Part Three · The Field of Merit in the Vinaya · Crossing to the Receiving End

The two parts before this both spoke from the giver's end—how the hand inside a person's heart loosens (Part One), and what that hand looks like when it reaches into the human world (Part Two). The eye has stayed fixed, all along, on the one who gives.

Part Three turns the lens toward two places that have been left out in the cold.

One is the receiving end. At the close of Part Two we said: to offer to the Saṅgha—a lineage that can carry on for a thousand generations—bears immeasurable fruit. But this Saṅgha, which receives the giving of countless people—how is it itself settled, itself guarded? With offerings pouring in by the thousands and tens of thousands, how does this field of merit keep from being eaten away by a self-interest fattened on it? For this, it takes the Vinaya. With the precepts, the Buddha established the Saṅgha as a field that no one can take as their own and that can be farmed long into the future—that is the matter of the first chapter.

The other is a giving with nothing in the hand. The giving we have spoken of always had something to pass over—food, robes, fields, houses. But there is a kind of giving that costs not a cent and needs nothing in hand, and is still real giving through and through. It is the keeping of the precepts—when you hold to "not killing," every being that would otherwise have feared you receives, in that instant, peace of mind from you. Keeping the precepts turns out to be a gift sent to all beings. That is the matter of the second chapter.

Two chapters: one on how the receiving end is held safe by the Vinaya, one on how giving can need no thing at all and joins straight onto the precepts. Underneath runs the same main thread: that loosened hand—this time, watch how an institution guards it, and how, even when it is empty, it is still giving.

We go first to look at a park covered with gold.