Happiness from the Trash Heap

Another day, another ceremony for someone who’s passed away. We make merit by being generous, by holding to the precepts, and by meditating. So let’s meditate now to make the merit complete. Make your mind one. When the mind is one, it has a lot of strength, because when you’re dedicating merit to someone else, the things you’re giving don’t go to that person. It’s the current of the mind. So you want to make that current strong, cheerful, and healthy, so that it’s a gift to them.

As for the ceremony, it’s called bangsukun in Thai. It comes from paṅsukūla in Pali. It goes back to the old days when monks were not allowed to accept gifts of cloth from laypeople directly. They had to go and find cloth that was left over someplace. Paṅsukūla means from a trash heap. If cloth was in a trash heap, the monks could take it.

Other places they would go included cemeteries. In the cemeteries in those days, they didn’t bury people. They would wrap them in cloth and just leave them out. Crows and other animals would come and feed on them. You can imagine that it was a very unpleasant place to be. As the Buddha said, no one else wants this—the cloth there. So the cloth is totally safe. When you can find happiness in things that nobody else wants, that’s when your happiness is secure.

But there were some laypeople who wanted to give the gifts of cloth. So they would hang them on trees. If they knew a path where a monk might go, they would hang a piece of cloth on a tree near the path. If the monk saw that, he could take it because it had no owner at that point.

Then later on, when the Buddha finally gave permission for monks to receive gifts of cloth from laypeople, people still kept on with the tradition of the old way of doing things. There’s extra merit in maintaining the old ways—that was the thinking. That’s why we have this ceremony.

So it’s good to think about the symbolism: If you’re looking for happiness in things that people don’t want, then there’s no competition.

This is one of the lessons I learned from my father: There are a lot of tasks that need to be done in the world that nobody wants to do. So it’s your free rein for doing good.

So look around you. There are a lot of things that are not being done that should be done. If nobody else is doing them, it’s open territory for you. Think in those terms. That way, we can live together as people. At the same time, when the mind is cheerful, having done something good, then you can dedicate the merit to someone else. It’s a cheerful gift, a cheerful energy.

So remember that when you’re making merit, it’s supposed to be happy in the beginning—as you think of doing it—happy while you’re doing it, and then, after it’s done, you’re happy that you did it. There are a lot of pleasures in the world that are happy only for a little bit, and then they turn into something else in the memory.

So. Do a lot of good things, so that you can have a lot of good things to remember. This lifts the quality of your mind. You benefit—and then, as you dedicate it to other people, it’s an opportunity for them to benefit, too.