11 January 2004: Make merit and spend it wisely

The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast Archives

Buddhist Hour
Radio Broadcast on Hillside 88.0 FM
Broadcast 311 for Sunday 11 January 2004

This script is entitled: Make merit and spend it wisely

Charles Churchill once wrote: "Where he falls short 'tis nature's fault alone; where he succeeds the merit's all his own".

Merit is the fuel of life. Merit it is what you establish by benefiting others.

Merit is the accumulated kamma of the good deeds you have done with body, speech and mind.

By practising what is good you improve yourself.

Venerable Master Hsuan Hua wrote the following:

"Fish leap in the water;
People clamor in the world.
They don't know enough to do virtuous deeds,
But create bad karma callously.

You may pile up gold and silver high as a mountain,
But when you close your eyes, it's all gone.
Empty-handed you go to see King Yama,
And regretfully you let your tears fall. "
If one has not the merit they are unable to get what they wish for.

Merit is like wealth (money) - it can be used to gain external internal wealth and internal development. It can be used for what ever purpose you wish for.

Did you receive a printed statement in the mail this week detailing your monthly expenditure and accumulation of merit, and giving the balance?

Was it accompanied by a glossy brochure telling you what goodies you could redeem your points for?

Merit is the fuel that drives Buddha Dhamma practice.

Life is short.

In order to get the most out of your merit, you must guard its accumulation and expenditure with care.

It is notable that any good action leads to merit and virtue, and its accumulation. The difference is in the level. Good actions performed with sincerity and no thought of giver, receiver or gift accrue boundless virtues which lead to rebirth outside the realm of birth and death.

Conversely, good actions performed without sincerity, for gain or fame, lead to merit 'with outflows', for example, limited and within samsara, the world.

Tainted merit accumulated within one's current lifetime may lead to rebirth within the human realm, in a position of wealth, power and authority, but what then.

Since power tends to corrupt, the individual may then create evil karma, resulting in retribution in the next lifetime. Therefore merits with these outflows are considered deluded.

In general, we as Buddhists, should gradually do merit as far as we can. Our merit will be accumulated just like scooping up water from a sandy place bit by bit, and as a result we can fill up the water container. Since our alms in noble, we should decide to do merit with a well-practiced monk. If we do it wholeheartedly, this will make us happy.

Last week, on Friday 9 January 2003 our members had the opportunity to welcome four monks to our Centre: Venerable Dhammadharo, Venerable and four other Venerables to our centre.

Members practiced wholesome actions such as the offering of tea, flowers, Buddha Dhamma texts and incense to the Venerable Sangha Members.

During this visit the Venerables gave a Dhamma discourse on the four truths.

The truth can only be obtained by experience.

No amount of philosophy can give you liberation.

The four noble truths are the basic of the teachings.

The four noble truths are:

1)There is suffering. This does not mean that there is only suffering in this world.
2)That there is a cause of the suffering.
3)The cessation of suffering and
4)The path leading to the cessation of suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path.

The Venerables also shared their experience of meditation but emphasised the need to actually practice the meditation.

After the Dhamma discourse Venerable Dhammadharo guided meditation in the John D. Hughes Meditation Hall.

By listening to the Dhamma and practising Buddhist meditation our Members were involved in wholesome and meritorious actions.

Is your merit budget healthy?

Last year our resident practitioner Anita Hughes cared full-time at home for our Teacher the late John D. Hughes, Founder of our Centre.

At this time John D. and Anita M Hughes had the merit to receive the services of a variety of healthcare professionals, including a speech therapist and a physiotherapist, who visited John regularly to assist with his rehabilitation following his serious illness this year.

One of the services offered at the expense of Australia's public health care system was that of a nurse to stay overnight once each week, to enable Anita to have a night's rest.

Anita and John decided not to accept on this offer due to the amount of merit it would consume. In dollar terms this service provided to pensioners costs the public $500.

Having a life plan allows you to monitor your merit.

Would you build a house without a plan?

Would you build a life without a plan?

One Member recently updated her life plan on her birthday in August.

Now, when she makes merit, she dedicates all of her merit to her life plan. This prevents leakage of any of the merit 'small change'.

Merit can be generated by association, for example recitation of the Buddha's name, like the use of a koan in Zen, is a panacea (a cure-all) to destroy the poison of false thinking… the practitioner by association absorbs some of the merit of the Buddha himself.

To maximise the merit from your good actions consider the guidelines given by Venerable Phra Ajaan Plien Panyapatipo's book "How to Get Good Results from doing merit":

To perform virtue in a fruitful way you will perform virtue:

1)in the right place
2)for the right person
3)at the right time

Merit can come from strong practice as well as other good works and deeds.

A Sonnet written by Alex Serrano for John D. Hughes' Birth Anniversary 1998 reads:

These pressures around about endanger me,
A little fish in a very big ocean,
Pressures with the pretext of veracity,
Beauty and power its own persuasion,
Like a little carp swimming up the stream,
Nothing too bold or sparkling to speak of,
Polite and quiet to a fault I seem
As I return to the peaceful places I love,
And grow more silent and more circumspect,
Become more determined and tenacious,
Even as the world shows me more disrespect
Than I have earned. Here I am loquacious,
But in other places I am as dumb as a fish,
And deaf, only by my teacher's words admonished.

Make Merit! Make Merit! Make Merit!

Alex Serrano also penned In Praise of John Hughes, Dhamma Teacher Composed by on the occasion of Founder’s Day 9 September 2003. It reads:

If we are comfortable with Life, and reconciled to our passing from Life, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we are unperplexed, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we are worthy of responsibility and praise, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we are sane, and free from irrational fears, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we are patient in difficulty, and persist in doing what is good, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we are tolerant of our limitations, and accept the limitations of others, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we can perceive, and enjoy, that which is truly beautiful in this world, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we love without regret, and rejoice in others’ achievements, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we can feed ourselves, and possess the means to feed ourselves again, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we trust in our intellects to grow in knowledge and wisdom through dint of effort, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we recognise vanity or willfulness in any of our own, or others’ actions, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we have indefatigable energy, akin to a country stream winding its way to the parent ocean, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we recognise the most precious aspects of our own persons, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we become daily more handsome and pleasant in appearance, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we become more comfortable both in mind and body, with each passing day, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we can communicate clearly and directly, without resorting to convoluted expressions, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we have abandoned perplexed thinking, and employ workable reason, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we see hope where once we saw hopelessness, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we protect our knowledge where once we debased its currency among the ignorant, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we esteem our parents, tolerating their limitations as we recognize our own, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we adapt to change as the colour of the ocean does to that of the sky, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we apply flexible solutions to intractable problems, eschewing dogmatism and embracing opportunity, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we are free from addiction to negative emotional or intellectual states, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we become happier with each passing day of each passing year, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If our determination becomes more and more thoroughgoing and well founded, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we can understand the paths to wealth and happiness, and those which conversely lead to indigence and unhappiness, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we can understand that to be human means to impact in many ways the lives of others, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we understand that actions bring about their natural results as effectively as a wheel mark follows a wheel, it is because our Teacher guides us.

If we understand why nations develop and become powerful, and why they decay and become weak, it is because our Teacher guides us.

We praise the day we first met our Teacher.

We praise the day we can learn from our Teacher.

We praise the day we can practice the Buddha Dhamma.

Sadhu!
Sadhu!
Sadhu!

Without doubt, we know this much to be true. If persons keep drawing from their merit bank without putting something back, they cannot hold human rebirth.

What happens when the person has enough merit to be born human, to find a Buddha Dhamma Teacher and the set of conditions and environment favourable to learning and practice of Buddha Dhamma?

They still need the volition to wish to learn. They must have the will to choose to put their merit into learning the Buddha Dhamma to see for themselves.

Human birth has the property of being precious in that, in human birth one can make a lot of merit by doing good deeds, and in human birth one can know that suffering in pali 'dukha' exists - poverty, sickness, death, old age and the changing nature of the world in Pali 'annica'.

Because of the law of cause and effect as taught by the Buddha - that every action performed by body, speech and mind generates a future effect, the idea is, that by doing good deeds (for example lending a helping hand, keeping morality, giving things to others) one will accumulate merit and better conditions for oneself in the future.

In human birth one can accumulate merit and the ability to discern the truth for oneself by their intellect.

It is only in human birth that one is able to see 'dukha' - suffering and pain.

Human birth is very rare and this fact escapes most human beings. It takes an enormous amount of merit to even make it as a human. To be in a position take advantage of this rare opportunity is uncommon among human beings.

This lost window of opportunity results in the being leaving human birth, in most cases, without even being able to wonder what happened, exiting to a lower birth to continue in the round of samsara.

Let us suppose this same individual had enough merit to be able to take advantage of this rare occurrence.

To refine this notion further, to have enough merit to come in contact with persons holding the qualities and merit to be taught the Buddha Dharma is a rare jewel.

What is this notion of merit and its relationship to the idea of what it means to be human?

To put the teachings of the Buddha into practice will get us out of suffering, this is the aim of the Buddha’s teachings.

Only human beings and certain Devas have the opportunity to follow the Buddha’s way to end suffering for themselves.

It is merit which fuels the learning process required to ‘calm the mind and discern the real’ so as to find the way out of suffering through your own effort and experience.

The accumulation of merit is what allows Students to advance in their practice and become aware of the many levels of thinking, which is one of the characteristics that distinguishes them from beings living at lower levels.

Animals, for example, cannot be taught Buddha Dharma because their minds can only go up to first order knowledge. But in order to understand the Dharma a being needs to be able to think in 2nd order thought or better.

In fact, if we want to learn the teachings of the Buddha, we have to abandon 1st order knowledge completely.

The limitation of 1st order thinking, where the individual operates in metaphors and simplistic phrases, lacking a cognitive structure that permits comparative judgement between alternative abstractions, or any other intellectual assessment, means that a first order thinker will attempt wherever possible to reduce the description of reality to glib ‘one liners’.

Practicing the Buddha Dhamma is wholesome so you can accumulate merit reflecting on the eightfold path.

In Nagarjuna’s Seventy Stanzas - ‘A Buddhist Psychology of Emptiness’, there is a quote from T. Stcherbatsky’s Buddhist Logic that states:

Reality according to Buddhists is kinetic, not static, but logic, on the other hand, imagines a reality stabilised in concepts and names.

The ultimate aim of Buddhist logic is to explain the relation between a moving reality and the static constructions of thought.

First order thinkers mistakenly attempt to define reality by vacillating between memory of the past and projection into the future, without directly perceiving the present.

All negative actions were made with unwholesome minds. Stop using unwholesome minds and start using wholesome minds.

You may not know what a wholesome mind looks like but Buddha Dhamma teachers know.

If you do not make merit and practice Buddha Dhamma this life then the price is the endless cycle of birth, death, birth, death.

If you look for pleasant even if you found pleasant you just burn your merit for what purpose.

You have got to stop saying you know how to do it. You have no idea how to do it. If you did you would be Arahat. So follow your Teacher's instructions.

You have to know for yourself that you are practising, that you are keeping the five precepts.

The amount of merit you have is what fuels your development of wholesome minds and practice.

That is why the Teacher is always saying make merit, it clears your mind. When you hear an instruction, merit will help you.

No-one has ever died from too much merit.

To have a human birth with suitable conditions took a massive amount of good actions.

We revisit the quote from Venerable Master Hsuan Hua:

"Fish leap in the water;
People clamor in the world.
They don't know enough to do virtuous deeds,
But create bad karma callously.

You may pile up gold and silver high as a mountain,
But when you close your eyes, it's all gone.
Empty-handed you go to see King Yama,
And regretfully you let your tears fall."
If one has not the merit they are unable to get what they wish for.

May you realise the need for accumulating merit.

May you have the merit to find what makes you truly happy.

May you spend your merit wisely.

We thank the Devas and Devatas of Learning for their help in and guidance with the writing of this script.

This script was written and edited by the Buddhist Hour Radio team: Julian Bamford, Simon Bates, Leanne Eames, Evelin Halls, Anita Hughes, Lisa Nelson and Pennie White.

May you be well and happy.

References

Seekers Glossary of Buddhism, 1998, The Corporate Body of the Buddha Educational Foundation, 2nd Edition, Taiwan, pp. 372-373.

Panyapatipo, Phra Ajaan Plien (2000) How to get good results from doing merit, Second Edition, Wat Aranyawiwake (Baan Pong), Intakhin, Maetaeng, Chiangmai, Thailand.

www.gbm-online.com, accessed 1/9/03.

www.bdcublessings.net.au/radio50.html, accessed 7/9/03

Abhidhamma Class Papers online www.bdcublessings.net.au

Charles Churchill cited The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 1979, 3rd Edition, Verse 15, p. 149.

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