**](https://www.dhammatalks.org/audio/evening/2024/240122-three-more-recollections.html)

January 22, 2024

There are times when you make up your mind to stay with the breath and it’s easy. The breath is right there. You think of making it long, it goes long. You think of making it short, it goes short. You can adjust it and think of the comfortable breath sensations spreading throughout the body. You find it pleasant. You find it interesting. The mind settles down.

There are other times, though when the mind refuses to settle down. In the words of the suttas, there’s a “fever” in the body that arises when you start focusing on the breath, or there’s sluggishness in the mind, or the mind gets scattered. No matter how much you tell it to stay with the breath, it resists.

When that happens, then, as the Buddha says, you focus on an inspiring theme—something that will make you happy to be here, confident that you’re doing something good, and you’re capable of doing something good.

The sutta in which he says this doesn’t list any specific inspiring themes. But other suttas talk about getting inspired by what are called the six recollections. I mentioned the first three the other night: recollection of the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha. That’s basically to remind you that there is goodness in the world. There are good people in the world. This path that you’re on was founded by good people.

The three remaining recollections—recollection of generosity, recollection of virtue, recollection of the devas—are to remind you that you’re a good person. You may not be as good as the members of the noble Sangha yet, but you’ve got some goodness to you. That gives you confidence. You feel good about yourself, you feel good about the path you’re on. The purpose of this recollection is to get the mind to have a sense of well-being that it can then take back and apply to the breath and really settle down.

So what are those last three recollections?

When you recollect generosity, you’re recollecting your own generosity. And here we’re talking about times when you gave a gift not because you had to—because it was a holiday or somebody’s birthday—but because you felt like doing it. It was a totally independent choice on your part.

Thinking about that can be nourishing. After all, you had something that you could have used yourself, and that would have been the end of it. But you thought about other people and how they would be pleased or how they would be helped by what you had. And you felt wealthy enough to share. That right there is a refreshing thought: that sense of wealth, that you have enough to share. And the fact that you did think about other people opens up the mind.

As Ajaan Lee once said, when you’re generous, the whole world becomes your home. The people you’ve shared things with become your relatives. This is one of the reasons why, in Thailand, when monks speak of the supporters of the monastery they use the term yaat yom, which literally means our relatives. When you give a gift it breaks down barriers.

One of the very first books in the study of anthropology was called *Le Don, The Gift, *which was about gift-giving. It pointed out how when you ask a price for something, you’re basically asserting the fact that you’re not related to the person you’re selling it to. Which is why when we buy and sell things within the family, it feels really weird.

But when you give a gift, you’re breaking down that barrier. You’re basically saying that this other person is a relative, part of an extended family. It opens your mind, opens your heart. And because the gift is voluntary, you realize that the goodness came from within you. It wasn’t forced on you from anyone.

This is why there are so many protections of the voluntary nature of giving in the Buddhist culture around giving. You know the story. King Pasenadi asked the Buddha one time, “Where should a gift be given?” He’d asked brahmans before, and the brahmans had said “Well, give it to brahmans.” The Jain teachers would say “Give it to the Jains.” So he was probably expecting the Buddha to say, “Give to the Sangha.” But the Buddha didn’t say that. He said, “Give where you feel inspired, where you feel it will be well-used.”

We have a rule—it comes under Nissaggiya Pācittiya 30—that when a monk is asked “Where should this gift be given?” you don’t tell the donor where to give it. You just say, again, “Give where you feel inspired to give, where you feel it will be well-used, well taken care of.”

So you don’t impose your requests on people. You don’t impose your ideas of what would be a good place to give. Let them have the choice. In that way, you respect the dignity of their gift. And it gives you some dignity too, as you’re not constantly on the lookout for someone who can support you. That way, you know that the things that come your way are voluntarily given.

So when you’re a recipient of generosity—of that kind of generosity—it lifts your heart as well. When you give a gift you’re giving with that attitude. This is why we try to protect the voluntary nature of a gift, both in giving and in receiving.

Thinking about these things can lift the heart. When the heart is lifted, that fever in the body grows cool. The agitation that scatters your mind around calms down, or the sluggishness of the mind begins to disperse.

The same with recollection of virtue: You think of the times when you could have broken the precepts and probably could have gotten away with it, but you realized it was beneath you. When you have that sense of certain actions are beneath you, that lifts the mind. When you can see yourself holding to that principle even when it’s difficult, that lifts it even further.

I was reading a piece one time by someone—I don’t want to mention which branch of Buddhism he came from—but he was saying, “Wisdom around the precepts means knowing when to observe them and when not to observe them.” That’s not wisdom. That’s just the ordinary way of the world. And look at the way of the world—people can find excuses for all kinds of horrible things.

But when you have clear-cut principles and you hold by them, that lifts you up above the general way of the world. And it lifts you up above your own defilements because you look at the things that would make you want to break the precepts and you realize that you’re not a slave to them. That lifts the mind and, again, gladdens the mind.

This is one of the reasons why we keep on practicing generosity, keep on practicing virtue, as we progress along the path because it lifts the mind, puts it in the right mood to be meditating. If you gave a gift once and that was it, it gets hard after a while to get a lot of juice out of that recollection. So you keep on giving, keep on observing the precepts, and that gives buoyancy to your practice.

As for recollection of the devas, this is about you, too. It may seem strange, thinking about the fact there are devas. But what the Buddha wants you to think about is, one, what is it that makes a person a deva? And two, do you have those qualities within you?

He lists five qualities: conviction, virtue, generosity, learning, and discernment.

Conviction is in the Buddha’s awakening. Generosity and virtue we already know.

Learning is learning the Dhamma, having a fund of Dhamma within you. Think of the things that go sloshing around in most people’s minds, especially now with the mass media: all kinds of stupid songs and jingles, issues that the media raises as important issues, and then disguises other, more important issues.

Whereas you remember, the Dhamma keeps you focused on this question: What, when you do it, will lead to long-term welfare and happiness? What when you do it, will lead to long-term harm and suffering? The Dhamma keeps you focused on what you’re doing right now, and the importance of what you’re doing right now.

So having that kind of learning in your mind helps to catch you when you’re about to slip off. That’s a good treasure to have, and that’s one of the qualities that make people into devas.

The final quality is discernment, which the Buddha defines as penetrative knowledge of arising and passing away, leading to the end of suffering.

This is not just a matter of watching things coming and going. For that knowledge to be penetrative, you have to see what causes things to arise, what causes them to pass away, and which things, when they arise, are worth continuing with, i.e., skillful, and which things, when they arise, are not, i.e., unskillful?

You develop that knowledge or that discernment first with your outside actions, and then it goes into your inside actions—which requires of course, that you have an understanding of the mind.

This is one of the benefits of virtue as well, as you hold to the precepts. The only thing that can make you break a precept is if you intentionally break it. If you break a precept unintentionally it doesn’t count as broken. This, of course, focuses your attention on your intentions.

The more you get to know your mind, the easier it is at the moment of death to have some control over what you’re going to choose to do. To whatever extent you have any of these five qualities, you’re going to qualify as a deva.

So regardless of what other people think of you, you realize that you’ve got some goodness inside you that doesn’t depend on other people recognizing whether the goodness is there or not. You know yourself—you’ve got generosity, you’ve got virtue, you’ve got the qualities of a deva. Then you learn to make that knowledge sufficient.

So regardless of other people’s opinions, you know that your goodness doesn’t rise and fall with their opinions—because the opinions of the world: What are they like? You see things changing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The world is totally unreliable.

But you’ve got the Dhamma and it’s a reliable set of standards. This is a point that the ajaans make again and again, that it stays the same. The Thai phrase is khong sen khong waa, in other words, what started out as, say, a meter always stays a meter. It doesn’t shrink; it doesn’t expand. It stays the same throughout time.

Even though the Dhamma teaches about how things change, the basic principles of the Dhamma don’t change. Those are the principles by which you’re measuring yourself. And they’re good standards, good principles.

When you live up to them, you can have a clear sense of your own competence, your own worth, your own value. That can give you the confidence you need to settle down and not get discouraged when the mind wanders off a bit. Well, you can bring it right back. If it wanders off again, you bring it back again.

This was the point Ajaan Suwat was getting at when he noticed all those meditators at the meditation retreat back east. He said, “These people look awfully grim, have you noticed?” His explanation was they didn’t have enough background in virtue and generosity that they could come to the meditation knowing that, one, what the Buddha taught was good, and two, they’re good people, so that whatever the difficulties, they wouldn’t be overwhelmed.

So these contemplations are meant to help you develop a sense of joy in the fact that you’re practicing here, realizing that you’ve got the potential to do this well.

That should help the mind settle down and get back to work, good work. The work of absorption, the work of discernment: These are all good things. They taste good and they’re good for you.