Dedicating Merit

Close your eyes; focus on your breath. Feel the breath coming in, going out. Each time it comes in, each time it goes out, try to stay right here. It’s in the staying that you develop good qualities of the mind. The breath is very easy to watch, but staying with it consistently requires that you be more mindful, more alert, put more ardency into what you’re doing. These are good qualities to develop.

We’re looking for happiness in a way that’s good for ourselves and good for others. Most kinds of happiness—based on material gain, status, praise, sensual pleasures—don’t really develop the mind that well. In fact, they can make you very lazy, whereas the goodness that comes from being generous, that comes from being virtuous, that comes from meditating, requires that you strengthen your mind as you find that happiness. And in doing so, you’re finding a happiness that doesn’t have boundaries.

With your wealth, it’s happy for you and a few people who enjoy the wealth with you. But there are a lot of people to whom that happiness doesn’t extend. The same with status—you gain, other people lose it. With praise—you gain it, other people lose it. That creates boundaries.

But when you’re being generous, what boundaries are you creating? You’re developing good qualities. You’re developing a sense of self-worth inside. The people receiving your gifts: They benefit, too. And the people who see what you’re doing and see that it’s a good thing—that there are still human beings who are generous—they benefit as well. So this is happiness that’s not just a feeling of pleasure. It’s a happiness that develops good qualities of the mind, strengthens the mind, and at the same time doesn’t have boundaries. The happiness that we try to find through material gain and status is what creates boundaries in the world, which is why there’s so much conflict going on.

But if we look for happiness in virtue, generosity, and meditation, that creates a greater sense of unity. People see you’re doing something good. Even if they don’t immediately benefit from it, they see that it’s a good thing that the world has good people in it. They benefit. You benefit. The people who are recipients of your generosity, the people with whom you are restrained in terms of your precepts, and the people who don’t have to put up with your greed, aversion, and delusion because you’re been learning how to meditate and to curb those tendencies: They benefit directly. It’s happiness all around.

This is why we want to dedicate merit to other people when we want to make them happy in whatever place they’ve gone to after they’ve died. We do merit. We’re generous; we’re virtuous; we meditate. They realize that we’re doing something good in the world, and we’re dedicating it to them. That makes them happy. That happiness becomes their merit.

So this is a kind of happiness that spreads its results out in ever-widening circles. It doesn’t end just with the end of the pleasure of a pleasurable sensation. It’s something that lasts for a long time.

So it’s a sign of wisdom that we look for happiness in these ways, for our own sake and for everyone else.