutra recitation, meditation, doctrinal study, and precepts, which different lineages have engaged in varying degrees. There has never been a historic Buddhist culture or subculture operating without reference to merit, and in almost all cases none has operated without the merit economy at its center.

So how does Buddhism fare in contemporary Western society, where norms often deviate from those established by the merit economy?

While Canada’s Cham Shan Temple is hardly the only wealthy Buddhist organization with significant land and property in North America, its financial success is more the exception than the rule when it comes to Buddhist temples and meditation groups. In fact, in many cases, groups that draw relatively wealthy members are facing the greatest financial difficulties. A significant factor is their failure to promote merit and establish functioning merit economies.

Many groups, temples, and even whole Buddhist networks in North America are operating outside of the Buddhist merit economy. They do not exist within a society that has successfully adapted to the logic of Buddhist merit, and they do little or nothing to create the conditions for such an economy to emerge, not even within their own membership. More than changes in ritual practice, racial composition, gender roles, or social activism, the jettisoning of the central, pervasive, and economically crucial notion of merit is potentially the biggest and most significant transformation in certain Western Buddhist groups and networks. It is a cleavage so momentous in its implications that some day it may appear in retrospect to be a paradigm shift as major as the rise of the Mahayana school in India around the first century BCE (although it may never attain a similar market share of the overall Buddhist community). And yet this change is largely unnoted, even by the very groups that are enacting it.

The term “post-merit Buddhism” may be used in order to frame this new model of Buddhist practice and organization. But it’s important to note that the forms that have emerged from this new framework didn’t simply evolve from Buddhism’s early lineages; they have arisen in the places where Buddhists have failed (by choice or circumstance) to establish merit economies.

Since the introduction of Buddhism into 19th-century North America, significant numbers of teachers from various Theravada, Zen, Tibetan, and other lineages have offered Buddhist concepts and individual practices without stressing the role of merit. One reason for this has been the Western perception that belief in merit is superstitious or unscientific—both handicaps in an era characterized by faith in Christianity on the one hand and in scientific empiricism on the other. The first wave of Asian teachers to bring Buddhism to the West were eager to escape the colonial scripts that portrayed Asian Buddhists as backward; new Western practitioners wanted to pursue only those forms of spirituality that did not clash with their sensibilities. Indeed, some Asian teachers had ambivalent feelings about merit themselves, and those who didn’t sometimes de-emphasized merit-based teachings and practices when they felt these might be misunderstood or ignored. Western students, meanwhile, often edited the teachings they received, bracketing out those that did not resonate with them spiritually or intellectually. This process was as much unconscious as it was deliberate: students simply paid more attention to teachings they found meaningful and ignored the others until over time they were forgotten.

But beliefs, both affirmed and rejected, have real economic effects. When merit stops being a viable currency, sweeping changes occur in nearly all other aspects of Buddhism. For example, the traditional merit labor of monks and nuns ceases to have value, which threatens their ability to cultivate the laity as a field of dana. Instead, Buddhist monastics become experts—along the lines of doctors, lawyers, professors, and other secular professionals—rather than merit producers. They are valuable not because they are ontologically superior and produce karmic benefits for those who engage with them, but because they have expertise in a body of knowledge they may share with non-experts.

Connected to this shift is a devaluation of monasticism in general. If celibacy and other monastic practices are no longer necessary to ensure the production of merit, and what truly matters is the knowledge that monks and nuns possess, then lay professionals can displace the monastic sangha as the new, quicker-footed experts and instructors. These lay professionals may be nominally ordained but still have jobs and families (as is common in Zen lineages, for instance). Or they may be former monastics—even former Buddhists—who teach aspects of Buddhism from a therapeutic perspective (as often occurs within the mindfulness movement). Without merit, models that turn Buddhist practice sessions into fee-for-service events become ever more common, and—consciously or unconsciously—teachers begin to see practitioners as potential customers in a competitive marketplace.

Simultaneous with the loss of merit is the diminished importance of karma. Without karma, the central concepts of rebirth and past and future lives collapse, leaving Buddhists to focus on the present life alone, forced to dramatically reimagine most elements of Buddhism. Without karma, the reality of powerful buddhas, saints, and deities becomes suspect or irrelevant. The threat of rebirth in hell evaporates, depriving Buddhists of a longstanding marketing tool for their services. Related ideas about gender—that rebirth in a woman’s body is a karmic punishment or that women’s defilements cause them to be reborn in a boiling pool of blood—become even more dubious than before. This is good for equality but bad for business: premodern Asian monks and nuns were successful at fundraising by convincing women that donations to the sangha represented their only hope for a better (future) life. Or maybe not: hopefully the presence of such misogynistic beliefs would themselves present an economic liability in modern North America.

In addition, as the concept of merit continues to disappear from certain Buddhist communities, the value of Buddhist statues, images, scriptures, and pilgrimages decreases, and consequently practitioners treat them less reverently. Without the ability to endow amulets, charms, scrolls, statues, and other items with meritorious power, post-merit Buddhist communities will lose another vital source of funding. This is especially true as they compete with outlets like Home Depot and Amazon for the sale of cheap Buddha statues and mass-produced Buddhist texts, to say nothing of the resources available online at no cost.

In post-merit forms of Buddhism, practices like silent meditation—repurposed as a tool for self-improvement—replace other merit labor activities such as long periods of sutra chanting. Through this process, formerly rare Buddhist practices become mainstream, perhaps dominant, and practitioners reconceive their benefits as scientific, medical, and psychological in nature rather than based on systems of invisible merit and its effect on future lives.

The loss of merit also impacts end-of-life and memorial rituals, which in many Buddhist cultures are essential sources of income. Without the need to manipulate merit at those moments when rebirth is assumed to take place, these rituals lose their urgency and laypeople stop paying for them. The loss of merit substantially undermines the foundations of traditional Buddhist ethics as well, creating the need for major reconstruction. Without merit, we are no longer able to explain our current life circumstances in light of our past behavior, and our current actions do not predict our destiny. Fear and desire stop acting as motivators, and empathy and compassion achieve an even greater importance than before as key ethical values. Thus, appeals to Buddhist donors will play more on their feelings toward the community and highlight the good works of Buddhism in the world at large.

Finally, given post-merit forms of Buddhism’s commitment to particular, often reformist, visions of the tradition, they are likely to have a difficult time according equal value to merit forms of Buddhism, their communities, and their practices. They will also have trouble understanding the Buddhist past and will continually reinterpret Buddhist history, seeing their own new practices and visions in productively misinformed ways tinged with romanticism. Instead of regarding their innovations as new, untested ideas and patterns, they will believe them to be actual inheritances from tradition.

None of this should be taken as a suggestion that specific groups need to immediately switch to a merit-based approach to Buddhism. For many, that would be artificial, or even antithetical to their approach to the dharma in the first place. Historical Buddhist practices are not necessarily superior just because they were common—Buddhist monasteries often sustained themselves through the use of enslaved labor as well. The point is to become more aware of the economic implications of various choices and note their effects. Whenever one type of successful fundraising is abandoned, some other equally effective means must be developed, or financial difficulties are inevitable. And the shift to new models carries many unintended doctrinal and practical implications, for better or for worse.

Still, the merit model is alive and well in parts of North American Buddhism. Cham Shan—which makes ample use of the merit economy—shows that merit-driven Buddhism can continue to operate within non-merit economies like that of the larger Canadian society. At least one way they do so is by employing the rhetoric of merit and actively cultivating local merit economies. With luck and inventiveness, creative Buddhists should be able to tap opportunities that exist within merit and non-merit economies simultaneously. Indeed, something like this already exists within the Tibetan Buddhist world in America, where some lamas offer merit-based teachings and practices for their Tibetan-American followers but emphasize post-merit activities to their non-Tibetan audiences.

Ultimately, if Buddhist groups don’t successfully adapt North American society to Buddhist models or attitudes, Buddhism will have to be adapted to answer the needs felt by North Americans. The proliferation of the mindfulness movement for improving our work, parenting, eating habits, and sex lives is one clear example. Another possible example is presented by social engagement: by offering refuge amid political, economic, or cultural turmoil, by instilling social activists with sustainability and resilience, or by becoming socially engaged themselves, some Buddhist circles may attract sufficient funding by being relevant to our society’s current state of affairs.

How Buddhist centers in the West continue to evolve and find funding for their operation will be keenly watched not only by researchers and those pursuing courses in Buddhist studies but also by leaders of dharma centers and those teachers who are aware of the wider history—and ambiguous future—of their tradition.

♦

Adapted from “Buddhism without Merit: Theorizing Buddhist Religio-Economic Activity in the Contemporary World,” which first appeared in the Journal of Global Buddhism, vol. 20 (2019).

The post The Merit Economy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It’s funny where we find the most important things sometimes, like in a grocery store. I had biked into town for some veggie burgers. I couldn’t find them in the freezer, so I asked a clerk for help and was told to wait for someone from the natural foods section. As I stood between the vitamins and the energy drinks, grateful for the air-conditioning, a young man, 18 years old at most, came to help me. After some searching, he told me that the brand I was looking for had been discontinued.

He kept looking at me, and I figured he was confused about my shaved head and the long robe, something that happens in places like grocery stores. I paused and waited for his question, ready to tell him a bit about the haircut and the clothes. With a look of sympathy and remorse, he leaned over and asked me, “Did you have cancer?”

I was so surprised by the question that I almost laughed; usually people ask, “Are you a Hare Krishna?” “Do you know the Dalai Lama?” or simply “What are you?” I took a breath and replied with a hesitant “Yes.” I had been in remission for over a decade at that point, but I had never been through chemotherapy; the shaved head was simply my choice. I was tempted to explain all of this to him but then he said, “My mom had cancer. She died a year ago.” I caught my breath and was so glad I hadn’t laughed or explained anything to him. I had also lost my mother to cancer, and my father, too, when I was a child. My heart trembled in resonant grief, and tears welled up in my eyes. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

“So I know about chemo and all that,” he continued, nodding, his eyes on the ground. He reached his right hand into his shirt pocket and took out a sticker. “Here,” he said, putting a neon orange circle marked “50% off” on the cheese I was holding. My tongue got stuck between wanting to explain and not wanting to mislead him. Then I realized that getting to do something for another person might be exactly what he needed in that moment. It wasn’t about me at all. I just happened to be there, so I accepted the offering. Looking in his eyes, I silently wished him the courage to keep growing up through the inescapable pain of losing a parent at such a young age. “Thank you,” I said. He told me to come find him if I ever needed anything again, and he went back to stocking the shelves, while I went off to find some olives.

I was surprised to see him again in the checkout line. He came directly to me and said, “I want to pay for your groceries.” The inner conflict arose again, the urge to explain that I wasn’t going through chemotherapy. Yet it was completely appropriate for me as a monastic to receive an offering of food. I took a deep breath, relaxed my body, and opened myself to receive again. We had a few minutes together in the line, so I asked about his mother. He told me she had been an artist and a great mom. He missed her. Though his eyes were heavy, he seemed to grow taller when he spoke about her. I asked about his dad and whether they could talk together about her death. He shrank back and said no, they didn’t really talk about things. He dreamed of joining the military and had promised his mom to follow through with it after she died. He had applied to a program I had never heard of, but he looked proud as he told me.

We reached the checkout counter, and he looked down into my basket. There lay the discounted cheddar cheese, a plastic container of olives, and a can of black beans. He seemed a little disappointed, as if he wanted to offer more. Then he confidently pulled out his employee discount card and paid for the food, all $8.36 of it. We never even exchanged names; it didn’t seem necessary. Another “Thank you,” a silent blessing, and another tender “Goodbye.” I left the store, tied up my robes for the bike ride, and rode off into the heat reflecting upon the many ways to practice dana—giving or generosity.

Despite the emphasis on sitting meditation in much of Western Buddhism, the Buddha actually began his teachings to new practitioners with a discussion of the value of dana, for it gladdens the mind and prepares one to face dukkha—suffering or dissatisfaction. This may be why dana leads the list of the paramis (Pali; Skt. paramitas)— the spiritual perfections. It is much more than simply a prerequisite to the “real” teachings, as some assume.

The Buddha used two words in association with the practice of generosity— dana and caga. Dana refers to the act of giving—food, money, time, kindness, or the dharma. Caga, on the other hand, refers to the inward disposition that gives rise to the action. In the discourse To Mahanama, the Buddha tells us that generosity allows us to “dwell at home with a mind devoid of the stain of miserliness, freely generous, openhanded, delighting in relinquishment, devoted to charity, delighting in giving and sharing.”

When I first took up the practice of generosity, I focused on understanding my motivation for giving. Sometimes it was openhanded and brought delight, while at other times it came from a sense of obligation and left me feeling resentful. I started asking myself, “Can I find an openhanded motivation here?” The questioning itself helped me to get in touch with caga even when forces such as greed or fear were at play. Later I found that changing my inner dialogue—replacing language like “have to” or “should” with something like “get to” made the shift to caga even easier. “I have to go to this meeting” became “I get to go to this meeting,” reminding me that even something I dreaded could become an opportunity to give when I remembered.

In the end, it’s not so important who gives and who receives. What matters is what takes us beyond our separation.

My biggest lesson in generosity, however, came when I had cancer. I was diagnosed in the last months of my twenties. Even though I had a good relationship with my mother, it was hard to move back in with her and receive her care, because I was so much more comfortable giving care than receiving it. It took months for the pangs of resistance and thoughts of “I can take care of myself!” to subside, because I couldn’t. I was horribly anemic, completely broke, and facing overwhelming decisions and medical procedures. It was a blessing and a privilege to be able to turn to my mother for support, even though I didn’t want it.

A turning point finally came when I received an email from a friend thanking me for sharing my journey with her. She was grateful to get to offer her care through prayers and well-wishes. Staring at the computer screen, it dawned on me that if I wanted others to enjoy giving as much as I did, then I would have to take my turn receiving, too. I looked at my mother with new eyes, able to see how she enjoyed caring for me. From that point on I released my resistance, and cancer became one big lesson in receiving: my mother’s care, the prayers and love of friends and family, and even the skill of a surgeon and the height of medical technology. I had thought that self-sufficiency would protect me, but really it was receiving that healed me.

Over a decade has passed, yet I still find it hard to accept simple things like help with a suitcase, a compliment, or even the offerings made to me as a monastic. My first impulse is to say, “No, I’m okay. I don’t need anything.” I have had to learn to bite my tongue when the habit to refuse arises, because this kind of refusal arises from the delusion of separateness. This compulsive self-sufficiency is as miserly as holding on to something that could be shared. The perfection of generosity, however, breaks down the barriers of self and other and frees me from the pain of holding back.

In the end, it’s not so important who gives and who receives. What matters is cultivating the openhandedness that takes us beyond clinging to our separation and into an awareness that all is given and received. This is why I have added to my translation of dana the word reciprocity, which derives from a Latin verb meaning “to move forward and backward.” Reciprocity is a dance like life itself. The air we breathe, the food we eat, the wounds we carry, and the love we share are all given and received. Reciprocity reminds us to look beyond roles to relationship. When we give without differentiating self from other, and when we receive without differentiating it from the giving, then we can find the gift of dana everywhere.

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Once a month, Tricycle features an article from Inquiring Mind, a Buddhist journal that was in print from 1984–2015 and now has a growing number of back issues archived at inquiringmind.com. This month’s selection is a teaching from the late Theravada monk Sayadaw U Pandita about the Buddhist notions of dana (generosity), sila (morality) and bhavana (meditation). U Pandita, the successor of the influential Burmese teacher Mahāsi Sayādaw, helped the Theravada tradition take root in America and brought a renewed emphasis to the role of ethics in Buddhist practice. The article originally appeared under the title “Dana, Sila & Bhavana—Acts That Purify Our Existence” in Inquiring Mind’s final issue in Spring 2015, one year before U Pandita’s death in April 2016. Be sure to check out the related articles in the archive, like “The Zen of Vipassana,” an interview with Gil Fronsdal and Max Erdstein, and “Faith,” an interview with Sharon Salzberg. If you feel so inclined, consider making a donation to help Inquiring Mind continue adding articles to its archive!

♦

One of the most beautiful stories of Sayadaw U Pandita happened about 20 years ago, when Sayadawgyi, as he is affectionately and reverently known, was in his early seventies. Shortly after a three-month rains retreat in Myanmar, he strolled past where a Western nun named Ma Visadañanî was donating medicines. “You’re throwing away the dhamma [dharma],” Sayadawgyi said.

Astonished, Ma Visadañanî said, “What?”

“Aren’t you forgetting the ‘no-death’ medicine?” Sayadawgyi quipped, adding a verse in Pali. “Appamado amatam padam,” he said, quoting the Buddha. “Heedfulness is the way to the deathless.”

Ma Visadañanî laughed like a flag waving in the breeze. Sayadawgyi had noticed that she wasn’t being mindful, she realized, and he wanted to set her priorities straight.

Sayadaw U Pandita is 93 now, still teaching. His first visit to the West in 1984 was a watershed in our understanding of vipassana [insight]. His willingness to set nibbana [nirvana] as the overt goal of practice, his reliance on a rigorously structured method, and his skill at reading how a student’s practice was unfolding—often simply watching the person walk into the interview room, or cutting off a meticulous report mid-sentence—were salutary and alarming in equal measure. That 1984 retreat, attended by senior Western teachers, arguably raised the quality of dhamma instruction in the West overnight.

Since that time, the “Mahasi” method of close observation that he taught (based on the teachings of Mahasi Sayadaw, one of the foremost teaching monks of Myanmar) has been practiced by hundreds of thousands of students all over the world. And Sayadawgyi is training Western teachers so that cultural sensitivity will underpin the rigors of the method. For some, Sayadawgyi’s uncompromising style remains a gold standard; for others, he appears as a blunt instrument. He was not always well-translated—for years, his “Keep going!” was rendered in English as “Try harder!” Nevertheless, he’s not afraid to goad you with traditional scolding if he thinks you’re wasting time or you’re at a stage where ardency is indicated. For better or worse, Sayadawgyi’s intensity is frequently cited by people who have not met him. I wish his compassion were equally renowned. For he’s our grandfather, as loving as he is fierce. You can trust his word, a lion’s roar that points out where you’re clinging and says, “That’s suffering! Get free!” How freaking awesome!

When we approached him this December, Sayadawgyi was busy leading a 60-day retreat for 127 students. We asked for a teaching on impermanence or the Buddha’s final words; instead, he offered sila, ethical conduct, as the most vital and urgent topic for this last issue of Inquiring Mind. Longtime close student Andrew Scheffer said it’s Sayadawgyi’s priority these days to convey our responsibility as citizens of this world: we must understand that our collective situation merely reflects everyone’s conduct. Sayadawgyi asks us to protect our world, make it a better place for all—before it’s too late.

—Kate Wheeler

♦

The Buddha saw that human beings get overwhelmed by greed, anger, and delusion and cause harm to themselves and each other—becoming inhumane, you might say. He also recognized that most human beings possess the ability to act unselfishly, with kindness and compassion, and that the human mind is able to become clear and concentrated. In addition, the Buddha uniquely saw that it’s within our human capacity to develop special knowledge through higher mental training. Out of compassion, he then devised three systematic trainings, known in the Pali language as punnas, or meritorious deeds, that support our full humanity, give us a clear human mind, and develop special human knowledge or insight wisdom.

Practicing punna is the foundation of an elevated, purified human life. The three types of punna are dana, sila, and bhavana—which can be further split into concentration and insight. We all desire a high quality of life, don’t we? We don’t want to live in a degraded way.

The first punna is dana, or generosity, which should be a systematic practice. Dana must be offered without expectation of return—and without attachment to what’s given. This frees us from greedy self-interest. If, moreover, we give with lovingkindness, dana frees the mind from anger. When dana is also imbued with compassion, it counteracts cruelty.

The more we practice dana, the less we will be inclined to harmful deeds motivated by uncontrolled greed, anger, and cruelty. A person who gives systematically in this pure way will become free of the most extreme forms of greed, anger, and delusion. She or he will find it easy to refrain from killing, stealing, and other strongly harmful behaviors. Thus, dana is a foundation for morality.

However, dana alone cannot purify all of our physical, verbal, and mental actions. Therefore, the Buddha offers a second punna: sila, or compassionate morality. Sila is also a systematic training, generally expressed as keeping at least five precepts. These five are: not killing, not stealing, not harming others sexually (or allowing ourselves to be sexually harmed), not telling lies and speaking harshly, and finally, not succumbing to intoxicants and addictions.

Sila means taming our physical and verbal behavior. As human beings we are social animals, living with others on this planet. Obviously, most sentient beings don’t want to be harmed. Each human being must control her or his own actions and speech; no one else can do that for us. We each should contemplate our actions as follows: “If that were done to me, I’d find it unbearable. The other person will feel the same way. So I won’t do it.” We may need courage to restrain ourselves if the impulse toward harm is strong.

It may sound odd to some Western ears, but in Buddhist culture, a sense of moral shame and moral fear is considered healthy and appropriate. When we recognize greed, anger, or delusion in our mind, moral fear makes us take precautions to avoid giving in. Moral shame, on the other hand, is retrospective. If we realize we’ve done harm and feel appropriately badly about it, this moral shame will induce us to behave differently the next time. A person with moral shame and moral fear does his or her best to maintain sila, keep the precepts.

Quite frankly, people who lack basic morality are disgusting! No matter how expensive their jewelry or clothing may be, they’re unattractive and offensive. It’s as if they smell bad. In contrast, sila is like a fragrance or an ornament. We have a saying, “Sila makes the wearer beautiful.” Sila also prevents us from falling into lower realms of existence, whereas people who do not sustain basic morality are bound for states of misery, devoid of happiness. We can think of harmful deeds as poisonous food that will lead to deadly consequences. Therefore sila is good to rely on throughout our life.

During the Buddha’s lifetime, a divine being, or deva, asked him a question in the form of a riddle: “What is it that is good up until old age?”

And the Buddha replied, “Sila.”

Indeed, sila is good from when we are born until the very moment we die. It is one of the most important tasks a human being can undertake. Sila is not only needed by Buddhists. It is needed by the whole world. Sila punna makes a person a true human being.

Without sila as a base, it isn’t easy to concentrate the mind and develop higher knowledge. As we practice controlling our actions, we will feel how dangerous and painful the tendencies of greed, anger, and delusion are. Dana weakens these tendencies, as we have seen above. But in order to thoroughly clean and uplift our minds, the Buddha offers a third kind of meritorious practice. This is bhavana, or mental development. If we undertake training in concentration, we will find our mind becoming clean and clear. One who develops concentration is said to have “a clear human mentality.” From the basis of concentration, we can go on to develop wisdom, special human knowledge.

Dana is the foundation for sila. Sila is like a mouth for us to take in the tasty, nourishing food of concentration and wisdom. If our mouth is injured or full of canker sores, it will be difficult to eat and drink; if we don’t have a mouth at all, it will be impossible. But of the three punnas, surely the most important one is sila—for sila protects our individual world as well as the larger world around us.

It is worthwhile to contemplate all the harm human beings inflict. Imagine if only half the people in the world stopped killing, stealing, and breaking the other precepts. How peaceful it would be! If we cherish the purity of avoiding misdeeds and value the results that come from keeping sila, surely we will want to make a personal effort. Sila has the four characteristics of an important task. It must be done; it can’t be left undone. It must be done by oneself, not left to others. It must be done at the right time and regularly. And it must bring lots of benefit.

May all human beings keep at least five precepts purely!

♦

Teaching obtained and given context by Andrew Scheffer, translated by Ma Vajirañanî, transcribed and edited by Ma Vimalañanî and Kate Wheeler. Biographical anecdote from U Pandita: One Life’s Journey by U Thanmyay Kyaw, lightly adapted by Kate Wheeler.

RELATED INQUIRING MIND ARTICLES:

• Faith, an interview with Sharon Salzberg
• Enlightenments by Jack Kornfield
• The Zen of Vipassana, an interview with Gil Fronsdal and Max Erdstein

The post Acts That Purify Our Existence: Dana, Sila, and Bhavana appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The incomparable loftiness of the monk figure—placid and disinterested, having renounced desire—leads many to think of Buddhism as a religion detached from all worldly concerns, especially those of economy. But Buddhism has always addressed a continuum of human flourishing and good, creating what has been referred to as an “economy of salvation.” Metaphors of economy—even of debt—abound in Buddhist texts, and in many ways Buddhism came to be fundamentally shaped by economic conditions and considerations of the era in which it originated.

Depending on material support from moneylenders, the Buddhist establishment from its outset did not seek to hamper the business that made it possible. Devout merchants (setthi) and householders (gahapatis)—controllers of property, moneylenders, often even usurers—were the primary supporters of the early monastic community. Giving material support (amisa dana) to the monkhood thus ranks in Buddhist doctrine as the most effective way for laypeople to generate positive karma, even above following the five moral precepts that define the Buddhist way of life. Out of a concern for its own survival, Buddhism could not condemn the acquisition of wealth, but it could provide principles for its dispensation—namely, giving and generosity (dana). To these ends, the Buddha celebrated wealth creation alongside a call for its redistribution.

The New Market Economy

In order to understand the subtleties of Buddhism’s approach to wealth accumulation, poverty, and debt, we must first have some understanding of the market economy from which it arose. The introduction of the widespread use of coinage to India just a few decades prior to the Buddha’s birth around 500 BCE disrupted existing social orders and also inspired a philosophical renaissance driven by spiritual dropouts like the Buddha, who sought to respond to the new economy.

One of the Buddha’s most poignant accounts of worldly life speaks to the social alienation inherent to economic competition and the accumulation of private property. It remains pertinent to this day:

Seeing people floundering
     like fish in small puddles,
     competing with one another —
               as I saw this,
               fear came into me.
     The world was entirely
               without substance.
     All the directions
                                    were knocked out of line.
     Wanting a haven for myself,
     I saw nothing that wasn’t laid claim to.
     Seeing nothing in the end
     but competition,
     I felt discontent.
              —Sutta Nipata 4.15, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Widespread use of currency led to a flattening of reality that rendered all goods and services commensurable, nourishing a tendency toward abstraction for which we owe much of our philosophical inheritance today—from Pythagoras in Greece, to Confucius in China, to the Buddha in India. The reformulation of economic relations brought about by monetization triggered previously unheard of levels of social mobility, and mobility’s attendant individualism.

The Buddha skillfully encouraged some of the new social values that emerged from these economic changes. For example, he encouraged the individualism that subverted family structures (monks were “home-leavers”). But he also sought to undermine other emerging values associated with psychological states that fuel the acquisition of capital: desire and greed. The Buddha condemned acquisitiveness at the same time he supported capital accumulation, specifically for its potential to create and multiply merit through generosity. In this way, Buddhism advocated a “Middle Way,” the simultaneous negation of the extremes of asceticism and indulgence. Spiritual health and material well-being were, in the words of economist E. F. Schumacher, natural allies.

The Buddha diverged from other religious thinkers in his embrace of the new market economy. Confucians in China and Brahmans in India strongly resisted this economy, denouncing the economic activities of businessmen and merchants as threats to the moral order of society.

Perhaps the Buddha embraced the new market economy in part because it supported his rejection of the Brahmans’ mythical justifications for the stratification of caste. Rather than speaking about caste, the Buddha spoke instead of economic class, the new social order, which was divided into six categories: very wealthy, wealthy, faring well, faring poorly, poor, and destitute. Such disparities are inevitable in a society organized by the market economy. The establishment of the monkhood, which presented a new, radical kind of freedom, enabled its constituents to stand outside caste and, in theory, outside the market economy altogether.

Can Buddhist Teachings Move Us Toward Jubilee?

The accumulation of wealth among urban merchants and moneylenders, scorned by the then dominant Brahmans, was a boon to the sangha, the Buddhist monastic community, which relied on the generosity of the laity for material support as well as the spread of Buddhist ideas along trade routes. This upwardly mobile class found in Buddhism a justification for its economic activities and new lifestyle. By giving to the monks, the laity performed acts of dana, or generosity, a fundamental tenet of Buddhism. Serving as “fields of merit,” the monks provided an opportunity for laypeople to practice generosity, the first “perfection,” and the basis of all other perfections, leading to enlightenment. Importantly, the amount of merit generated by such transactions was determined by the recipient’s level of virtue and not the benefactor’s, forming a holy alliance between the monkhood and the laity that, at least within the performance of dana, condoned the benefactor’s methods of accumulation. This alliance was furthered by the Buddha’s injunction forbidding those with debt from joining the monastic order, by which the indebted would effectively default.

So instead of challenging the accumulation of wealth, Buddhism critiques the social structures that perpetuate poverty and the unwholesome states of mind that contribute to the suffering of self and others. This is admirable enough, but still leaves quite a bit for Buddhist socialists and Buddhists committed to Jubilee to wrestle with.

Buddhism has historically taken a permissive approach to economic relations. It might be the only world religion that does not formally condemn usury. And being wealthy in and of itself has been taken as a sign of good karma. Yet there remains much in the Buddhist canon that can enrich our thoughts on debt and wealth distribution.

The Ina ­Sutta, the Buddha’s “Discourse on Debt,” praises ananasukha, the pleasure of being debtless. Conversely, it also links indebtedness directly to bondage and, ultimately, suffering, the first noble truth of Buddhism:

Poverty is suffering in the world. . . Getting into debt is suffering in the world. . . Interest payment is suffering in the world. . . Being served notice is suffering in the world. . . Being hounded is suffering in the world. . . Bondage is suffering in the world. . . . When a poor, destitute, penniless person, being hounded, does not pay, he is put into bondage. For one who partakes of sensuality [a layperson], bondage is suffering in the world.

Buddhist texts make ample use of metaphors of debt and exchange to confer spiritual advice, both a sign of the times and a winning bet made by the Buddha on the future hegemony of the monetary economy. At the end of the Ina Sutta, the Buddha goes as far as to use freedom from debt as a metaphor for nirvana (liberation from samsara, the indefinitely repeated cycles of birth, misery, and death caused by karma):

[Knowledge in the total ending of the fetters of becoming] is the highest knowledge
that, the happiness unexcelled.
     Sorrowless,
     dustless,
     at rest,
that
          is release from debt.

For Jubilee, perhaps the most instructive concept in Buddhist thought is that of karmic debt, for which financial debt is often used as a metaphor, as it is in these final lines. Born as humans, we all have karmic debt, the first one being to our parents, who brought us into this world, raised us, fed us, and guided us. This debt extends to all our benefactors—teachers, friends, and anyone else who has acted with our well-being in mind. But this is not a debt that can be easily repaid. For such an infinite debt, no material compensation is sufficient. In fact, the only way to repay such a debt is to become enlightened ourselves and endow others with the conditions for enlightenment. Thus, according to the Kataññu Sutta, we become debtless:

But, O monks, one who . . . encourages his ignorant parents, settles and establishes them in wisdom—such a one, O monks, does enough for his parents: he repays them and more than repays them for what they have done.

In other words, recognizing our true debts establishes the basis for the discernment of contrived debts, and thus any kind of resistance against them. This old Buddhist idea is freshly relevant in the context of contemporary efforts to build a debt resistance movement. In fact, it sounds surprisingly similar to the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual. “To the financial establishment of the world,” the manual reads, “we have only one thing to say: We owe you nothing.” It continues:

To our friends, our families, our communities, to humanity and to the natural world that makes our lives possible, we owe you everything. Every dollar we take from a subprime mortgage speculator, every dollar we withhold from the collection agency is a tiny piece of our own lives and freedom that we can give back to our communities, to those we love and we respect.

Repaying Our Karmic Debts

In the Buddhist approach to debt, wealth can be accumulated, but only so that it can in turn be given away to those to whom we are truly, karmically indebted. Production and multiplication of merit-creating wealth is thus a noble determination. One who acquires lavish wealth, the Buddha said, should provide for the pleasure and satisfaction of himself, his loved ones, and his associates, and also for priests and contemplatives.

Buddhist monasteries for a long time accomplished a kind of redistribution of wealth, supporting mendicants who owned nothing. They also invested in local economies, providing an alternative to local moneylenders. In later years, however, some monasteries (such as in Medieval China) started making high-interest loans and meddling with debtors’ contracts. A Burmese proverb characterizes Buddhist economic excess succinctly: “The pagoda is finished and the country is ruined.”

As greed—the motor of capital accumulation and, in Buddhism, one of the three “poisons” that binds beings to the wheel of samsara—became institutionalized in the new social order, the Buddha edged out a place in society where greed’s opposite, generosity, could flourish.

While the production and multiplication of wealth creates conditions for merit in the form of virtuous giving, greed annihilates merit. The Buddha said that even if one could transform one single mountain into two mountains of solid gold, it would still not provide complete and lasting satisfaction of a single person’s wants. Such is the unlimited nature of desire. From the Buddhist view, then, capital accumulation does not find its end in capital accumulation, but in its transmutation into merit through generosity. “To have much wealth and ample gold and food, but to enjoy one’s luxuries alone is a cause of one’s downfall,” the Buddha says in the Parabhava Sutta. Wealth is not the enemy of spiritual development; it has an enormous potential to create merit—but not principally from lending, but giving.

For this reason, even to live modestly while retaining great wealth is sinful. In the Aputtaka Sutta, the Buddha speaks of a moneylender who “ate broken rice and pickle brine” and wore only “hempen cloth,” riding around in a “dilapidated little cart.” Many lives ago, the moneylender had given alms to a contemplative, leading the moneylender to be reborn seven times with great fortune. But in his subsequent lives the moneylender failed to create virtue with his fortunes, passing up many opportunities to generate merit through generosity. For this reason, after the merit generated for seven lifetimes ran out, the moneylender found himself in one of the hell realms.

The Evil of Endless Accumulation

Today’s ultra-wealthy commit this same evil of endless accumulation without redistribution. Moneylending through the financial establishment, effectively indebting others in order to create profits, does not create merit but destroys it. Such a system of debt has helped concentrate 40 percent of the nation’s wealth in the hands of 1 percent of its population, while the bottom 60 percent owns just 2.3 percent of the nation’s wealth. Debt today encourages the upward distribution of wealth, whereas the Buddha seems to have advocated its downward distribution.

In the Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta, the Buddha makes clear that charity, and philanthropy especially, is never enough. Giving advice to a king, he says, “Whosoever in your kingdom is poor, to him let wealth be given.” When a king comes to power and neglects this duty, he is faced with social deterioration that can be reversed neither through recourse to charity nor through justice (i.e., brutal punishments): “Thus from goods not being bestowed on the destitute, poverty, stealing, violence, murder, lying, evil-speaking, and immorality grew rife.”

Considering that Buddhist texts tend to concentrate unrelentingly on defilements of the mind as the roots of suffering, this passage is remarkable in that it focuses instead on social and economic injustice as a foundational cause. Here, the ignorance, desire, and hatred of the people—the three poisons—are traced directly back to the failure of the state rather than to their own individual moral failings. When the king attempts to correct social strife by dispensing charity, this produces only more negative results, clearly demonstrating that charity cannot stand in for economic justice. Perhaps most importantly, the Buddha places the responsibility for the material well-being of the poor on the government. There exists no other power capable of enacting any progressive economic policy, including debt forgiveness.

This gets to the problem at the heart of the massive proliferation of personal debt in the United States: the country’s long-term disinvestment in public goods such as higher education, health care, and housing. If wealth, of which there is no shortage, is not shared with the poor in such forms, inequality becomes exacerbated in the form of debt, which increases the burden of poverty in the form of interest.

Vital to Buddhist doctrine is the conviction that all people, regardless of social position, are capable of becoming enlightened, of becoming buddhas. Poverty and the stress it entails, however, can be real barriers to spiritual development. The Buddha recognized that becoming free of worries about our material welfare enables us to develop our potentials. If release from karmic debt is the goal of Buddhist thought and practice, then release from economic debt is its precondition.

“Buddhism and Debt” in Tikkun, Volume 30, no. 1, p. 35. © 2015, Tikkun Magazine. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyrightholder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press.

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