Giving needs to be practiced and developed because our underlying tendency toward attachment, aversion, and confusion so often interferes with a truly selfless act of generosity. An act of giving is of most benefit when one gives something of value, carefully, with one’s own hand, while showing respect, and with a view that something wholesome will come of it. The same is true when one gives out of faith, respectfully, at the right time, with a generous heart, and without causing denigration.
Launched in September 2009, Aotearoa Buddhist Education Trust has received donations from a small number of people in the first three months, but the extent of the generosity has been both truly heart warming and surprising. We’re aware it will take time for the wider dharma community to become aware of the fact that ABET exists, to see value in the work of the trust, and decide to support it. What has been given, though, has taken the trustees by surprise.
“To embrace dukkha is to fully embrace the suffering of the world. When the Buddha talks of the path, the whole business beginning with fully knowing dukkha, it’s also an injunction to compassion. When we begin to be more attuned to the tragic nature of our own existence, when we begin to wear down the rigidity of our selfcentredness, that has the effect of making us more empathetically open to the far, far greater suffering that is going on all around us; in others, in the environment.”