WHEN I STARTED on the path of Buddhist practice, I was mainly interested in meditation. To my novice ears, other teachings sounded less relevant or interesting. I vaguely remember hearing in a dharma talk that the Buddha had emphasized the practice of generosity for lay folks such as myself. In the trilogy of meritorious deeds (puñña), he first and foremost taught generosity, or dana, which in Pali connotes both the act of giving and what is given. Only after the practitioner appreciated this teaching did the Buddha proceed to teach ethics (sila) and mental cultivation (bhavana); it was the latter I was jumping into, head (not heart) first.
My first response to dana was skepticism. Wouldn’t any leader of a monastic order espouse generosity, if for no other purpose than to sustain the order? Had I dared to share my cynicism with anyone learned in the tradition, they might have pointed out that while the rules of the early monastic community could have been designed to allow for the monk’s independence, they were in fact devised to foster interdependence between the lay community and the ordained. The vinaya rules forbid monastics from handling money, cooking, or saving food for the next day—the monastics depend upon the generosity of the lay community, to whom, in turn, the monks freely offer daily practice and teachings.
A couple of decades older, many dimensions of generosity have opened up for me—not only in the ordinary expressions of giver, receiver, and gift, but also while meditating and teaching, when dana seems
