Looking Back on What You Have Given

1.3 Looking Back on What You Have Given

The last chapter said letting-go matters enough to serve as a mark of stream-entry. But to know it matters, with nowhere for the hand to take hold, is still to be unable to bring one's strength to bear. This chapter is about the very concrete, very workable method the Buddha left—turning around to look at what you have once given.

The Fifth: Recollection of Letting-Go

The Buddha left six things for His disciples to take up in recollection—recollection of the Buddha, of the Dhamma, of the Saṅgha, of virtue, of letting-go, of the deities. The first three recollect the Three Jewels; the middle two recollect one's own virtue and one's own letting-go; the last recollects the deities. Recollection of letting-go stands fifth.

The word "recollection" means returning to one object, along it, again and again. Not a thought that comes and passes—the mind is laid against the object, laid against it repeatedly, and as it adheres, the mind is turned by what it adheres to.

The Buddha's teaching of this fifth recollection is preserved in the Aṅguttara Nikāya; its Chinese rendering survives in the Saṃyukta Āgama. For the fifth position the object-formula runs:

"The noble disciple recollects their own letting-go: 'It is my gain, my great gain, that in a generation consumed by the stain of stinginess, I dwell at home with a mind freed from such stain, with letting-go loosened, with hand washed clean, delighting in relinquishment, responsive to those who request, delighting in giving and sharing.'"

See what is recollected here. "Recollects their own letting-go"—looking back on one's own giving. And in the looking back, gladness rises of itself; what the gladness is over comes in the very next breath—"a mind freed from the stain of stinginess." The gladness is not over "me"; it is over the leaving of stinginess, over that one loosening.

What follows is all a description of one's own loosened hand: letting-go loosened—released, unbound; delighting in relinquishment; responsive to those who ask; delighting in giving and sharing. And a mind that, at such a time, is not obsessed by greed, by hatred, by harm. The direction of this recollection the texts mark plainly: the mind, made thus straight, travels the straight road, directed toward Nibbāna. This recollection does not rest in the self-satisfaction of "I have done a good deed"; it moves, along that straight road, toward Nibbāna. We will return to this below, for it is exactly where the practice is most easily misunderstood.

Of the Six, Only This One Is Something You Have Done

Set the six side by side, and you will find that letting-go is very unlike the other five.

Recollection of the Buddha recollects His nine epithets; recollection of the Dhamma, the Dhamma's several excellences; recollection of the Saṅgha, the qualities of the community; recollection of virtue, the marks of the virtue you yourself keep; recollection of the deities, the qualities the deities possess. For these five, the object is either there ready-made (the Buddha's qualities, the Dhamma's qualities) or a set of specifications (the virtue to be kept, the qualities a deity must have). None of them requires you to produce it first—they are already there; you have only to cast your mind toward them.

Only letting-go is different. Its object is not a set of specifications; it is things you yourself have actually done, one by one—this morning you yielded a lane; yesterday you shared the leftover rice with the person at the door; last month you caught and held a friend's outpouring of grief. These events have a time, a setting, a recipient; they really happened.

This gives it a feature the other recollections do not have: the other five you can take up at any moment, because the object is always there; but with letting-go, you must first have truly loosened your hand once before there is anything to recollect. Without the event, there is no object.

So it is also the most down-to-earth of the six—it forces the practice down into your own days, down onto the small acts you have actually done.

The Method the Tradition Has Left

How, then, concretely, to recollect? The treatises have left two ways in.

One is for those already in the habit of giving: find a quiet place, sit down, and take the occasions of your own everyday loosening directly into review—looking back at how, within that event, the mind came loose.

The other is for those in whom the habit has not yet formed: on rising in the morning, first set yourself a clear vow—"Today, until I have first shared out a little of something, I will not take the first mouthful." Then keep to it through the day; having done it, hold the event in mind, and in the evening sit down and look back at it.

Notice how deft the second way is: it first has you produce an act of letting-go, then has you look back on that act. First the event, then the recollecting. For someone not yet practiced, this squeezes an object for the lesson of letting-go right out of daily life.

One thing should be said: recollection of letting-go like this can bring the mind right up to the door of concentration, but it will not carry you into the deepest kind of concentration. This is not because letting-go lacks strength—all six recollections are like this. The reason is simple: the object of a recollection is always several things put together (in the object of letting-go there is the time, the person, the thing, that loosening in the heart…), and the mind must move back and forth among them; it cannot fix dead-still on a single point. To enter that deepest concentration, one must change to another method. Recollection was designed from the start to come to rest at the door of concentration—its virtue is not depth, but steadiness, and being ready to hand at any moment.

One Thing to See Clearly Here

In speaking of looking back on one's own good acts, there is one thing above all to see clearly here, or the whole practice will slide into something else.

"Looking back on what you have given" sounds very much like self-congratulation—"See how kind I am; I have done another good deed." If that is how you recollect, you are recollecting wrongly—feeding more firewood to the "I."

But the recollection of letting-go that the Buddha's tradition teaches does not recollect the self-verdict "I am a good person." It recollects the structure of loosening inside the event. Looking back at the same sharing of yesterday's rice, the self-congratulator has his eyes on the "I"—how fine I am; the one recollecting letting-go has his eyes on the loosening—how, in that moment, the hand inside went from gripping, to loose, to open. The more the first recollects, the bigger the "I" grows; the more the second recollects, the fainter it grows.

The treatises place "a mind freed from the stain of stinginess" first in the review. This is not so that you can be pleased that "I am clean now"; it is so that you will put your attention on the act of leaving the stain itself—on that loosening, not on that "I." The object of concentration is always the loosening, never the "I." Hold to this one point, and recollecting letting-go will not turn into boasting in disguise; steadily, solidly, time after time, it will loosen the "I" a little fainter.

Perhaps the Easiest of the Six to Take Up

For people today, this fifth one may in fact be the easiest of the six to begin.

To recollect the Buddha's nine epithets steadily takes no small amount of study; to recollect the Dhamma or the Saṅgha takes a real acquaintance with the teaching and with the community; to recollect virtue, you must first have the work of keeping virtue before there is material; to recollect the deities, you must know a whole map of the heavens. Only the recollection of letting-go—its object you already have, today.

It may be something very small: at the crossing you let a car go first; at dinner you put the better piece in your neighbor's bowl; a friend sat down troubled and you stopped what you were doing to sit with him a while. In the evening, when it is quiet, take that one event out and make it the object the mind is to lie against. Then, following the few items the treatises have left, look back through it one by one: in that moment, did the mind leave that bit of stinginess? Did the hand loosen? Was it willing of itself, with no one forcing it?—not judging, not boasting, not thinking "how good I am"—only attending, closely, to the look of the loosening inside that event.

This is the plainest doorway into the recollection of letting-go. It needs no temple bell and drum, no solemn ritual—only that today you have, in fact, loosened your hand once. Even if only a very small once.

Fifth Place Is a Turning Point

Last, look back once at the order of the six, and you will see why letting-go is placed fifth.

The six have a direction of travel. First, recollection of the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Saṅgha—the mind faces outward, cast toward the ideal exemplars of the Three Jewels. Then recollection of virtue and of letting-go—the mind draws back, faces inward, looks at its own conduct and its own heart. Last, recollection of the deities—the mind faces outward again, but this time not to worship: it takes the deities as a mirror. The deities were born there because they have faith, virtue, learning, letting-go, wisdom; I look back into the glass, and I have these things too.

Letting-go sits exactly at this turn—at the end of the stretch that looks inward at oneself, and at the head of the stretch that holds the deities up as a mirror to oneself. To be able, while recollecting the deities, to see "the deities have letting-go, and I have it too," you must first already know how to look back on your own letting-go. So letting-go stands fifth not as a ranking, not as a lower seat, but as the hinge on this road where what comes before is carried into what comes after.

Part One, to This Point

With this, the three chapters of Part One have driven the root in firm.

Chapter one made it clear: giving has three layers—the giving of the hand, the letting-go of the heart, the reverence of the offering—and its real substance lies in letting-go, in that loosening of the heart, not in how much was given. Chapter two made it clear: this letting-go matters enough to serve as a mark of stream-entry, ranked alongside virtue and wisdom; even a Sakyan laywoman, on this one item alone, could attest her own fruit to the Buddha. Chapter three made it clear: this letting-go can be practiced—by looking back on what you have given, letting the mind soften along it, time after time, growing the "I" a little fainter with each turn.

This whole set is the earliest, plainest giving, handed by the Buddha in His own words to householders. It is complete, and it has roots. A householder busy with worldly affairs—like Mahānāma—holding this set in hand, can already set out on the road.

But the road ahead is long. What we walk next is how this same letting-go grows up from this plainest root, layer by layer, and opens out—first into the wider world of the Āgamas, to see how the Buddha drew, from one same hand, eight different minds.