Giving

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Whatever word you use for giving, it divides into material and Dhamma, and the second is the better.

Ten words, one division

The variation is entirely lexical: dāna (gift), yāga (offering), cāga (generosity), pariccāga (charity), bhoga (riches), bhoga as enjoyment, saṁvibhāga (sharing), saṅgaha (inclusion), anuggaha (support), anukampā (sympathy). Sujato renders each differently, and the English shows the range: the Pāli has words for giving that cover worship, hospitality, material wealth, and compassion.

The point of the enumeration is that the division applies to all of them. There is no kind of giving to which the material/Dhamma distinction does not apply — not even sympathy, which one might have thought was not a transfer of anything at all.

What is not being said

The verdict is unqualified, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not claim. It says the Dhamma version of each of these is better. It does not say the material version is worthless, or unnecessary, or that a person who gives food is doing something spiritually inferior in a way that should discourage them.

The rest of the collection makes this plain. Anāthapiṇḍika is named foremost as a donor of material things; the chapter of foremost laypeople is heavily weighted toward material support; and AN 2.2 called the lay endeavor of providing robes, almsfood, lodgings, and medicine challenging, not trivial. The ranking here is a ranking, not a dismissal.

It is also worth noting the direction of the traffic. In a monastic economy the material gift flows from laypeople to monastics and the Dhamma gift flows back. Read in that context, this chapter is not telling donors that their giving is second-rate; it is telling the recipients what they owe in return, and setting the value of that return above what they received.

What the East Asian tradition made of it

The formula 法施 — the gift of Dharma — against 財施, the gift of goods, becomes standard across Chinese Buddhism, and is often extended into a threefold list with 無畏施, the gift of fearlessness. That extension is not in this chapter; the Pāli here has two terms, not three.

The slogan also tends to travel without the qualification. Used carelessly it can license a monastic or a teacher to treat material support as the lesser thing while continuing to receive it, which is precisely the posture AN 2.48 named as the assembly that values things of the flesh. Reading this chapter beside that one keeps both honest.

Sympathy, the last entry

The final pair — sympathy in things of the flesh and sympathy in the teaching — is the one that repays most thought, because it is the least obviously a form of giving.

Material sympathy is what one feels and does about somebody’s hunger, illness, or poverty. Dhamma sympathy is what one feels and does about the cause of their suffering rather than its present shape. The chapter ranks the second higher without denying the first, and the honest tension is obvious: a person who responds to hunger with a teaching has misread the situation, and the canon elsewhere is entirely clear that you feed people first. What the ranking claims is about the ceiling, not about the order of operations.

Key terms