The Practice of Giving

Giving — the first of the six pāramitās. The DĀNA volume locates giving inside the full Mahāyāna architecture rather than reducing it to material generosity: dharma-giving, fearlessness-giving, non-giving, and the non-dual handling of the giver–gift–recipient triad.

Nine Parts trace the trajectory: from the Pāli roots where dāna first crystallizes as a faculty alongside cāga, through the Āgama corpus where the eight bases and the Velāma exemplar arrange the practice, through the Vinaya schools where the saṅgha emerges as a field of merit and abhayadāna takes shape, into the early Mahāyāna turn that reframes dāna as dāna-pāramitā with the threefold purity of giver, gift, and recipient resolving into emptiness, into the Prajñāpāramitā tradition where giving becomes formless under emptiness's protection, through the Śūraṅgama's reverse-giving thesis where not-taking itself is inscribed as the precondition of giving, into the Lotus's gift of body and life, up to the Avataṃsaka's dharmadhātu offering, and closing on a contemporary diagnosis and an AI-age coda.

Thirty-one papers across nine Parts — Volume Two complete. Each paper stands alone as a technical analysis; read in sequence, they trace one continuous argument from cāga as a faculty of stream-entry, through the threefold purity and the Śūraṅgama's reframing of not-stealing as itself a doctrine of dāna, to the dharmadhātu offering and the place to begin.