No Spiders in the Icing

Close your eyes, and try to stay with your breath all the way in, all the way out. Notice where you feel it in the body and keep your attention there. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If not, you can change. Try shorter breathing, more shallow. Deeper, heavier, lighter. Faster, slower. Try to find what kind of breathing feels good right now, because you’re trying to get the mind to stay right here, get it to want to stay right here, because we’re making merit. We’re making merit not only for ourselves, but also for others—those who passed away, wherever they may be. It’s as if you’re sending them a gift, so you want the gift to be good. And, of course, for your own sake you want it to be good, too.

The merit you make is not depleted by the merit you send to other people. It’s like lighting a candle. Once your candle is lit, you can light other candles, and the flame of your candle is not diminished. Everything gets brighter, the more candles you light. So make merit, and dedicate it. But as I say, it’s a gift for you and for the others, so you want it to be really good. You don’t want there to be any slips in your meditation.

We’ve already presented offerings. We’ve already taken the precepts. Now we have to work on meditation so that our merit will be complete. In all those cases, the Buddha said you want to do your best. When he set forth the heart of the Buddha’s teachings—not doing any evil, bringing your skillfulness to its consummation, and cleansing the mind so it’s pure—in each of those cases he said don’t do any evil at all, even the smallest little things.

Sometimes we get a sense that when we’ve made a lot of merit, it’s like having a big bank account. So you can afford to waste a little money here, waste a little money there. It doesn’t matter. In other words, we’ve done so much good that we can do a little bit of things that are not so good. But that’s like saying, “I want a cake, but it doesn’t matter if it has some dust, and some spiders, and some hairs in the frosting.” You want your cake to be good all the way through.

So make sure that your meditation is good. Make sure that your precepts are good. When you make a gift, the Buddha never talks about the value of the gift being measured by its material value. It’s measured by your attitude as you give. You’re trying to develop the quality of generosity. You want that quality to be good. When you give a gift, really give it and put some thought into it.

When you observe the precepts, realize there are going to be some times when it’s really easy to break a precept. Number four is probably the easiest to break, the one against lying. It’s so easy to say a few untrue things just to cover up awkward situations, to hide some things from people that might be upset by the truth. But you realize if you start telling lies, even in little areas, people begin to catch you, and they realize they can’t trust your words. That spoils a lot of your other speech, as well, in their eyes.

And, of course, the mediation—you want to really stay with your topic. We’re trying to develop a concentrated mind here, a state of having our awareness gathered into one, around one object. So anything else that comes along, you say, “Nope. I’ve got my one object that I’ve got to really work on here.” You want to give the breath your full attention. You want to give your awareness in the present moment your full attention. That’s how the mind becomes one. When the mind is one, that’s when it has high value.

It’s like a fruit in a market. When there’s only one durian, say, or one mango, that durian and that mango have a high price. If there are lots of them, they can’t sell them in time. Sometimes they get thrown away. So make your mind one and keep it one. Make all your merit really, really good. In that way, you get what you want: complete happiness, a happiness that doesn’t have any sorrow mixed in with it because you haven’t mixed anything evil in with your goodness.

“Evil,” here, sounds like a strong term. But even if there’s just a little lapse of mindfulness, wandering away for a little bit, say, “This is not what I want. I want to make sure that the cake that I get is a good cake all the way through.” When you want complete results, you have to make the causes complete as well.