Doing Favors & Making Merit

I knew an elderly Thai couple who came to the Dhamma late in life and became so dedicated to the practice that Ajaan Suwat had the husband become the lay chairman of the monastery up in suburban LA. They were new to the whole idea of monastery life, monastery etiquette. One Sunday, as people were leaving after having come to make merit, the wife stood at the doorway and thanked them. One of the people said, “I didn’t do this as a favor to you. I came to make merit.” It’s important to maintain that distinction.

The Buddha recognizes that some of our relationships in life are reciprocal. There’s a whole sutta in the Digha Nikaya devoted to the proper way in which a teacher treats a student, and the student responds. Parents treat their children, the children respond. People give support to contemplatives, and the contemplatives respond. There’s a reciprocity there.

The big reciprocal relationship, of course, is your relationship to your parents. You owe them a huge debt. As the Buddha said, you can’t repay them simply by looking after their physical needs. The ideal way to repay them is to get them interested in the Dhamma. If they’re not generous, influence them in such a way so they become generous. If they’re not virtuous, influence them in a way to become more virtuous. Of course, that’s hard. Parents don’t like being taught by their children. But it gives you a sense of how big the debt is and how much you have to repay.

Whereas in making merit, there’s no sense of indebtedness. There’s no reciprocity. You give gifts. You give forgiveness. You give your knowledge. You give your energy. You make a gift of the Dhamma, not to get anything back from the people that you’re giving it to, but for the happiness of giving, for increasing your store of goodness.

The same way with the precepts: You give the protection of not harming other people, not because they haven’t harmed you, but because you’re trying to develop something of independent value from within.

And, of course, with thoughts of goodwill: Sometimes we’re told we extend goodwill to others because they deserve it. But the Buddha never spoke in those words. We extend thoughts of goodwill because it’s good for us. It makes us happy, provides us with protection. It protects us from having ill will, which would then lead us to act in unskillful ways.

So when you think about your reasons for being generous, you do think about the rewards that’ll come, but not that you’re hoping that the person who receives your generosity will be the person who gives things back to you. Even in the lowest motivations that the Buddha recognizes for being generous — i.e., hoping that you’re going to get it back in a future life — it’s not the case that you want the person who receives your gift to be the one who delivers it back. It’s more impersonal. You create good karma, and that good karma will take care of you. But you want to raise your sights, because the quality of your motivation raises the quality of your generosity.

When King Pasenadi came to see the Buddha and asked him, “Where should a gift be given?” the Buddha’s first response was, “Give where you feel inspired or you feel that it would be well used.”

But then the king asked further, “Where, when a gift is given, does it give the best results?”

The Buddha replied, “Now, that’s a different question.” With that question, the king was bringing things into the level of skill. How are you skillful in being generous? Part of the skill is choosing good people to receive your gifts, people who you feel will use them well. Because, remember, what makes you happy? The sense that you’ve given a gift and the person who received it has enough appreciation to want to use it well.

There are times when you feel, “Well, so-and-so is poor. I feel sorry for them. I’d like to see them have something.” But then when they go and buy alcohol with your gift, it doesn’t make you happy. So choose good people, people who will use your gift well or take care of it. Choose something that’s appropriate for their needs. And maintain the right attitude as you’re giving, that something good will come from this.

In terms of the motivation, the Buddha says a higher motivation than wanting to get that gift back in a future life would be simply that giving is good, in the sense that it’s a virtuous thing to do, part of being a human being with a wider sense of your mind and more expansive sense of your heart. A higher motivation, the Buddha said, is seeing, “These people don’t have what I have. It’s not right that I don’t give them something.” Higher than that is, “Giving makes the mind serene.” You just feel good giving the gift. The highest is when giving doesn’t expect anything in return. The act of giving is simply an ornament of the heart and mind. This is the giving of a non-returner.

So we’re working in that direction. Don’t think in terms of, “If they give to me, I’ll give to them,” but simply, “I need to develop the quality of generosity in my heart, primarily for my own sake.” This is one of those ways in which looking after your true happiness spills out into other people in a good way.

A lot of times Theravada is accused of being selfish. But if it’s selfish to give with a sense that makes your mind serene, what would an unselfish gift be? The gift of a non-returner. Very few people are on that level yet. So work on that attitude that giving makes the mind serene. And see the gift as something that comes from within, not in response to someone else’s goodness to you. Simply because you feel inspired, that you would like to give.

As for gratitude, it’s interesting the Buddha’s ideal way of showing your gratitude for your parents is basically teaching them to look for goodness in a way that’s not reciprocal—in other words, making them think in terms of wanting to engage in acts of merit, encouraging them to produce goodness from within themselves. This is the whole nature of the path. As Ajaan Fuang liked to say, “No one hired us to be born. No one hired us to come and practice.” We have the right to choose. This is our free choice.

So recognize where generosity is reciprocal in the sense of doing favors for one another. It’s part of what makes human society human. But also recognize that merit is something else. In Thai they make the distinction: puñña, “merit,” is one thing; a favor, khun, is something else. People who are experienced in the Dhamma make a clear distinction between the two. They’re both good. If we didn’t have reciprocity in our relationships in general, life would be really hard. But when you want to make merit, that’s something above and beyond.

It’s interesting that when the Buddha introduced the topic of karma, the two areas he focused on were generosity and debts of gratitude. It’s because we have freedom of choice that generosity means something. If we had no freedom, the fact that you gave something to someone else would have been forced on you by the stars or whatever influences are coming from the past. It would have no virtue at all. That’s why the Buddha said, when he introduced karma, “There is what is given, there is what is sacrificed.” In other words, these things have meaning.

Then he went on to say, “There are parents.” You might think, “Well, that’s obvious.” But what he meant is that your parents should have a special place in your heart, should have a special place in your life. They’ve done so much for you that you owe them a lot in return. They’ve done you the favor of raising you, teaching you language, giving birth to you. And you owe them something in return. After all, they had the choice not to give birth to you. And when they did give birth to you, they had the choice not to raise you. If you’ve ever been a parent, you realize how much goes into the first two or three years of a child’s life. But they had the choice not to do that. So the fact that they did do that means you owe them a lot.

So have a sense of where your reciprocal duties lie and have a sense of where you’re giving freely—in other words, nobody hired you. Keep the distinction clear. We’re here at the monastery primarily to make merit. There’s a reciprocal relationship between the teacher and the student, but above and beyond that, that’s where the merit lies.

During my early years as a monk, Ajaan Fuang had me memorize the Divine Mantra as a part of my meditation. For my first rains, I had to go back to Wat Asokaram. I found that people would come to Wat Asokaram and ask monks to chant the Divine Mantra for their relatives who were sick, on their deathbed. So I volunteered—until one day I heard a woman saying, “The monks here at Wat Asokaram are nice and cheap. You don’t have to pay them that much to get a good chant like this. Go to other monasteries in Bangkok and you have to pay them a lot more.” The fact that there was that reciprocal attitude toward something like this made me stop. The idea that I was doing this because I was getting paid ruined the whole thing. So I stopped volunteering.

So keep the distinction between the two very clear. Making merit is one thing; doing a favor is something else. Realize that both sides of the human transaction, both sides of human relationships, have their value. It’s simply that making merit is a more internal affair, a private affair, where you want to generate goodness from within, totally independent of what other people have done.

Now, you do take into consideration that when you’ve been generous with someone and they abuse the generosity, you might not feel inspired anymore. That’s your choice. That’s your call. But otherwise, the goodness of generosity, the goodness of virtue, and the goodness of goodwill are things you want to generate from within. Have your own independent source of goodness inside. Because if your goodness depends on the goodness of the world, well, look at the world around you. There’s a lot that doesn’t inspire goodness at all. But you have to maintain the attitude that you’re not doing it for them. You’re not doing it to pay anybody back. You’re doing it because, as the Buddha said, “‘Acts of merit’ is another word for ‘happiness.’” And you take to heart that question, “What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?”

Acts of merit are the answer.