Gratitude

Close your eyes and watch your breath. Watch it all the way in, all the way out. And again, each time it comes in, each time it goes out. Stay with the breath as much as you can, as consistently as you can. Because consistency is an important quality we need to have in life. If you’re not consistent in doing good, it becomes difficult for you to get good results consistently. We all want a consistent happiness, so we have to make sure that the causes are right.

And it’s good that we’ve received these teachings because it’s so easy to look at the world and see that people who do evil can get good results, and the people who do good get bad results.

But that’s looking in the short term. Over the long term, if you act on good intentions, you’re going to get good results. If you act on unskillful intentions, you get bad results. It’s good that we have this teaching to give us guidance. Otherwise, it would take us a long time to figure things out like this.

This is why you have to stop and think that the fact that we live a human life, and there’s goodness in human life, comes from the goodness that other people have done for us. They’ve gone out of their way—our parents, our teachers, a line of parents and teachers going way back. We’ve got the Buddha as our ultimate teacher to point out the way. And we have our parents to have us give a sense of right and wrong. So it’s good that we reflect on that—how much we owe to our parents, how much we owe to the people who’ve helped us, realizing that this is what made our human life a good place to be.

So how do you repay them? Well, one, the Buddha said, with your parents, it’s hard to repay your parents. You could carry them around on your shoulders all your life, feeding them, wiping off their urine, excrement, from your shoulders, and still that wouldn’t be repaying them for the fact that they’ve given you life. As for your teachers, they’ve gone way out of their way to teach you what’s right and what’s wrong.

The best way to repay them, on the one hand, the Buddha said—if your parents are not generous people—if that you try to set a good example, so that they become more generous. If they’re not virtuous, you try to set a good example so that they become more virtuous. Of course, you know it’s hard for parents to learn lessons from their children, so you have to be very diplomatic in how you do this. But it is an important lesson that this is the best way to repay our parents.

Then you think about who’s coming after you. You want to set a good example for them, as well. This way, the goodness of your parents, the goodness of your teachers, doesn’t die with you. It has a longer life as you try to set a good example and you try to be helpful to other people.

So think of the fact that you’re born into this world, and you come with debts: debts to people who have given you life and, as you grow up, debts to the people who’ve taught you. The best way to repay those debts is to take their lessons to heart and set a good example, to pass those lessons on to others. This way, goodness gets maintained in the human world and doesn’t die.

We see what happens around us when people forget what’s really good, what’s really right. We start getting more greedy. We start getting more angry. Society breaks down because of simple things like this. So whether your parents were wealthy or not, whether they were well educated or not, doesn’t matter. The fact that they gave you life and taught you goodness should inspire you to pass the goodness along to others. And it doesn’t have to be just your children—anybody whom you can help.

It’s in this way that human life becomes a more pleasant place to be, a more inspiring place to be. If you looked around and saw that people were just greedy, greedy, greedy all the time, it wouldn’t be a good world to live in. It’d be a very depressing world. It’s because of the goodness that we do that makes this a good place. And you realize that goodness may not come naturally. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort, a lot of sacrifice.

This is why the Buddha said when you see someone who’s grateful, you realize it’s the sign of a good person, because they realize what goodness is and what its value is—and that it’s worth the effort that goes into it to maintain that tradition of goodness for people who come after us. So you benefit, and the people who come after you benefit as well. In this way, you repay your debts by making sure that goodness continues its long life into the world.