Part One · Pāli Roots · The First Loosening of the Hand
This book is going to walk a long road—from the plainest giving the Buddha taught His lay disciples in person while He was in the world, all the way to that dharma-realm offering in the Avataṃsaka Sūtra which gathers in all things. Along the way we will pass through the eight kinds of giving in the Āgamas, through the field of merit in the Vinaya, through the Diamond Sūtra's three wheels—giver, receiver, gift—all empty, through Samantabhadra's vast cultivation of offerings. The objects will grow ever larger, the ritual forms ever finer, the language ever more solemn. Yet beneath all of it, the same one thing is being walked: loosening, inch by inch, the hand clenched around "mine."
The starting point is in none of those solemn places. It is somewhere earlier, and plainer—the Banyan Park outside Kapilavatthu, the grove where the Buddha often stayed when He returned to His homeland. There lived a Sakyan layman busy with the affairs of his household, named Mahānāma, who again and again brought his everyday worries to the Buddha. The giving the Buddha taught him, and laypeople like him, is the true starting point of this long road.
When most people today hear "giving," what comes to mind is donating money, making merit, trading for blessings in return. All of these came later. Before any of them, the giving the Buddha taught had its weight never on "how much was given," but on whether that "mine" in the heart can come loose.
What Part One does is return to this root.
Three chapters, laid out in order. Chapter one: see clearly what giving is—when the Buddha spoke of it, He in fact used more than one word: one for the giving of the hand, one for the loosening of the heart, one for the reverence of the offering. Chapter two: see how much this loosening matters—the Buddha listed it among the marks of a person "stepping into the stream of liberation," standing shoulder to shoulder with virtue and with wisdom; and a Sakyan laywoman, in the Buddha's own presence, used it to attest her attainment to His face. Chapter three: see how to take this loosening and practice it—looking back on what you have given, letting the mind soften along it, one time after another.
Read these three chapters through, and beneath all the seemingly ever-more-elaborate offerings in the chapters that follow, the lines of one same hand will show—the hand that is coming open.
The foundation must be driven firm first. We begin with chapter one—returning to the Banyan Park, to hear the Buddha speak to Mahānāma that first "giving."