Determining Merit

When you meditate, it counts as a meritorious activity. Like right now, you’re focusing on the breath, watching the breath coming in, going out. Then again and again and again, trying to stay right here, trying to develop some consistency in your mind. It’s a good thing to do.

The more consistent you can be in sticking to good intentions, the better your life will be as a whole. This is why we practice generosity, why we practice virtue, why we meditate: to learn how to be consistently good. Then the power of that goodness will come back to us, and it helps people around us as well.

The ajaans talk a lot about making a determination when you do goodness, so that you don’t just fritter your merit away. For instance, for a lot of people, when they’re being generous, what they think about is, “May I be wealthy in the future.”

There was a time when I was in India with a group of Thais. We were going to the different Buddhist holy spots. We stopped off in Savatthi and went to Jetavana. There they have the foundations of what they claim to be specific huts: the hut where the Buddha lived, the hut where Venerable Ananda, Venerable Sariputta, Moggallana, and the other famous disciples of the Buddha had their huts.

And the leader of the group would take us around to each hut, and there would be a determination. For instance, with Sariputta, who was known for his wisdom, we would make a determination: May we have wisdom in our future lifetimes. With Moggallana and his psychic powers: May we have psychic powers. We finally got to two huts that were right next to each other, Mahakassapa on one hand and Subhuti on the other. Mahakassapa is the better known of the two in the West. His outstanding characteristic was his asceticism and his concentration. As for Subhuti, his outstanding characteristic was that, among the Buddha’s disciples, he was the one who tended to get the most gifts from lay people.

The monk leading us in our determinations had a very short, short, short determination for Mahakassapa and a very long one in front of Subhuti’s, about all the splendors of the wealth that would come from our generosity.

But that’s not necessarily a good thing—wealth, power, beauty—things that we value in the world, because if you don’t have any discernment, they can turn around and bite you. So when you get good things like that, you want to have the wisdom to use them well.

This is why, when the Buddha talked about determinations in the practice, the things he said to determine on were not wealth, power, beauty, or influence. He said those are good things. But the things to make as a serious determination were: one, discernment, so that whatever good things you get, you learn how to use them well. Use them in a way that is for your long-term happiness and not just for the short term.

Then you want to determine on truthfulness so that you really learn how to depend on yourself. When you make up your mind to do something good, you do it. If you can’t depend on yourself, then who knows what’s going to happen with your future lifetimes—even your future in this lifetime. So you want to learn how to make yourself a trustworthy person.

Then there’s the quality of relinquishment: the fact that when you get something good, you share it. That extends it out many, many times.

There was a riddle I heard one time in Thailand: How do you catch a fish and get to eat it all year? And the answer is, you share it with other people, and then they’ll be willing to share with you as they get things in the course of the year. So your generosity, your willingness to relinquish, should be something you don’t just sit there and hope that you’ll get lots in return. You should hope that you continue to be generous with whatever you’ve got.

And finally, calm: A lot of people with power and wealth just don’t have enough. But when you realize you’ve got plenty—you’ve got more than you need—then you can focus on calming the mind because that’s where your real wealth is going to lie.

So if you can determine on these things, then the goodness you’ve done will be aimed at a good purpose. It really will be conducive to long-term welfare and happiness. Otherwise, we gain things in life and then we lose them. And we gain them again; we lose them again—again and again and again—up and down, up and down, up and down. So you want to make a determination that whatever good things you’ve got, you’ll learn how to use them well so that you keep on going up, up, up, and finally reach the peace of mind, the calm of mind, that the Buddha said was the highest goal possible. That’s when your goodness is really safe.