The Six Paramitas - Generosity
David Oromith · 32 minutes · recorded January 15, 2023
In this visualisation we walk through an ordinary day and imagine bringing generosity into it: giving materially, giving time or expertise, offering a kind word. David opens a six week series on the paramitas with the first, generosity, describing three kinds, material giving, sharing the dharma, and offering fearlessness to those who are afraid, and why true generosity means being willing to give up what we are actually attached to, not just what we no longer want.
These Six Paramitas are often translated as the six perfections, but the Sanskrit term paramita does not really mean to perfect. It means to transcend. You cannot really perfect giving. What would that even look like? It is more that your giving goes beyond the ordinary, beyond the norm. These are six important mental states that we should develop. They are not meant to be a nice list we look at and think it would be lovely to cultivate those. They are advice for daily life, and they are meant to be brought into daily life. They enable us to avoid problems in the first place, to solve the problems that do come up, and to reduce and remove some of those disturbing mental afflictions: attachment, aversion, anger and so on. They empower us to be our best self, to give our best to others, and to help others. Generosity is the first of them, and it is not only about giving material things, though it includes that. It is a mental state, one in which you are willing to give up what you are attached to. It is the mind overcoming attachment, because it is easy to give away what you do not want. You might clear out old things and find them easy to give away, but that is not really the mind of giving, because it is not what you care about. Here is the stuff I am attached to, and you can have all the rest. Real generosity is willing to give up those things too. One teacher, I think it was Gelek Rinpoche, once said that you should be able to give even with that little tinge of "I kind of wanted that". So it is a willingness to give to others in need. Give material help if you can, and if you cannot, give your time and your expertise. We could donate to a charity, offer our time to a charity, or offer time to our teachers, our friends and our family. People have been practising the Buddha's teachings for 2,600 years in places of real poverty, where there may have been nothing to give, and that is no problem, because what we are cultivating is a mental state. In meditation we c
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