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Practicing With the Dana Bowl

From Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia
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By Stephen Sloan


About two years ago I was asked to hold up the dana bowl on Tuesday nights. Dana is the Sanskrit word for generosity. The dana bowl is where contributions for Aryaloka may be placed. While I was never told why I was chosen for this task, I accepted it as something I was trying to do to help out.


Generosity is an important concept in Buddhism. It is said that when the Buddha came to a new place, generosity was the first practice he taught. One of the most important considerations in practicing generosity is the state of mind of the giver. It can be very easy to give for the wrong reason. Looking back I can


see that, initially, giving my time to hold up the dana bowl may not have been for the most skillful reasons. Perhaps I saw standing up on Tuesday nights as some sort of recognition of the depth of my Buddhist practice. There was more than just a little bit of ego involved.


Of course ego can have its way of sticking out a foot to trip us as we try to follow the path of the Dharma. For while I may have craved the recognition, I also feared making myself look foolish in front of the Tuesday night crowd. For the first six months, I had a set script that I repeated every week. This afforded me a bit of protection, I wasn’t likely to slip up if I said the same thing each week. It was one of those screens that the ego sets up to keep us apart from others.


One day someone parroted my speech back to me, and I knew things would have to change. It was time for me to come out from behind the mask and practice generosity with more skillful motivation. I decided that I would try to offer something back as part of each of my presentations Tuesday nights. This would take the form of some piece of dharma that I would read.


The transition wasn’t easy. At first, I would write everything down and read it to avoid the opportunity for slipping up. The ego was still whispering in my ear: “What are you doing?” As I went along, I realized that reading the message wasn’t going far enough. I had to learn to share myself, to share my practice of generosity.


These days, I offer a short dharma reading and frequently some reflection. I’m working on opening my heart and really connecting with the people I’m talking to. I try to maintain compassion and increasing metta as the motivations for my actions.

Mostly I’m grateful for the opportunity that my Tuesday night activities with the dana bowl offer me to work on my practice of generosity.


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