การวัดผลของทานไม่ได้วัดที่ปริมาณวัตถุ แต่วัดที่สามารถขจัดความตระหนี่ออกจากใจได้มากน้อยเพียงใด ทานที่ประกอบด้วยจาคะคือการสละมลทินออกจากใจ จะทำให้ท่อทางแห่งบุญกว้างขวาง ดึงดูดสมบัติได้มากThe measure of a gift is never the quantity given, but how much stinginess it manages to uproot from the heart. Giving accompanied by genuine relinquishment widens the channel through which merit flows, drawing far greater resources back to the giver.
A gift given with faith, however small, can still bring great benefit. A gift given well, offered with a heart full of confidence toward one who is pure, can bring one's aspirations to fulfillment in wondrous ways. Giving has the power to transform a life's course, turning the poorest of the poor into a great magnate. To measure whether someone has given much or little, or given with more or less faith, is never a matter of the quantity donated — it is measured entirely by how much that person has managed to root out of their own heart.
Why stinginess must be overcome through relinquishment
Stinginess is a stain that keeps people from being able to let go of their wealth — a genuinely difficult thing to overcome, and it must be uprooted through jāgā, true relinquishment. Some people give, yet without genuine relinquishment — they give, but the heart has not truly let go of its stinginess — and the fruit of that gift is small. But whoever gives together with real relinquishment, casting a great deal of stain from the heart, reaps great merit: that orb of merit shines bright and pure, and the channel through which merit flows grows wide and generous. Stinginess does the opposite — it narrows that channel further and further, the heart grows tight and small, and resources find it hard to flow through at all.
Training to uproot stinginess means trying to give more than we're used to — if we usually give 100, try 200, 300, 500. Notice, after giving, the feeling of having overcome stinginess itself. Don't calculate it as a bargain — thinking, for instance, that helping someone in need earns less merit than giving to monks, and so refusing to help the needy. That habit will follow us into every future life. If instead we give to everyone who comes to us in need — a little when we have little, more when we have more — without expecting anything back, giving generously so they can be free of suffering, we earn the privilege of asking that in every life to come, we never suffer from lack of wealth.
How does giving connect to right view?
Giving, observing precepts, and meditating are all ultimately aimed at correcting our view to match reality, straightening it into right view. Each day, then, we need the wisdom to watch for who is in trouble, and act quickly to help — because helping others is helping ourselves, just as causing others trouble is causing ourselves trouble, following exactly.