Merit

Merit

§ One of Ajaan Fuang’s students reports that the first time she met him, he asked her, “Where do you usually go to make merit?” She answered that she had helped sponsor a Buddha image at that temple and contributed to a crematorium at this temple, etc. So he asked further: “Why haven’t you made merit at your heart?”

§ Once Ajaan Fuang had one of his students cut away some of the grass and weeds that were threatening to overgrow the monastery. She didn’t really want to do the work, though, and all the while as she was cutting away she kept asking herself, “What kind of karma did I do that I have to work so hard like this?” When she had finished, he told her, “Well, you got some merit, but not very much.”

“What? After all that work, I still didn’t get very much?”

“If you want your full measure of merit, the merit has to go all the way to your heart.”

§ There’s another story involving grass. One day Ajaan Fuang pointed out the overgrown grass near his hut and asked the same woman, “Don’t you want the grass at the corral gate?”

“What do you mean, grass at the corral gate?”

“The opportunity to make merit right nearby that everyone else overlooks. That’s called ‘grass at the corral gate.’”

§ Another time, Ajaan Fuang took some of his Bangkok students up the hill to clean the area around the chedi. They found a large pile of trash that someone had thrown away up there, and one of the group complained, “How could anyone be so disrespectful as to do something like this?” But Ajaan Fuang told her, “Don’t criticize whoever did it. If they hadn’t thrown the trash here, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to earn the merit that comes from cleaning it up.”

§ One day, after Ajaan Fuang’s name had appeared in a magazine article, a group of three men from Bangkok took a day off from work to drive to Rayong and pay their respects to him. After bowing down and then chatting for a while, one of them said, “Our country still has monks who practice rightly and well so that we can ask to have a share of their paramis, isn’t that true, Than Phaw?”

“It’s true,” he answered, “but if we keep asking for a share of their paramis without developing any of our own, they’ll see that we’re simply beggars and they won’t want to share with us any more.”

§ A woman in the town of Samut Prakaan, just outside of Bangkok, sent word through one of Ajaan Fuang’s students that she’d like to donate a large sum of money to help build the Buddha image at Wat Dhammasathit, but she wanted him to come to her home to give a blessing as she handed over the check. He refused to go, saying, “If people want merit, they have to go looking for it. They can’t expect the merit to come looking for them.”

§ Another woman once telephoned the main office at Wat Makut, saying that she was going to provide a meal for monks at her house and wanted to invite Ajaan Fuang to the meal because she had heard that he was a Noble Disciple. When the invitation was conveyed to him, he refused it, saying, “Is her rice so special that only Noble Disciples can get to eat it?”

§ One of Ajaan Fuang’s students told him that she’d like to do something special to make merit on her birthday. He replied, “Why does it have to be on your birthday? Do you get less merit if you do it any other day? If you want to make merit, go ahead and do it on the day the thought occurs to you. Don’t wait for your birthday, because your deathday may get to you first.”

§ Referring to people who didn’t like to meditate but were happy to help with the construction work at the wat, Ajaan Fuang once said, “Light merit doesn’t register with them, so you have to find some really heavy merit for them to make. That’s the only way to keep them satisfied.”

§ Shortly after the chedi was finished, a group of Ajaan Fuang’s students were sitting and admiring it, taking joy in all the merit in store for them because they had had a hand in building it. Ajaan Fuang happened to walk by and overhear what they were saying, and so he commented, as if to no one in particular, “Don’t get attached to material things. When you make merit, don’t get attached to the merit. If you let yourself get carried away, thinking ‘I built this chedi with my own hands,’ watch out. If you happened to die right now, all you’d be able to think would be, ‘This chedi is mine, it’s mine.’ Instead of being reborn in heaven with everyone else, you’d be reborn as a hungry ghost to guard over the chedi for a week or so because your heart was fixated on material things.”

§ “If, when you do good, you get stuck on your goodness, you’ll never get free. Wherever you’re stuck, that’s where there’s becoming and birth.”

§ There is an old tradition in Buddhism — based on the Apadana tales — that whenever you make a gift to the religion or perform some other meritorious deed, you should dedicate the merit of the deed to a particular goal. There were times when Ajaan Fuang would tell his students to make similar dedications every time they meditated, although the dedication he’d recommend would depend on the individual. Sometimes he’d recommend the dedication King Asoka made at the end of his life: “In my future lives may I have sovereignty over the mind.”

Other times he’d say, “There’s no need to make any long, drawn-out dedications. Tell yourself: If I have to be reborn, may I always encounter the Buddha’s teachings.”

But it wasn’t always the case that he would recommend such dedications. Once a woman told him that when she made merit she couldn’t think of any particular goal to dedicate the merit towards. He told her, “If the mind is full, there’s no need to make any dedication if you don’t want to. It’s like eating. Whether or not you express a wish to get full, if you keep on eating, there’s no way you can help but get full.”