Giving: Loosening the Hand

1.1 Giving: Loosening the Hand

The last of something is left in the house—the last bowl of rice, the last piece of bread. And just then someone comes to the door, asking. At that moment, more likely than not, there is a slight catch inside you.

That catch is short, perhaps less than a second. Before the hand reaches out, the heart contracts first. That small inward contraction is not evil; it is simply human. But the Dhamma has a special name for this contraction, an account of where it comes from, and a remedy for it. It is called stinginess.

The "giving" this whole book is about comes down, in the end, to dealing with that flinch.

The Buddha spoke of this matter very plainly.

There is a passage in the Itivuttaka—a collection of the Buddha's short sayings, each opening "Thus was it heard from the Blessed One"; in Chinese it survives as the Běnshì jīng—where the Buddha says to the mendicants seated before Him:

"Mendicants, if beings only knew, as I know, the fruit of giving and sharing, they would not eat without first giving, and the stain of stinginess would not occupy their minds. Even their last morsel they would not eat without sharing, so long as someone was there to receive it."

Notice where this saying lands. The Buddha did not say "give a great deal," nor "give to renowned recipients." What He spoke of was the last morsel—when this little is all you have left, when keeping it is just enough for yourself and giving it away means going hungry, and you still share it out. This is the touchstone. A person who can loosen his hand at the last morsel—his letting-go is real. Giving away the spare ends of one's surplus, ornament upon plenty, tests nothing at all.

The Buddha went on: most people cannot do this because they "do not know"—they do not see how much is folded into that one act of loosening. Possessing measureless food and wealth, they cannot share out even a little; the stain of stinginess occupies their minds, and they eat and use it all themselves. What blocks them is not poverty. It is that stinginess.

One Word, "Giving," with Three Layers Beneath It

Here one thing must first be seen clearly: when the Buddha spoke of "giving," He used more than one word.

When we ordinarily speak of giving, our eyes are mostly fixed on the act of giving—how much was given, to whom, whether anyone knew of it afterward. All of these are visible, and all of them matter. This layer is giving (dāna)—placing a thing into another's hands, the visible giving.

But beneath that visible giving lies a layer that cannot be seen. In the passage just quoted, the Buddha pointed it out: what blocks a person from sharing out his last mouthful is stinginess; and the single inward movement that loosens that stinginess and lets the hand come open has, in the texts, a word of its own—letting-go (cāga).

Giving and letting-go are two different things. Giving is the act of the hand, and can be seen; letting-go is the loosening in the heart—the mind no longer gripping "mine" and refusing to let go—and cannot be seen.

A person can perform a very large act of giving while the letting-go inside has not moved at all: out of face, out of repaying a favor, out of fear, he hands the money over; the gesture is handsome, and the "mine" in his heart has not loosened by a hair. And there are those who share out only half a bowl of rice, yet the hand inside has truly come open. When the Dhamma looks at these two people, it looks at the layer underneath.

This is why this book is not a history of giving, not a story of humanity growing ever more generous. It is about how a hand comes open—and how much that hand is holding has never been the point.

"Letting-Go": The Buddha's Own Description

This invisible letting-go, the Buddha described in His own words.

In the Pāli texts the Buddha returns, again and again, to one string of phrases to paint a mind in which letting-go has been brought to maturity. The Chinese rendering of it is preserved in the Saṃyukta Āgama. At the Banyan Park outside Kapilavatthu—the grove where the Buddha often stayed when He returned to His homeland—He was teaching the Sakyan layman Mahānāma the qualities a householder should bring to fullness; and when He came to letting-go, He said that such a person

dwells at home with a mind freed from the stain of stinginess, with letting-go loosened, with hand washed clean, delighting in relinquishment, responsive to those who request, delighting in giving and sharing.

Take it apart. "With a mind freed from the stain of stinginess"—among people enmeshed in stinginess, this heart has come free of that stain. "With letting-go loosened"—his giving is a released giving, not a giving that is bound or coerced. "Delighting in relinquishment," "responsive to those who request"—not a sudden impulse, but a settled default: the mind's resting position has shifted from keep to loose, and toward another's asking the heart stands open. "Delighting in giving and sharing"—in the loosening and the giving there is gladness, not reluctance.

You see that these lines paint not the outward look of "a generous person" but the place where "a heart that has already come open" ordinarily rests. The thing most worth marking is the gladness—when loosening the hand is itself a joy. If a person still winces, still has to force himself when he loosens his grip, the stinginess is in fact still there. Only when the loosening reaches gladness has it truly loosened.

What Stinginess Actually Is

Now look at the stinginess that works against this letting-go. It is not merely the small feeling of "I can't bear to part with it." What it catches on is the boundary line of "mine"—the mind's inability to allow "what is mine" to become "mine, and also another's." The moment that line is touched, the heart contracts.

So you will see a strange thing: a person who can hand over ten dollars without blinking, yet cannot allow someone else to sit in his chair. The ten dollars never touched his line of "mine"; the chair touched it. The switch of stinginess is "mine" being challenged, not how costly the thing is.

And for just this reason, the remedy for stinginess is not "force yourself to donate more." Giving that is forced often only hides the stinginess in a new costume. The true remedy is to grow a contrary habit in the heart—and that habit is letting-go. Let the mind see, one time after another, the very moment its hand comes loose; let those moments accumulate, and the binding of stinginess on the heart loosens, inch by inch. This is work done on the heart, not work done on a ledger.

That passage from the Běnshì jīng had already laid this bare: when the Buddha spoke of "sharing out even the last mouthful," what He prized was not the importance of the morsel given away, but the rareness of a heart that can give it—a heart no longer occupied by stinginess. The weight has always been on the heart, never on the rice.

One More Layer: Offering

Besides giving and letting-go, the texts preserve a third word with a register of its own—offering (yāga).

In the age when the Buddha taught, India already had a very old culture of sacrifice. People made offerings to the gods—for timely wind and rain, for offspring, for the life to come. The Buddha's teaching arose in that soil, and it did not cut the gesture of offering away with one stroke. It took the gesture over and changed its direction—the same gesture of respectful presenting remained, but the one presented to was changed: from the gods in the heavens to the field of merit—the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Saṅgha, and virtuous good people.

So the gesture here carries a measure of reverence and solemnity. It is not the cold handing-over of a thing; it is a presenting with respect, made at the proper time to the supreme field—the Three Jewels and the noble ones. This is offering.

This layer will open out in full when we come, much later, to Samantabhadra's vast cultivation of offerings in the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, and become the far end of this long road. For now, only remember this: within giving there has always been the reverence of offering.

Set the three side by side, and a complete act of giving is in fact three layers moving at once: first the loosening of letting-go in the heart, then the giving of the hand, and that giving carrying with it the reverence of offering. Loosening, giving, reverence—only with the three layers together do you have the full shape of what the Buddha meant, back then, by giving.

The layer most easily missed is letting-go—because it is the least visible. Money can be counted; reverence can be seen; only that loosening in the heart is invisible to others, and even you yourself, if not attentive, will miss it. And yet that is precisely the layer that is the heart of the whole matter.

One More Kind of Giving, and a Higher One: The Gift of the Dhamma

The Buddha also taught that within the word "giving" itself there is a higher and a lower.

He said:

"Mendicants, there are these two gifts: the gift of material things and the gift of the teaching. Of these two, the gift of the teaching is supreme."

One is the gift of material things—sharing out food, clothing, shelter, medicine. The other is the gift of the Dhamma—speaking to others the true teaching that can free them from suffering. Both are giving; yet the Buddha said: the gift of the Dhamma is supreme.

The reason lies here: a material gift relieves another's hunger and cold for a time; the gift of the Dhamma relieves the delusion and suffering of life after life. This layer will reach its far end later, when the Avataṃsaka declares the offering of Dharma to be supreme. For now, only remember this: the Buddha said in His own words that giving has a higher and a lower, and the gift of the Dhamma is the highest.

One Thing to See Clearly Here

Having come this far, there is one thing to see clearly, lest the first step go crooked.

The world often treats giving as a transaction: I donate so much now, to draw back so much blessing later—like depositing money into an invisible account, waiting to withdraw it with interest. The thought is natural, and very common. But it gets the direction of giving entirely backward.

To say it plainly: that giving draws blessing is, in the Dhamma, true and no lie—the verse just quoted, "the fruit it draws among humans and gods is beyond all measure," is the Buddha's own word. The question is not "whether there is blessing." The question is "where the eyes are fixed."

The giving the Buddha taught faces not toward "what I can get back later" but toward "what I can loosen now." That hand clenched around "mine"—what it grips is not only property. It grips an "I," a habit of drawing thing after thing inside the boundary of "mine." And this habit is the very root that keeps a person turning, without rest, through birth and death. Giving is precious because it is one of the few practices that goes straight to that root and loosens it.

In other words, giving is not "do a good deed and wait for the reward." It is "loosen the hand a little, lose a little of the I." As for blessings—will they come? They will—but they fall as something shed along the way when the hand loosens, not as the purpose of loosening it. Just as the soles of your shoes wear down when you walk, yet no one walks in order to wear down their soles. Fix your eyes on the blessings, and this road becomes impossible to walk; set your heart on the loosening, and the road opens of itself.

This principle—that the real substance of giving lies in the loosening and the losing of "I," not in the giving and not in the exchange—is the spine of this entire book. In the chapters ahead, the objects grow larger chapter by chapter and the methods finer chapter by chapter, but underneath, the question being asked is always the same one: has that hand come open?

How much, then, does this loosening matter?

It matters this much—the Buddha listed it among the marks of a person who has "stepped into the stream of liberation." Whether someone has truly entered the way, truly set out on the road: one of the signs looked for is how far this hand of his has loosened. That letting-go can stand in the same position as keeping virtue and as wisdom, and serve as a mark of realization, may at first sound surprising.

The next chapter begins right there—still at the Banyan Park, still with Mahānāma, looking at why the Buddha said that letting-go is one of the marks of stream-entry.