When the Offering Is Hijacked

6.3 When the Offering Is Hijacked

Whatever is good will be stolen and misused. Things as clean as giving and offering are no exception—above all where practice runs deep.

At the end of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, the Buddha deliberately devotes a long stretch of teaching to one matter: when a person sits in meditation and the concentration grows quite deep, all manner of states will appear; and hidden inside these states are the fifty skandha-māras—fifty traps that can deceive a person onto a wrong road. And of these fifty, a large part are precisely this thing called giving being quietly inverted, quietly hijacked.

This chapter is the heaviest alarm bell in this part, and the one most worth keeping in mind.

"Taking the Thief for Your Own Son"

The Buddha first issues a general warning. He says that when a practitioner meets states in concentration, the gravest danger is taking the thief for your own son—mistaking a thief for your own child; mistaking a māra-state for a sage's realization.

How could anyone mistake them? Because such states often arrive wondrous and beautiful—suddenly you feel you have awakened, broken through, become someone extraordinary. The moment the thought stirs, "I am a sage now," the māra slips in through the gap.

And once this counterfeit sagehood lands in the human world, its most common expression is the building of an inverted relationship of offering: someone falsely claims to have realized a sage's rank, and on the strength of that false identity goes soliciting offerings that were never his to receive, reverence that was never his to accept. The giving that should have pointed toward liberation is switched out, just like that, into a tool for fattening the fraud.

Two Pictures That Sting the Eye Most

The Śūraṅgama Sūtra paints these traps in concrete detail. Two of the pictures sting the eye most.

One is called "becoming a servant, offering the four necessities."

The four necessities—food and drink, clothing, bedding, medicine—are the most reverent offering the faithful can make to a true practitioner. But the sūtra says that a deviant teacher possessed by a māra can make those who listen to him see him as if he had lived for hundreds of years, conceive a clinging love for him, and become unable to leave him—unable to what degree? Willing to become servants, presenting those four necessities in an unending stream, and "without tiring." The words forever on his lips: "In a past life, in such-and-such a birth, I liberated you first; you were then my wife, my concubine, my brother—and in this life I have come to liberate you again…"—a fabricated "bond from former lives," gluing people fast.

Look at what has happened here: the offering has been hijacked whole. The reverence of the faithful, which should have been laid before a true field of merit, has been stolen away by a false identity; and that "willingness" has in fact been glued into helplessness by patter about "bonds from former lives."

The other picture stings more sharply still: "the white-robed receiving the bhikṣus' obeisance."

"White-robed" means a layperson. The sūtra says that some of the possessed call themselves Buddha—plainly laypeople, yet they sit there grandly, receiving in reverse the prostrations and offerings that monastics make to them; they slander the precepts, abuse and revile everyone, even "praise sexual desire," passing off all manner of vile conduct as "transmitting the Dharma."

This picture turns the whole order of offering completely upside down.

In these two pictures the Śūraṅgama Sūtra sees with deadly accuracy. It is reminding every practitioner: when someone uses words like "I am a sage," "I have powers," "you and I share a bond from a former life" to demand from you offerings, reverence, obedience—even your body—that is not a spiritual friend; that is a māra. A true spiritual friend leads you toward loosening the grip of self; a false one drags you toward making offerings to the self that is him. One would have you lose your "I"; the other would have you feed his. The directions are exactly opposite.

The Thief Is Not Outside—He Is in Your Own Mind

And yet the deepest sentence in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra does not teach you how to guard against the māras outside—it teaches you to turn around and look at yourself.

The Buddha says that the reason these māras can succeed lies not in the māras at all, but in whether the "master" within your own mind has lost his way. He says:

"When the master is lost, the guest finds opportunity."

The māra is the guest, come from outside; but if the master within your mind—your awareness, your watchfulness—is clear and awake, then however formidable the māra, it can do nothing to you. Only when the master is lost and muddled does the guest—the māra—find his opening.

The patriarchs laid this layer barer still. One of them said: "The harm may seem to come from the māra, but what summons the māra is truly the filth of the mind." It looks as if the māra is harming you; in truth, what invited the māra in is the filth in your own mind. What filth? That faint, half-hidden craving—stored up for who knows how long—for offerings, for renown, for being revered. The moment concentration deepens, this craving hidden at the bottom of the heart appears, as in a mirror, as the māra-state outside.

So in the end—the māra-state is the mirror of your mind's filth. That "māra" who impersonates a sage and covets offerings is in fact the enlargement of one thought in your own mind: "I too would like to be offered to like that, revered like that." If that speck of filth is not in the mind, the māra has nothing to reflect in it, and nowhere to fasten on.

Another patriarch quoted one line from the Avataṃsaka Sūtra as the master diagnosis: "To forget the bodhi-mind while cultivating wholesome roots—this is māra's work." Even if what you cultivate are "wholesome roots"—good things like giving, keeping precepts, recollecting the Buddha—so long as you have forgotten the bodhi-mind, the mind that seeks awakening for the benefit of beings, these good deeds all turn into māra's business. Soliciting offerings, gathering disciples, receiving reverence—all of it is on that list. This sentence is a blow to the head for every practitioner.

The Deepest Greed of All: "For the Sake of Saving Beings"

The subtlest inversion of all hides deepest.

Speaking of very deep states of concentration, the Śūraṅgama Sūtra says there is a kind of person in whom a thought like this arises: "If I enter nirvāṇa and depart, who will save the beings? So I must remain in the world—store up more comforts, widen my following, lay in more treasure, so as to keep things going, so as to save beings…"

It sounds high-minded, does it not? "For the sake of saving beings," after all. But a patriarch saw through it at a glance and passed a four-word verdict: "clinging to a true that is not true"—it looks true (for the sake of saving beings) and is in fact false (a self-serving greed hidden inside). Translate that thought into today's words and it reads: "If I do not receive these offerings, who will maintain the monastery? If I do not enlarge my following, who will spread the true Dharma?"—how much grasping has slipped quietly in under the banner of "spreading the Dharma and benefiting beings."

This is stealing-mind in its most hidden transformation. Earlier, cutting off stealing meant cutting off the coarse kind—not taking other people's things. Here, what must be cut off is the fine-grained stealing-mind wrapped in sugar, the kind that has deceived even its owner: in the name of "for the beings," doing the work of fattening this "I."

The Best Giving Is to Pass This Alarm Bell On

Having laid out this fearful string of traps, the Śūraṅgama Sūtra closes with great deliberateness.

The Buddha at once sets up a comparison. Suppose someone took seven treasures enough to fill the whole of space and offered them to countless, measureless Buddhas—that merit is already boundless, is it not? But the Buddha says: if there is another person who, in the age of the Dharma's decline, can teach this teaching—how to recognize the skandha-māras, how to recognize inverted giving—to one person who has never yet learned it, so that in days to come he is not deceived by these māras, then this person's blessing exceeds that of the one who gave the seven treasures filling all of space "a hundredfold, a thousandfold, a thousand million millionfold"—too much to be counted.

See how exquisite this closing arrangement is. This whole book has been speaking of giving, and here, at the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, the Buddha Himself ranks it: the highest giving is not the gift of wealth (giving things) but the gift of the Dharma (giving the Dharma); and the most precious gift of the Dharma is precisely to hand down to those who come after the knowledge of how to recognize inverted giving—so that their offering hearts are never hijacked.

This is the true intent of this chapter—and of this part. It is not asking you to fear practice, or to fear giving. Quite the opposite: pointing the traps out to you one by one is itself a gift of the largest kind—it is protecting that clean heart of yours, the heart willing to make offering, from being stolen by the wicked.

Part Six, to This Point

Part Six has circled around to the reverse side of giving and, through the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, looked at three layers.

The first layer, from the side of precept: not stealing is itself a kind of giving—blocking the hand that wants to take is also loosening that "I." The second layer, from the side of concentration and wisdom: the twenty-five roads of practice each flow, at the end, into giving—even sitting in stillness and Chan inquiry is an act of giving. The third layer is an alarm bell: giving can be hijacked into inverted giving, and what summons inverted giving is the speck of craving in one's own mind for offerings and renown; the best remedy is to pass this power of recognition on, as a gift of the Dharma.

Take the three layers together, and this hand that has been loosening all along the road is seen more fully: it gives outward (giving), it blocks inward (not-taking), it flows out naturally in practice (perfect penetration), and it must stay watchful, lest it be stolen away (discerning the māras).

And the last sentence of Part Six—"the highest giving is the gift of the Dharma"—pushes us straight toward the next part.

If the gift of wealth has its ceiling, then where is the limit of the gift of the Dharma, the gift of the body? There is a sūtra that pushes both—the offering of the body and the offering of the Dharma—to the utmost place: the most extreme, the most heroic, and the most moving. A bodhisattva offers to the Buddha the burning of his own body. In the next part, we enter the Lotus Sūtra.