Everybody Gets Fed

Years back, there was a cartoon. Two middle-aged couples—they looked to be in their fifties—sitting in a very nice living room, and the husband of one couple was saying to the others, “Of course it’s had its ups and downs, but by and large, Margaret and I have found a consumer experience to be a rewarding one.”

The humor there, of course, is the fact that it’s so untrue. Simply consuming, consuming, consuming is not rewarding. Yet it’s how most people define themselves. In fact, as the Buddha said in that question: “What is one?—All beings subsist on food.” It’s how we define ourselves as beings—by what we consume. Not only physical food, but also pleasures of all different kinds. Physical food. Emotional food. Most people just spend their time eating, eating, eating. But there’s no real reward there.

It’s like that commercial for the soft drink years back that said, “Obey Your Thirst.” If you obey your thirst, you’re just like a common animal.

You begin to realize there’s some good that you can do, both for yourself and for other people, when you’re generous. Generosity is the opposite of feeding. Although, you might call it feeding on a higher level—you’re feeding off of the goodness you’ve done, something where everybody benefits.

Most of the happiness in the world comes from material gain, status, praise, sensual pleasures. This is the type of pleasure where somebody gets it and other people don’t. In fact, some people have to lack it for other people to gain it. Whereas the happiness that comes from being generous, the happiness that comes from being virtuous, the happiness that comes from training your mind: That doesn’t create any boundaries. You gain and the people around you gain as well. You’re trying to find a happiness that causes no harm to anybody at all. That’s a noble thing. You lift your mind up above its constant consuming. You actually become a producer of happiness. And that’s a lot more rewarding.

So think of that as you go through the day, as well as when you’re meditating. It’s not just you out in the forest. You’re taking care of the part of the world that you have the most control over—or potentially have the most control over: the state of your own mind. And it’s from the state of your mind that your actions come out into the world. So if you create a good state, good things will come out of you. That can be your contribution to the people around you.

So learn how to encourage yourself as you practice. It sometimes gets lonely. You wonder, “Why am I doing this just for myself?” Well, remind yourself, it’s not just for yourself. Other people benefit as well. The less greed, aversion, and delusion you have taking over your thoughts, words, and deeds, the less other people have to suffer from those things. The more goodwill, compassion, and empathetic joy that you can develop, the more other people will benefit, too. This is an area where you feed, but other people get fed as well.

Someone once asked Ajaan Suwat why Buddhism didn’t have a god that would give encouragement to people that, when things were getting tough, there was somebody up there looking out for them. And as Ajaan Suwat responded, “If there were a god who could ordain that if I take a mouthful of food everybody else gets full, I would bow down to that god.”

Basically the Buddha found the way you do it: not through appealing to a god, but by being generous, being virtuous, meditating. You feed off the goodness of these actions, and other people get fed as well. They may not be full—it depends on them how much they appreciate your goodness—but that doesn’t detract from the fact that you are contributing something really good to the world.

So when the Buddha teaches this sort of thing, that’s why we bow down to him.

He teaches us to find a life that really is rewarding all around.