A Robe Woven with Her Own Hands

2.4 A Robe Woven with Her Own Hands

The Banyan-Tree Park outside Kapilavatthu.

The aunt who raised the Buddha—Mahāpajāpatī—came before Him holding a robe in her hands. She had spun the thread herself and woven the cloth herself; stitch by stitch, it was to be offered to the Buddha. He was the child she had brought up with her own hands; folded into this robe was the deepest heart a mother has to give.

The Buddha did not accept it.

He asked His aunt: offer this robe to the Saṅgha.

His aunt asked again; the Buddha declined again. Three times over. The third time, the Buddha said something weighty:

"Gotamī, give it to the Saṅgha. When you give to the Saṅgha, both I and the Saṅgha will be honored."

A mother, with a robe woven by her own hands, wishing to give it to the child she raised; and this child—now the Buddha, the Awakened One—again and again directing that devotion toward the Saṅgha. What is happening here?

Two Kinds of Giving, Two Ways of Reckoning

To understand why the Buddha did this, you first need to know that giving, according to who it is given to, in fact runs on two very different ways of reckoning.

One is giving to individuals, one by one. Giving to an ordinary person, to one who keeps the precepts, to a true practitioner, even to the Buddha—this is called the personal gift. The fruit of a personal gift is reckoned by how far the receiver has gone in practice: the deeper the receiver's practice, the greater the fruit of the offering. The ladder of the last chapter walked exactly this road—from giving to animals and ordinary people, all the way up to the noble ones and the Buddha.

The other is offering to the Saṅgha as a whole. This is called the saṅgha-bound gift. Its reckoning is different—it does not count by how far any one receiver has gone in practice, but by the fact that what you offer to is the Saṅgha as a whole.

The Buddha then said something startling at first hearing: even in ages to come, when the Saṅgha has taken in some who wear the robe in name only, whose conduct is already broken—so long as you make the offering for the sake of the Saṅgha, its fruit is still immeasurable. And more—no gift to any individual surpasses an offering to the Saṅgha; not even when the individual receiving it is the Buddha Himself:

"Ānanda, I do not in any way say that a personal gift is of greater fruit than a gift given to the Saṅgha."

Not "the Saṅgha Outranks the Buddha"

This sounds like a riddle: the Buddha is plainly the highest rung of the personal gift—how can offering to the Buddha rank below offering to an ordinary Saṅgha, even one with precept-breakers mixed into it?

It does not mean the Saṅgha is greater than the Buddha. It means the two reckonings simply cannot be set side by side and compared.

An offering to an individual reckons by "this person"—as far as this person's practice reaches, so far reaches the fruit; it is tied to one concrete person and his practice at this moment. An offering to the Saṅgha reckons not by "which person" but by the Saṅgha as the whole that carries the Dhamma forward—the body the Buddha established with His own hands to pass the Dhamma down, generation after generation. When you make an offering to it, you are making an offering to a lineage that will keep running on through time, through every change of the people within it. Even if someone in it at this moment falls short, the whole of that lineage is still there, still handing the Dhamma onward.

So these two kinds of giving use two different measures. One measures how far a person's practice has gone; the other measures whether the lineage still stands. The two measures measure different things, and naturally neither scale can be read as higher than the other. The Buddha kept directing His aunt's robe toward the Saṅgha not because a mother's devotion weighed little, but in order to place that stitch-by-stitch depth of heart into the lineage that can run on for a thousand ages—so that what it bears would be that other kind of fruit: the kind that crosses time, the immeasurable kind.

One More Measure: Your Own Mind

Speaking of "who you give to" this far, an unsettling thought surfaces: does this not say that the nobler the receiver, the more the gift is worth? Is this not despising the poor and courting the rich—sizing people up before serving them?

In the same discourse, the Buddha had long since closed that door. Besides the measure of the receiver, He spoke of another measure—the purity of a gift, seen in four cases:

Sometimes, the giver's mind is pure and the receiver is not pure; sometimes, the receiver is pure and the giver is not pure; sometimes, neither is pure; sometimes, both are pure.

Notice the first case—"the giver's mind pure, the receiver not pure": this too is a valid gift, a gift that bears fruit. Which is to say: even if the receiver you happen upon is nothing much, so long as the mind you give with is clean—without stinginess, without angling for return, without pride—the purity of this gift stands complete, on your own side.

And that shuts the door on despising the poor and courting the rich. "Who the receiver is" is one measure, true; but "whether the giving mind is pure" is another measure, and this one rests entirely in your own hand. You may never meet a noble one to receive your offering, but at any moment you can make this giving mind of yours clean. The rank of the receiver is not yours to command; the purity of your own mind is.

This is the fairest road the Dhamma leaves open to every person who gives: no matter who you give to, no matter how far the other has gone in practice, that pure mind—loosening "mine," asking nothing back—is always yours to bring to completion. And we are back at that line from Part One: the real substance of giving is in the mind, not in the ledger.

Walking On

Part Two has now touched each of the great questions of giving in turn: why we give, who we give to, what we can get now, and whether to make the offering to an individual or to the Saṅgha.

The next chapter is the last of Part Two. There the Buddha gathers everything this road of questions has turned up into one very simple master outline—the works of merit come to three in all: giving, virtue, cultivating the mind. And giving always stands first. Why does it lead? That one question will bring Part Two to a clean close.