​Gate 97: Accretion of happiness

Accretion of happiness is a gate of Dharma illumination; for it benefits all living beings.
福聚是法明門、利一切衆生故.

The word translatted “happiness” here can mean blessings, good fortune, good luck or wealth.  It can also be action that leads to good things -- or merit -- so "accretion of happiness" could be read “accumulation of merit.”  Aha -- now it starts to make more sense in a dharma context.

Merit in Japanese is kudoku or in Sanskrit, punya.  It's literally the virtue or power of good deeds, in other words, karmic consequences.  Traditionally, the abstract positioning of this was as a sort of spiritual wealth that you earned and spent.  You accumulated merit through your good actions and then dedicated it to other beings who needed it.  Punya can be thought of as something karmically fruitful -- a wholesome result of a wholesome action by bodhisattvas -- and traditionally it can be accumulated.  Punya skandha is a heap of merit.

However, bodhisattvas transfer that merit to all beings to help with their awakening rather than keeping it for themselves.  The purpose of the ino intoning an eko after we chant a text during a service is to transfer merit.  We’ve generated benefits by our chanting, and the purpose of that is not to keep them for ourselves but to dedicate them to buddhas or ancestors or all beings.

Eko have a standard three-part form, which is good to know when you have to write one for a particular occasion.  You don’t just say any old thing; the eko includes:

1) How the merit was generated: usually, what texts were chanted, for example, "Having chanted the Heart of Great Perfect Wisdom Sutra . . ." 

2) Who’s receiving the merit: for example, "We dedicate the merit of our chanting to the great teacher Shakyamuni Buddha, the great ancestor Eihei Dogen, the eminent ancestor Keizan Jokin, the successive ancestors who transmitted the light of Dharma, and to the eternal Three Treasures in the ten directions." 

3) What we hope for as a result of the transfer of merit: for example, "May the true Dharma flourish in the ten directions, may all nations dwell together in harmony, may peace and tranquility pervade this sangha, and may all beings live together joyfully."

You also can’t chant just any text and then put an eko after it.  It has to be a text that generates merit, generally a sutra or a dharani.  Sometimes in North America, individuals or small groups want to put together a chanting service for themselves, but they don’t understand the arc of that story.  It’s a nice performance, but it’s not Soto Zen liturgy.  Certain things get included and in a certain order for a reason.  Chanting the bodhisattva vows doesn’t generate merit, for instance, and neither does the repentence verse.  Those things have other purposes.

In our morning service here we do the two most common texts, the Heart Sutra and the Daihi Shin Darani.  In the world of Soto Zen, we dedicate the merit of the Heart Sutra to the One Buddha Two Founders (ichibutsu ryoso) (1) and the Daihishu to those who are ill or have died.  In the longer standard service, either the Sandokai or the Hokyozammai is dedicated to the lineage, and there are chapters of the Lotus Sutra dedicated to temple founders and patrons and past abbots.

The point of all that chanting is to serve all beings of past, present and future by generating and sending them merit, and there are teachings that say that this is the way to protect punya or merit.  If the bodhisattva’s intention in accumulating merit is to transfer it to all beings, that’s a selfless intention, and thus the merit is real and is effective for helping others.

There are other things we do in this tradition that generate merit: bathing the baby Buddha during Buddha’s birthday; making offerings on the altar of things like water, light, tea, sweets and food; circumambulating while chanting sutras, particularly memorials; or chanting the names of Buddha, which is not just a Pure Land exercise, because we do it during oryoki meals and on other occasions.

Traditionally, sponsoring the printing of sutras and dharma materials created huge merit.  Supporting the sangha was also powerful because it was a group of bodhisattvas already generating and transfering a lot of merit, and donations helped make that possible.  And yet . . .

There’s famous story in our tradition which I’m sure you’ve heard.  Soon after the first ancestor Bodaidaruma arrived in China, he had an audience with Emperor Wu.  The emperor asked: “I have constructed monasteries, had sutras copied, and allowed the ordination of a great many monks and nuns; surely there is a good deal of merit (kudoku 功德) in this?” 

Bodaidaruma said, “There is no merit (mu kudoku 無功德).” 

The emperor asked, “How can there be no merit?” 

Bodaidaruma replied, “This merit you seek is only the petty reward that humans and devas obtain as the result of deeds that are tainted.  It is like the reflection of a thing which conforms to it in shape but is not the real thing.” 

The emperor asked, “What, then, is true merit?” 

Bodaidaruma replied, “Pure wisdom is marvelous and complete; in its essence it is empty and quiescent. Merit of this sort cannot be sought in this world.”

It’s an illustration of exactly what we were considering.  The emperor did all these things looking for earthly rewards, but because of that, he missed out on the real merit, which you can’t find in this samsaric world of form and separation.  It’s the acts done on basis of emptiness and compassion that are purest and most beneficial acts, and the ones that heap up the most merit.  Wisdom or prajna is an essential part of this thing.  As soon as we realize emptiness, we also realize non-separation.  It’s when we deeply understand and experience non-separation that the transfer of merit really happens.  The ability to share or transfer merit is actually a key characteristic of the bodhisattva.

In the Karandavyuha Sutra, a bodhisattva asks Buddha how much merit Avalokitesvara has accumulated.  He says if you were to provide robes, food, bowls, bedding, seats, medicine and utensils to all the Buddhas and arhats for an unimaginable length of time, that would be the same as the tip of one hair of Avalokitesvara.  Or, if it was raining over the whole world all the time and you were able to count the drops of rain, or if you counted all of the drops of water in all the oceans, each one is less than the merits of Avalokitesvara.  Also if you counted all the hairs on all the four legged animals in the world, or all the leaves on the trees of the forest, it would be less than the merits of Avalokitesvara . . . and it goes on like this.

Avalokitesvara has a lot to work with in saving beings.  The power of his or her practice of wisdom and compassion generates a tremendous amount of merit, which then gets thrown back to beings who need help.

In the broadest sense, of course, there is no such thing as reward or merit and no one who generates it or owns it to give it away, so in a sense it’s given away as soon as it arises and it can’t really "accumulate.”  It’s just jijuyu zammai, the total dynamic functioning of the universe.  

Dogen gives us an example of this when he writes about being the tenzo: " . . . rejoice in your birth into the world, where you are capable of using your body freely to offer food to the Three Treasures: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Samgha. Considering the innumerable possibilities in a timeless universe we have been given a marvelous opportunity. The merit of working as a tenzo will never decay. My sincerest desire that you exhaust all the strength and effort of all your lives - past, present, and future - and every moment of every day into your practice through the work of the tenzo, so that you form a strong connection with the buddhadharma.  To view all things with this attitude is called Joyful Mind."

Earlier in the week at the Wednesday evening book discussion we read this from Katagiri Roshi on giving:
"If we can practice giving in [a selfless way with an understanding of nonseparation], the merit of giving reaches at once to all beings, and all beings are in a position to receive it.  Thus the relationships of practicers and all beings create an endless, agile interconnection and interpenetration.  When we do zazen, we have to cast the pebble into the ocean first.  The ripples caused by this action are forms, the doing of zazen.  'Do zazen' spreads endlessly everywhere just like ripples.  From this aspect zazen as the practice of giving is a great universal activity disclosed in personal practice."

The things we call good deeds done by ourselves are forms completely expressing the emptiness of total dynamic functioning of the universe, so in that way there’s no person or being that can heap up merit separately from other beings.  After we read that in the group, we thought about how the nature of our giving affected someone else’s ability to receive.  Are we giving in a selfless way based on prajna and emptiness, or are we giving based on three poisonous minds in order to get something for ourselves, including a good feeling from helping someone else?  If there’s any stickiness there, there is no reward for us and no merit that we can dedicate to others, so the nature of our giving absolutely affects the potential for receiving.  In that group we also read and discussed Todo-san’s comments on beneficial action:

According to Dogen, beneficial actions will return to those who perform them without any expectation of reward. So here is a paradox: when a person performs a beneficial action without expecting any reward, that person receives some benefit in return for that action. However, if a person helps others with some expectation of a reward, such actions essentially become a means of barter, therefore producing no reward. According to Dogen, actions can be either defiled or pure, depending upon the motivation of the person performing them. If a person performs a generous act without any expectation of personal gain, although rewards for the action are not important to that person, the person does receive a reward. If the person has even the slightest expectation of any reward, however, the action is defiled and the person definitely is not rewarded. What strange logic!

So it’s not enough just to do good acts; as bodhisattvas we have do to them based on seeing with Buddha’s eye, or seeing the true reality of all beings, not just because someone says so or we want to be liked or we want to think of ourselves as good people.  That means it’s important to practice and cultivate wisdom if we’re going to generate merit for all beings.  Otherwise it would be easy to just take the list of precepts and do what it says without a second thought and then say, “There.  Job done.”

However, if I don’t see and understand for myself out of my own direct experience that we are distinct but not separate, I can’t fully generate merit and transfer it to you even if I want to.  I can have good intention and aspiration, but some hindrance will still get in the way, and that’s my delusion.

So how do we use merit to benefit all beings?  We need to talk about the field of merit, or fukuden.  You might not think you know this image or the word fukuden until you think about the robe chant: Great robe of liberation, virtuous field far beyond form and emptiness -- sometimes translated "a formless field of merit," as in the first translation I learned decades ago.  In Japanese, it's dai sai geddapukku, muso fukuden-e.  What is a field of merit?  Whatever receives our gifts or offerings or dedications.  This recipient, whatever it is, is like a field that we cultivate by planting good seeds.  Good karmic actions have a good karmic result, and giving results in merit.

I think another way to consider robe as a field of merit is the teaching that anything we do while wearing a robe is a seed of prajna, so the field is not only the recipient of our dedications but the ground or container of those dedications.  It’s both a cultivation of wisdom and a manifestation of wisdom.

With regard to the robe, field metaphor comes from traditional story in which Buddha needed to create a robe to distinguish his followers from those of other teachers.  He asked Ananda to make a robe using the pattern of the rice field.  For us, the field also represents the day to day world of our activities and responsibiities where we carry out bodhisattva practice.  Unfolding and wearing the Tathatgata’s teachings is what we literally do following the robe verse, but also we carry and share the dharma in the world, making it available to others and embodying practice and teachings, and that generates merit by helping beings to awaken.

But here’s the thing:  the amount of merit depends on the state or condition of the field in which the seeds are planted.  The greater the worthiness of the recipient, the greater the merit, just like seeds planted in fertile field yield more crops than seeds planted in poor soil.  There are writings in the canon that say that if a bodhisattva is asked to give up his life for another being, he/she/they have to decide whether the recipient has as much compassion as he does, and whether giving up his life will enable the recipient to save more beings than he could.  

The two richest fields of merit are the Buddha and the sangha.  Giving to them is supposed to generate the most merit, again because the Buddha and practitioners who follow his teachings are actively maintaining precepts, sitting, and cultivating wisdom, the three parts of the Eightfold Path.  If you give to Buddha and monks, you get a share of the merit they generate because you’re helping to make it possible.

One other way that the sangha is a huge field of merit has to do with ango or practice period.  When a sangha practices together during the three months of the retreat, it’s supposed to generate a mighty supernatural power because of the vast store of merit it’s accumulated with sustained intensive practice by all these practitioners.  Then all that merit can be used to save hungry ghosts in hell realms who are so far gone they can’t be reached any other way.

Within the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition, some folks dedicate merit at the end of their period of sitting.  Someone who tried it said it changed her attitude and the quality of her sitting.  It stopped being about her and started being about sitting with and for all beings.  It might be interesting to try in our own personal practice.  Maybe you'd like to come up with a one or two line dedication verse of your own to say silently as you  get ready to stand up.

Notes:
(1) See on our Buddhist Essentials page: Two founders and two head temples

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