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Guided Meditation: Generous Attention; Dharmette: To Transform the World (3 of 5) With Generosity - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 30, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Generous Attention

Hello and welcome. I delight in the greetings in the YouTube chat and all the locations that people are connecting from. I feel a radiating field of goodwill from all these locations, so thank you for being part of this.

Many years ago, I was very inspired, encouraged, and a little bit amazed by a very simple Zen teaching. Zen has a lot of stories of students asking the Zen master a question. Someone asked the Zen master, "What is the Gate of Zen?"—meaning, what is the entryway to Zen? The teacher answered, "Generosity." That was the end of the story.

It struck me in two ways. One was that generosity is often seen as the entry-level practice in Buddhism; it sets the stage for everything else. Secondly, a gate is also the way you leave. You enter and leave a monastery through the gate. So, you enter and leave Zen, you enter and leave Buddhism, through the gate of generosity. You enter being generous, and you leave being generous.

This is also encapsulated in a fantastic way by the words for the great relinquishment, the great letting go. In Pali¹, the ancient language, the word for letting go is cāga², which is also the word for generosity. It has a double meaning: the final, deep release of liberation and generosity. To give something, we have to let go of something. We don't give and then hold on. So the gate of practice is generosity—giving something, releasing something.

We will sit with that today, the idea of generosity. We offer something; we give. Sometimes we give our love, sometimes we give our care, sometimes we give our smiles. Sometimes we give safety, sometimes we give space, sometimes we give attention. All these forms are things given in meditation. We give our attention, we give space, we give our respect, we give our care. We give our generosity for each step along the way, seeing it as an act of generosity, not as an act of accomplishment, of getting something, of attaining something, or making something happen.

Assume a meditation posture and gently close your eyes. Sit here first evoking in yourself the very best associations, feelings, and memories that you have for generosity—for being the recipient of a generous act, or for being generous with someone else. Imagine that your generosity comes from deep within you, from a place inside which is stable, steady, warm, and open. As you take some deeper breaths, relax and settle into some deeper place within. That's the foundation from which generosity is inspired.

Relax and settle in, letting your breathing return to normal. Then, offer your body's experience of breathing space. Provide breathing room for your breathing so that the way you attend to the breathing is not forceful, sharp, or pointed, but light and gentle. Be generous to make room for the experience of breathing. Welcome it.

Is there a generosity that's not of the mind—not something you have to think about—but is a state of feeling? The quality of the heart, or a quality even deeper than that, of the torso or the belly?

Whatever comes up into awareness, whatever you know or are experiencing, take a metaphorical step back and have your attention to it be an act of generosity. As if seeing, knowing, and listening to what's here is an expression of care and goodwill. Generosity where the practice is less about being mindful and more about offering a spirit of generosity to all things that are present.

If mindfulness is an act of generosity, how would you be mindful?

And as we come to the end of this sitting, consider as a thought experiment: if your biggest gift to the world, the biggest benefit that you can provide everyone including yourself, is to spend the day being generous, with a spirit of generosity everywhere you go. Where the generosity is enacted with smiles of generosity, care, opening doors for people, making room for people, saying hello to people. The whole day, a day of generosity, a day of giving. How would that be for you? How would you end the day when you go to sleep—a day in which you abided in a state of generosity?

May all beings be put at ease with our generosity. May all beings feel safe in our field of generosity, where we don't want anything from anyone else. May all beings be happy, experiencing generosity as the obvious first way in which they are met. May the way we walk through this world touch everything that we encounter with a movement of generosity. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we contribute an environment that makes this possible—an environment of generosity.

Thank you.

Dharmette: To Transform the World (3 of 5) With Generosity

Welcome to this third talk of a series titled "To Transform the World." May it be that the way we walk through this world contributes to it becoming a better world.

One of those transformative steps that all cultures and all religions emphasize is the value of generosity, of giving. A marvelous Jataka³ tale—a Buddhist fable—involves a little parrot.

In the forest where the parrot lived, a gigantic forest fire started. The animals ran from the fire, but they ran towards a huge body of water, a lake where they couldn't swim. They were going to be trapped between the fire and the water. The parrot, of course, could fly, but seeing all this, it felt something had to be done.

So the parrot flew into the water to wet its wings, and then flew over this gigantic forest fire and shook its wings so the drops fell on the fire. Over and over again, this parrot went and dripped these drops on the fire. This was a great act of generosity, of compassion, of care.

It had such a cosmic effect that it warmed the throne of the great god Brahma⁴. Brahma said, "Who is doing this wonderful act that should warm my throne?" So Brahma turned himself into an eagle and flew down to see. He found this parrot doing this over and over again, sprinkling water on the huge fire.

As an eagle, Brahma asked, "What are you doing?" The parrot said, "Well, I'm trying to put out the fire to save all these animals in the forest." The eagle said, "Isn't that ridiculous? How could you, with just a few little drops over and over again, have any impact on the fire?" The parrot said, "It doesn't matter. What matters is that I have to do something. I have to try to make a difference."

This inspired Brahma, so he created a big rainstorm and put out the fire.

This idea is that we give even when maybe giving or caring seems impossible. There are many stories and instructions that say when there is conflict, give a gift. Don't give anger; give a gift.

Fifty years ago, I read of a community that lived high in the mountains in the Philippines, living as they had done for many centuries. The custom of this community was that when they woke up in the morning at breakfast, they would tell each other the dreams they had. If there was a dream about somebody else in the community where there was a conflict of any kind—something scary or difficult—then the custom was that you would go and give a gift to that person. This community was known for being peaceful, known in the neighboring territories as living up in the mountains peacefully, never causing any trouble for anybody else. Maybe this act of generosity was what did it.

There are also fables of an old poor woman coming to the three princesses of a royal family asking for alms. Two of the older sisters give nothing, but the younger sister gives something, and that giving then transforms the fortune of the younger sister in some dramatic way.

There are many stories like this showing that giving has a tremendous power. But like the parrot, we give even if it's hopeless. We give because it transforms the world. Who knows who's watching? Who knows the impact it will have to care for someone, to offer something?

Giving is a social lubricant. Giving is a way of establishing safety, warmth, and goodwill to others. Often, giving to the people we're challenged with can disarm them. It puts a crack in their defense, in their armor, a crack in their anger. It's hard to be angry with someone who has given you a gift. It doesn't have to be a big gift—"Here, have this." Maybe it's some cookies we baked at home, maybe it's offering them a place at the table, maybe it's all kinds of things.

Why be generous? One reason is that the opposite of generosity—to be closed, to be held back, to be miserly, to be tight or shut down from this open-handed way of living—is actually harmful to ourselves. It limits us, diminishes us. So part of the reason to be generous is that it's good for us.

If we are generous in a healthy and wise way—it doesn't have to be giving away all our things, it doesn't have to be a big act of generosity; it can be done with gestures, with smiles, with our attention, with things that don't cost anything like, "Here, can I bring you some water?"—we feel a kind of release. We feel a kind of handing over. We don't hold on to grudges, we don't hold on to being closed. It's a powerful act to be generous.

It turns out that one of the words ancient Buddhism uses to describe the profound release of liberation has dual meanings. The most famous is the word cāga², which means both letting go or relinquishment, and it means generosity—to give. There is this inseparability of letting go and giving; letting go of whatever we're holding on to or attached to through acts of generosity.

We live in a difficult world. We live in a world where there's a lot of animosity, a lot of fear, a lot of tension. It's not obvious what the solution to the divisiveness of our times is. But the divisiveness of our times is the forest fire that we live in.

Maybe each of us is a parrot. And maybe there's something that listens to the small parrot with its little drops, being generous in the best way, the only way that it knows how to do it. Maybe something is listening—profoundly listening—that will come in support and help this world of ours. Maybe a neighbor will notice, maybe a colleague will notice, and maybe some of their anger, some of their hostility will diminish as they go home to their own family. Maybe they're kinder to their kids. And that kindness to their kids maybe is the very thing that prevents that kid from growing up angry and bitter as well, just as the parent did.

We don't know the effect of our acts of generosity and goodwill on the people that we encounter. It might be profound. Trust the ripple effects. That's what the story of Brahma—this god whose throne is warmed by the parrot's actions—speaks to for me. That there is something profound and unseen that is the consequence of how we live in this world with our generosity.

May it be that each of us acts generously, no matter how strong the fire is, so that the ripple effect of that—results of which we might never see—reaches out into the world. Trust those ripple effects. Be a parrot. Offer what you can to make this world a better place.

Thank you.