Reimagining Generosity



Growing up, I was not taught how be generous.  It was just not something that I learned. 

To be sure, I was taught many other human virtues that revolved around giving such as: charity, reciprocity, equality, responsibility, and accountability.  But not, generosity.

I don’t think my lack of education on generosity is that unusual though in the white Western world of my background.

I first became aware of my lack of experience with generosity on the last day of my first 5-day Mindfulness Meditation Retreat one year ago at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts.

We were all gathered in the main meditation hall, and silence had already been broken.  Everyone had already cleaned out their rooms, and luggage was packed. We were in the home stretch minus the final talk on Dana, the Eastern spiritual practice of generosity, that many meditation centers maintain for the payment of their meditation teachers.

According to Wikipedia (aka the source of all truth), Dana is:

a Sanskrit and Pali word that connotes the virtue of generosity, charity or giving of alms in Indian philosophies.

However, as I learned the hard way when trying to speak Spanish to a native speaker, the problem with a direct translation from one language to another is it sometimes loses the cultural context for a word, which leaves the larger meaning of the word literally lost in translation.

This is why last May, I so much enjoyed the following definition of Dana or Generosity that was provided by the retreat staff:

It is having joy before, during and after giving.

To which I had to pause right where I was, and think to myself, “Hugh, I don’t think I was taught to do that…”

I thought: “I was not taught to be generous as a means to my own happiness.”

No, growing up I was taught to give and share because it was special, good, moral behavior. 

To be a “good person” you give and share with others, and particularly those less fortunate than you.

But this is not generosity from the eastern perspective.  This is charity from the western perspective.

In doing a little internet research on generosity through the University of Notre Dame I learned that the western use of the word generosity has its historical roots in an understanding that to be generous was to be noble- at first noble in the aristocratic sense, and then noble in the sense of spirit (http://generosityresearch.nd.edu).

The word “generosity” that we inherit and use today entails certain historical associations which may still inform, however faintly, our contemporary cultural sensibilities on the matter. Generosity has not long been viewed as a normal trait or ordinary, or of all people, but rather one expected to be practiced by those of higher quality or greater goodness.

In other words, the emphasis in the western perspective is on the giver herself, generosity as an adjective. In the eastern perspective, the emphasis is arguably on the giving, generosity as a verb. 

I’ll give an example.

Several years ago I was out to brunch with my husband celebrating our wedding anniversary.  The brunch and restaurant were quite nice, and more on the expensive side.

Midway through our meal, our attention was called to an elderly couple sitting close by. 

The couple shared with their waiter that they too were celebrating their wedding anniversary, their 50^th wedding anniversary!  “Wow,” we thought, and then offered a “Congratulations” to them.

Toward the end of our meal though, our attention was again directed to the elderly couple as they were finishing eating and preparing to pay for their meal, and their waiter brought over their bill, but said to the couple, “No need to pay.  Another diner in the restaurant who was sitting nearby heard that it was your 50^th anniversary, and paid for your whole brunch.”

Ahhh, love that story…I still get warm fuzzies every time I re-tell it…

The thing is, until recently, I only conceptualized that experience from my western view of giving.

I saw the anonymous diner as an extra-special “good” person who was worthy of praise and admiration.  I also believed his “good” deed would leave him off the hook for the rest of the year in terms of more giving since it was so “good.”

I never once considered the possibility that the role or function of giving could be to create greater joy and happiness in the giver because even to consider that from a western perspective (or as a hardcore New Englander, a puritanical Christian perspective) leaves you looking selfish and self-centered- more guilt, more shame.

The other pitfall of this western understanding of giving, is the inherent dichotomy it creates.  If there are special “good” moral people who give and share, then there are also more ordinary “bad” selfish people who hoard and stockpile. 

So if you had a moment of giving, it was not joy that was felt- it was righteousness and self-importance.  And if you had a moment of keeping to oneself, it was not neutral or even sadness that was felt- it was shame and guilt.

Joy before, during and after giving…

What would that even look like?

Western Buddhist author and teacher Sharon Salzberg tells us in her book Loving Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness that generosity, or Dana, was thought to be so important in the path of enlightenment that

The Buddha himself always started with new practioners by teaching them dana, the practice of generosity…Generosity has such power because it is characterized by the inner quality of letting go or relinquishing…When we practice generosity, we open to all these liberating qualities simultaneously.  They carry us to a profound knowing of freedom, and they also are the loving expression of that state of freedom. (pg 154-155)

A couple of months ago I posted a blog entitled “Spiritual Democracy: A Cultural Philosophy,” and since that time I have continued to wonder about the qualities or practices that would be necessary to cultivate this type of global reality. It seems to me, one of those qualities may be generosity.

Take, for example, the political and cultural debates going on at this very moment in the United States about the on-going possibility of an antiquated world where an owner of a bakery can refuse to make a cake for a couple based on a religious objection to the fact that the couple is gay.

(Which as a sidebar I must say is grotesquely reminiscent of the Racial Integrity Act of 1925 in the state of Virginia.)

If we stay in the narrow confines of western dichotomy to address these historical moments, then we will continue to only perceive a reality in which to preserve my right you must concede your right or vice versa. 

This dualistic universe of us vs. them, heterosexual people vs. LGBTQ people, white people vs. Black people, white people vs. immigrants, Christians vs. Muslims, will continue to painfully (and sometimes cruelly) lock our democracy in a limited and purely legal view of democracy that always leaves righteous winners and bitter losers. 

But, if we expand our sense of democracy to include the eastern view of generosity in which my own happiness is tied up with your well-being, then it might motivate individuals to embrace the type of wisdom that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used to preach to America:

All I'm saying is this: that all life is inter-related, and somehow we are all tied together. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of all reality (1966).

May it be so.