Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;The Unsupported Practice of Generosityand#8221; is an inspiring excerpt from the third in a sparkling, wide-ranging, thoroughly comprehensive ten talk series by Padmavajra on and#8216;The Diamond Sutraand#8216; given at Padmaloka Retreat Centre, 2004.
This talk is part of the series and#8220;The Diamond Sutra and#8211; Taking Mind to its Limits.and#8221;
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. So the Diamond Sutra is telling us to aim our supported dependent practice at unsupported practice. Unsupported generosity, unsupported meditation, unsupported ethics and so on. A generosity of spiritual life that is independent of, unsupported by sense experience and mental constructions. The Bodhisattva will use sense experience, will use things, but he'll not be defined and limited by them. Of course, he has to use things. He has to use the medium of sense experience. He has to use ideas in a way he has to use the notions of self and other to communicate with people. But he's not going to be defined and limited by them. So the generosity, the practice, goes on and on. It goes on when there is no reason for it to go on. When everybody else is saying, you can't carry on giving. You can't carry on living in this way. You can't do that. Where everybody else would think you're crazy to do it. It goes on even if the body is in pain, even if it's broken. It goes on through illness, goes on however others treat you, whether they block you, abuse you or just change. Or if there's just the impermanence of things. The generosity, the practice, the path the Bodhisattva's life goes on. The best example in Buddhist literature that I know of this is the account of the Buddha's last days. Really extraordinary. I mean, when you read the sutra, the Sutra, the Mahaparini Banasata, you can see that what is communicated is in tremendous pain. He's in his eighties. He's suffering from the ravages of old age. He's very, very sick with chronic dysentery, with appalling back pain. He's really suffering severe illness. He's completely broken and beaten up. And when you read the Paranivana Sutra, don't have an idea that the Buddha's walking around like it's depicted in tankers. I mean, you'll see that, you know, the Buddha's Paranivana. And he looks just the same as he did when he was in line. Well, it would not have been like that. He would have been this old man, you know, completely bashed up and beaten up. But he carries on walking, carries on teaching, carries on glowing with the Dharma. There's just unconditioned, unsupported generosity, generosity undefined by sense experience. This kind of generosity doesn't even think in terms of being generous. There's no self, there's no other, there's no thing given. There's just the unforced flow, the natural flow. Perhaps generosity is not quite the right word. And perhaps we don't even have a word for what Dharma Paramita, the perfection of generosity is. Because in the first place you wouldn't be thinking in terms of ownership. So I don't think we really have a word for Dharma Paramita. Perhaps Dharma Paramita is the word. Perhaps by way of approaching it would be something like the notion of sharing, but not in the sense of dividing things up. But in the sense of an abundance, just which isn't yours, which you're in touch with, which you, as it were, put people in touch with. That sounds very weak. Lin Chi says to practice giving is to give everything away. This means to give up perceptions of self being life and fixed soul. Practice of giving involves giving up your sense of a fixed and separate self. So I think we can see from this that giving then is not an elementary practice at all. Like Meta, it's the beginnings of wisdom. If you really go into giving in its fullness, you arrive at the perfection of wisdom. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [music fades out] [music fades out] [BLANK_AUDIO]
