The Skills of Merit

Close your eyes and feel your breath. Where do you feel the breath when you breathe in? Where do you feel it when you breathe out? Focus your attention there. Try some long breathing for a while and see how that feels. And if long breathing feels good, keep it up. If not, you can change. Make it shorter, deeper, shallower, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Experiment to see what kind of breathing feels best for the body right now.

When the breath feels good, think of it filling the whole body—because the breath, here, doesn’t mean just the air coming in and out through the nose. It’s the quality of energy in the body. Think of it flowing freely all the way down to the tips of the fingers, tips of the toes. See if you can maintain that full-body awareness.

As for any thoughts that come in, you can just let them go away. They come and they go. You don’t have to get involved. Like traffic on the road: Just let the traffic go past. If you try to get in the middle of the road and stop the traffic, it runs over you. Here you’re stepping out. You’re not in the road. You’re in the present moment.

This is one of the skills the Buddha taught. All of his teachings are basically skills. Even right view is a skillful way of thinking that leads you to act in skillful ways. So it’s good to know the various skills.

Like today we’re making merit for June, dedicating it to her. The question is, when you make merit, how do you make merit? How do you dedicate it? It’s a skill. You think about the goodness you want to do—that makes you happy right there. You realize that the level of your mind is on a high level. It’s not just thirsting and hungering for things. But you want to do some goodness. So you do a good act. You’re happy about it as you anticipate it; you’re happy about it as you’re doing it; and then you’re happy about it as you reflect on it afterwards. As you reflect, you might stop and meditate, make the mind quiet, and say “May June also have a share in this merit as well.”

Now, the question is: How does that happen? After all, each person has his or her own karma. But you basically say that you’re happy to share yours with her. If she knows about what you’re doing and approves, that’s her goodness. That’s her merit. That’s her good karma. That’s how merit gets dedicated. But it all comes from the mind. We’re all trying to develop the skills of the mind.

In this case we want to do good. We think of the goodness that she’s done. She’s helped set up a hermitage in Canada for the monks here at the monastery. She’s been a very reliable, very solid person doing that and has been helpful in all kinds of ways. Very circumspect. Very discerning. It’s a shame that she had to go so soon. But as the Buddha said, once you’re born, you’re ready to die at any time. So we think about that. We think about the fact that we’re going to be dying sometime soon as well.

Even if we live for another 100 years, when the 100 years is gone, it’s gone. You can’t carry it around with you. So you want to do good as part of your life as a human being. When you think of the goodness that other people have done, you want to dedicate your goodness to them. If they approve, goodness spreads around.

So goodness like this doesn’t have any boundaries. It’s something that we can share. When you look for happiness in this way, you’re looking for happiness in a wise way, in a way that leads to harmony, in a way that leads to cooperation among people. Because when you act in skillful ways such as being generous, observing the precepts, meditating, you benefit; the people around you benefit as well. So it’s good to look for a happiness that you can share like this, a happiness with no boundaries.

And stop and reflect on what you’re doing: that this is where goodness comes from in the world. There are pretty things out in the world, beautiful things, but there can be a lot of ugliness in the human heart. So we want to make sure that we develop goodness, beautiful goodness, inside our own human hearts—and we appreciate it in others. That’s how this human world becomes a place that’s worth living in.

So look for your goodness inside. Develop it as a skill. And if you follow the skills of the Buddha, you find it can take you far.