Gratitude for Birth

Ajaan Fuang used to note that when you’re born, you enter the lineup to die, but you don’t know where you are in the line. It’s like when you go into a bank and you pull a number so that you know where you are in line. But in this case, the numbers are handed out randomly. Some people go straight to the head of the line and die right away.

In any case, birth is suffering. There’s the suffering of being in the womb, the suffering of being pushed out of the womb. Many babies die right then. Many mothers die at the same time.

Of course, there’s the pain and suffering for the mother: nine months of carrying this weight around in her belly. There’s that story in the Canon of Suppavasa. For seven years she had a pregnancy. When the baby came out, he could talk. So she invites the Buddha and the Sangha to her home for a meal. The baby is in conversation with Ven. Sariputta. Ven. Sariputta says, “I hope everything is okay with you.” The baby says, “How could everything be okay? I was seven years in that cauldron of blood.”

The mother is overcome with bliss that her son is talking to the general of the Dhamma. The Buddha asks her, “Would you like to have another son like that?” She says, “Oh yes, I’d like to have seven more.”

The Buddha responds with a verse that’s pretty brutal: “The disagreeable in the guise of the agreeable, the unlovable in the guise of the lovable, pain in the guise of bliss, overcome one who is heedless.”

So, as you can see, Buddhism doesn’t glorify birth. As Ajaan Chah would say, “Most people are happy and laugh when a baby is born. They cry when somebody dies. Maybe they should cry when the baby is born as well.”

But still, the fact that we’re born here means that we can practice the Dhamma. We have this human birth. We can do a lot with a human birth. There are people who gain full awakening in a human birth. We have the opportunity to learn the Dhamma and practice the Dhamma. So, for that, we should be grateful.

This is why the Buddha stresses gratitude for your parents. And don’t think that parents were all wonderful back in the time of the Buddha. In many cases, they weren’t. In the case of deadbeat dads, parents who abandon their children or started pregnancies with one-night stands, the conditions that lead up to birth are not necessarily all that honorable.

In many cases, though, the parents are honorable. They take care of the child. They love the child. As the Buddha said, they give you their blood. In other words, the mother feeds you with her milk. They teach you about the world. They teach you language. They teach you how to function as a human being. It’s a long, painstaking process, and it takes a lot out of them. Once you have a baby, can’t expect to have a solid night’s sleep for several years. So the parents sacrifice a lot in the best cases.

But even in the cases that are not the best—as I said, the one-night stands, the deadbeat dads—you still have to have gratitude for your parents because they’re giving you this opportunity to be a human being. You wanted to be a human being, you know. There are people who blame their parents for their birth, but that’s not fair. You were the one who wanted to come in there. They opened themselves up to the possibility of having a child, with no idea who that child would be, where the child came from, what karma they would have with that child in the past. And you were the one who came out.

So gratitude is the proper response.

Now, this teaching is often misunderstood, both in Asia and here in the West. In Asia, it’s misunderstood as meaning that the child should always obey the parents. Many parents abuse that idea, but it’s not one that comes from the Canon. There are many cases in the Canon where people are, with good reason, disobedient to their parents.

There’s the story of Ratthapala, who wants to ordain. He listens to the Dhamma of the Buddha. He’s inspired. He goes back and tells his parents he wants to ordain, and they say, “We’d rather have you die.” So he says, “Okay, I’ll go on a hunger strike.” The parents plead with Ratthapala’s friends to tell him to stop the strike, but he refuses.

The friends finally say to the parents, “Look, he’s better off alive as a monk than dead here on the ground. He’s really determined.” So the parents give in, unwillingly. This story, for them, goes from bad to worse, but for Ven. Ratthapala, it goes well. He becomes an arahant. So, there are cases where people are disobedient to their parents and it’s good.

There are also cases where people obey their parents and it’s bad. Ven. Sudinna is the prime example. He’s the monk who’s the star of the origin story for the first parajika rule against having sex. It’s a case similar to that of Ratthapala. He wants to ordain. His parents don’t want him to. He goes on a hunger strike. They finally give in. He doesn’t become an arahant, though, but he is a good monk.

There’s a famine. He thinks, “Maybe I can go back home and get some food from my family. They’re well off. They’re not suffering from the famine. I can share it among the monks.”

He goes back, and the mother pleads with him, “Even if you don’t want to disrobe, please have sex with one of your former wives so that we can at least have an heir.”

So he does. Three times. He immediately regrets what he’s done, and he gets a very severe dressing down from the Buddha.

That’s a case where obeying your parents is the wrong thing.

So the idea that gratitude for your parents means that you have to obey them has no basis in the Buddha’s teachings. What you’re expected to do is to look after them. Make sure they don’t fall into poverty. Make sure that if they’re ill, there’s someone to treat their illness, and when they grow old, there’s someone to look after them.

Ideally, the Buddha says, you should bring your parents to the Dhamma if you can. There’s the case of Rohini, the woman who’s chastised by her father: “Why is it that you’re constantly feeding the monks? Monks are lazy and good for nothing.” But she convinces him that monks actually do the highest work, the best work. He ends up going for the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha for refuge and then ultimately becomes an arahant himself.

In that case, he was willing to listen to his daughter. Generally, though, it’s very difficult often for children to teach their parents, or for parents to listen to their children, but it is possible for children to influence their parents to see that maybe the Buddha was right, maybe the Buddha’s teachings are worth listening to. That’s the ideal way of repaying your debt.

But the point is, you are born with a debt. This is a point that people in the West don’t understand. They think that as soon as they’re born, they’re entitled to certain treatment, certain wise counseling, a wise upbringing. Then, when they find that they’re suffering from unwise choices made by their parents, unwise words or attitudes, they blame their parents for not treating them right.

The Buddha’s attitude is that you’re born with a debt. You’ve got this body that you took from them, so you have certain duties toward them. Whether they raised you well or didn’t raise you well, you still have a debt of gratitude to them and you should try to repay it. While they’re alive, you try to bring them to the Dhamma if you can. Failing that, you make sure, as I said, that they don’t fall into poverty, that there’s someone to look after them when they’re ill and when they grow old. After they die, you make merit for them in case they go to a bad place after death.

There’s the story of the brahman who asked the Buddha, “This merit that we make and dedicate to our relatives, does it actually get to them?” The Buddha said, “If they’re in a position where they can receive it, yes.” He’s referring to hungry ghosts, but in the forest tradition, the ajaans say that there are others who can also receive the merit that’s dedicated to them, too.

The way they receive it, of course, is not that you take the merit out of your account and put it in their account. They have to know that you’ve done something good and have dedicated the merit to them, and they have to approve. Their approval is then their merit. They benefit from that.

So we’re born with a debt. We have this opportunity to be a human being. Whether our parents were honorable or not honorable in opening that opportunity to us, we still owe a lot to them. And you should respond with gratitude.

As the saying goes, gratitude is a sign of a good person. It means that you recognize when people have gone out of their way to help you and that it was difficult for them. They had the choice not to go out of their way, but they chose to do it. You realize how much you depend on that choice they made, and you value it. That’s a sign that you might be willing to go out of your way for other people, too.

Gratitude, by the way, is different from appreciation. Appreciation means you simply have a sense of how much you benefited from something. Gratitude means you’ve benefited from something that people have done. You might have appreciation for the weather, appreciation for the opportunity that we have right here, right now, with a good location to practice. You can appreciate the things around you. But things don’t make choices. It’s people who make the choices. So you should be grateful to the people who arranged for this place.

To put it another way, the word gratitude in Pali, katannu, literally means that you know what was done. So when people made a choice to do something to help you and went out of their way, you should recognize that fact and have gratitude for what they did. The primary instance is, of course, your parents, but this applies to other people as well. You realize that the human race depends on people going out of their way for one another. This is what makes human life a good life to have.

If people didn’t go out of their way for one another, the Buddha would have gained awakening and then just disappeared into the Himalayan mountains. Instead, he taught for all those many years, forty-five years, walking around northern India, trying to establish this teaching that we have: not only teaching the Dhamma, trying to explain it, but also dealing with people who wanted only to argue with him. Here he had found the way to true happiness, and people wanted to argue with him. Monks and nuns ordained with him and then did all kinds of stupid things. One of them even tried to kill him. He had to set up a huge body of rules. It wasn’t easy, but he saw that it was worth it. Nobody hired him to do it. He did it out of his own free will.

We should have gratitude for that, and gratitude for the people who’ve passed those teachings along. We have gratitude for our parents. We want to put them in that line-up of people who benefit from the teachings, if we can. If we can’t, we repay our debt in other appropriate ways.

But when you understand what’s meant by gratitude and what your debt to your parents is, then it’s a lot easier to respond in an appropriate way. The appropriate way is to make the best use you can out of this human birth. Think of all the suffering that has been involved. You should practice the Dhamma as best you can. Ideally, you should get to the point where you have no more debts to anybody. That’s the state of the arahant. When you do that, the people who make merit with you benefit a lot, and your parents will benefit, too. Practicing the Dhamma means that you have a lot to share with your parents and with everyone else.

As the Buddha said, it’d be hard to find anybody that you might meet in this lifetime who hasn’t been a parent at one time. The debts go all around.

So repay those debts in the best way: Practice the Dhamma. And if through your practice of the Dhamma you inspire others to practice as well, so much the better. But at the very least, dedicate the merit you’ve made, the goodness you’ve done, to everyone to whom you’re indebted. The Dhamma is the best currency for repaying those debts.