Transcendent Generosity

giving beyond samsara

Dear Dharma friends,

In Thailand, it’s traditional to go to the temple on your birthday. You give food to monks, free birds from cages, and walk over to the wet market where you buy fish swimming buckets, destined for dinner, and pour them into the canals instead. On your birthday the most important thing is to practice generosity. Generosity is the opening to divine action.

Six Paramitas

We’ve been looking at the intentions of awake ones: loving kindness; equanimity; compassion; joy. In Buddhism we emphasize intention because it influences how an action manifests. Clear intention is a clean starting point.

From there we move to the actions of a bodhisattva, which are called the Six Paramitas. Paramita is Sanskrit. It’s usually translated as the 6 Perfections. A bodhisattva has perfect action.

Let me tease out the literal meaning of parmitas.

- “Mita” is friend. Intimacy.

- “Para” you might recognize from the Heart Sutra:

OM, GATE, GATE, PARAGATE, PARASAM GATE, BODHI SUAHA!

om, gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, what awakening!

So actually, “para” means beyond. The actions of a bodhisattva take you beyond samsara. They help you live beyond the dualisms of the world. We can translate the Six Paramitas as Transcendent Action.

Dana of Material Things

Generosity is dana in Sanskrit. The first kind of generosity is the dana of material things. This is usually seen as giving money. At Heart Sangha, a friend talked about their daughter, who keeps water and snacks in the back of her car. When she’s in certain neighborhoods she rolls down her window and offers food and drink. Just this example shows why generosity is courageous action. More commonly, we probably speed along past such people, hoping they don’t scratch the car.

Is time a material thing? I put volunteering into this dana bucket. My teacher Anam Thubten has a huge mandala. He moves all over the world, teaching. His flights, schedule, and retreats are coordinated by volunteers. My impression is that people are grateful for the chance to practice dana. The idea is to joyfully step into giving. Dana opens the heart.

Dana of Protection

Equally, we don’t need to over-emphasize giving money. US culture venerates money. Not being able to give material things can generate guilt and shame. This is not the intention of generosity practice at all. There are many ways to practice dana.

The second type of generosity is the dana of protection, which is offering shelter and sustenance to others. Some cultures prize this, such that you might be traveling and come across people living with very little money, yet they invite you into their home to share the best portion of their food.

There are people in my neighborhood who’ve taken in refugees and housed people fleeing war. This is the dana of protection.

I hear that people are abandoning pets at rates equal to that of the Covid pandemic. You could practice the dana of protection by adopting a pet, or fostering them, because Bodhisattvas are here for all sentient beings.

Buddhists would say that if we’re able to give an animal a stable home, they’ll be in less distress, so when they die they have a better chance to be reborn as humans who can practice the dharma. A bodhisattva wants to further every sentient being’s path to awakening.

Dana of Dharma

The last category for generosity is giving the dharma. Classically, this referred to monks teaching the dharma. Buddhism evolves to every culture where it takes root and adapts to the times. In the modern context, when most societies are not built around monastic life as the path for Buddhist practice, the dana of dharma is giving compassion and lovingkindness. When your friend unloads a story and you meet it with compassion and not judgement, that is the dana of dharma. When you send lovingkindness to people you don’t know, that maybe you dislike, that is the dana of dharma.

We’re well aware that the forces of fear, ignorance, anger, and hatred are contagious forces. Compassion is also a contagious force. So is lovingkindness. The more of us practice the dana of dharma, the more evolved our culture becomes.

Dana is limitless

Expanding our heart’s capacity for generosity goes from giving material things, to protection, to energy or prayer. As we practice, we realize that generosity is a limitless resource.

How can this be? Real generosity starts in the heart. It comes from gratitude for what we have. This means we have a lived sense of abundance. It’s hard to give when you’re limited by a mindset of scarcity. If you are reading this post on Substack, the chances are likely that you can find a way to cultivate generosity.

When you investigate this divine action you’ll find that your days are full of moments to be generous, whether that is letting someone walk through the door before you, letting them cut into your lane, giving someone the benefit of the doubt, or picking up the groceries a person has spilled on the street. You might smile at the kid on the rocking horse. These are all communications of dana.

Non-dual Dana

Level One of generosity might be making a donation and taking public credit for it. That’s the naming rights to the building of the college where your kids go to school. It’s okay, but it’s bound. Egoic giving is still a part of samsara.

Generosity can be tricky. When we give, we might feel entitled to a say in how the gift is used. Often when we give, we feel we’re owed something in return, even if it’s gratitude.

The truth is that most of us are practicing a dualistic version of generosity. I include most Buddhists in this! We are still reifying a 1-1 relationship when we give. There is probably an internal holding that looks like: I give, you receive. I benevolent, you in need. I help, you grateful. (Somehow our egos sound like Cookie Monster.)

It can be hard to admit that this is what’s happening inside, but it’s normal. The context of the world we live in has trained us to this limited form of generosity.

The teaching on transcendent generosity is to break the shell of dualistic generosity. To reach beyond the concepts of self, other, and anything that is being given.

Even if this doesn’t make a ton of sense right now, holding the idea in your heart, and holding the aspiration to transcend samsaric generosity, is the place to begin.

Practice Invitation

I invite you to try five acts of generosity in the next month. Notice within yourself if the act can spring from a transcendent well, and what that feels like in your body. Try and let go of the ego’s chatter about what the giving means. Try and focus on what you gain energetically when you give.

If there is a lot of chatter, give it a sweet bow and witness that. Everything is treated with kindness and bemused witnessing. We can only be in the place we are.

At Heart Sangha a friend told a story of a couple who was divorcing. The man and woman decided to give their adult daughter a house. The man mentioned that their daughter never said thank you. He continued: “It didn’t matter. We wanted to give her a house.”

That is the difference between ordinary generosity and transcendent generosity.

When we practice transcendent dana, we open the gate to the big stream of Buddhism. We step firmly onto the noble path of the Bodhisattvas. We begin to create a Buddha-realm here in Samsara. That is what we are called to do in these times.

With love,

Sunisa

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