Buddhist and Stoic Lessons on Giving, Connecting, and Happiness (Even Beyond the Holidays)
The art of meaningful gifts
As a child, an idea I didn’t understand was that someone could enjoy giving as much as receiving. The reason we do, Buddhist and Stoic philosophy teach, is that it is the connection we forge through gifts that brings happiness — not the items themselves.
Many of us learn this lesson through disillusionment. When I was 8 years old, I wanted a radio-controlled car. My fantasy was to race it behind our house in a dirt field with friends. Initially, I was overjoyed unwrapping the toy, but after an hour I was bored.
The reason? What I really wanted was recognition for winning races. Instead, I now had the task of building a track in the dirt and the logistical problems of coordinating friends to race their cars.
In academic jargon, I had fallen prey to affective forecasting bias.
When we imagine what we want in the future, we are usually pretty good at identifying what might clash. Most of us know that tuna flavored frozen yogurt isn’t going to be good without trying it.
Where we go wrong is in thinking about the context. We leave out all of the details that will be needed, such as all the work that would be required to build a race car track. And we put in details that won’t necessarily be there, such as a crowd of adoring fans.
The other side of receiving is giving. One reason Buddhists and Stoics insist on its practice for a good — a happy — life is that reliably bestows something positive, namely a connection with another person.
Of course, there are bad ways to give, ways that tie you to what is unimportant and impermanent, as the Buddhists note, and ways that only strengthen your desire for praise, as the Stoics caution.
So there is an art to delivering meaningful gifts.
It makes up part of the broader ethics of living well because it meaningfully connects us to other people and sustains their (and our) development. At least, that’s my philosophical claim.
Practically, my purpose is to provide you with two different, but complementary, approaches to giving well. They are practices that, while useful during the holidays, are really better suited to use throughout your life.
Let’s start with the broader ethical picture about giving to situate the practices.
The Ethics of Giving
For the past four years, I have taught a philosophy class called “Learning by Giving” where the task is to give away $10,000 to local charities. The money is sourced from the Learning by Giving Foundation, part of the network of such foundations giving away Warren Buffett’s billions, and a community foundation.
This last year was particularly difficult since COVID-induced shutdowns made the students choose whether to fund a food bank, or an after school childcare camp, or an educational center focused on students with learning disabilities.
The first option represented immediate needs for the poor. The second solved an immediate problem for working-class parents trying to make ends meet. The final option represented a long term solution to a community problem.
Which would you choose? How would you divide the funds? They all wanted $5,000.
This is the sort of dilemma philosophers often address, but it is, importantly, one that happens through institutions. In practice, when the activity is institutionally based, the answer tends to have institutional reasons.
The students, for example, decided by using their mission for the class as a “grantmaking” foundation. Their mission was to help the health and education of the community, so they chose the first and last of these (with some differences in the details).
Personal giving requires a different approach.
Stoic Giving
Seneca the Younger (1 BCE — 65 CE) was a Stoic philosopher in the Roman empire and the ill-fated tutor of Emperor Nero. In one of his longer letters, entitled “On the Happy Life,” he addresses the topic of giving well.
You could condense his reasoning in this way. What is of real value in a human life is how you conduct yourself — whether or not you are virtuous. Everything else is indifferent relative to that. Still, among those things that are indifferent, some are clearly to be preferred.
The main thing to be preferred is that our world should improve, which is why Stoics were involved in politics. But improvement requires money. So it’s preferable to have money rather than not. It’s also preferable to make others better through gifts. In Seneca’s words:
And so [the good person] will possess wealth, but with the knowledge that it is fickle and likely to fly away and …. he will give of it either to the good or those to whom he will be able to make good (23.4–5, translations are mine).
The trick in all of this is to act wisely or discerningly (with consilio in Latin), so that you improve (or edify) the other person.
Buddhist Giving
The Buddhist approach to giving also builds a connection with another person through edification. The difference is that it gives away — in the ideal case — without a sense of aiming to own things at all.
To explain, let me take a step back.
Buddhism is a vast tradition with many different forms. For this topic, I think Śāntideva’s (7th-8th century CE) Bodhicaryāvatāra proves appropriate. This is an immensely popular text in Tibet and the Dalai Lama describes it as his favorite work. There is also an important commentary in the Tibetan tradition that I’ll follow, namely Sonam Tsemo’s (from around 1100 CE).
Śāntideva was a Mahāyāna Buddhist, meaning that he sought both an Awakening Mind, a bodhicitta in Sanskrit, and to remain in the cycle of existence for the sake of helping others.
Tradition has it that while a student, Śāntideva was called a “bhusuku,” which is a Sanskrit acronym derived from words meaning “eat,” “sleep,” and “defecate.” In short, his classmates thought he was useless. The monks called on him to recite a text in an upcoming religious festival in order to teach him a lesson. When they asked him for something new, he began to recite the Bodhicaryāvatāra (BCA hereafter).
The core metaphysical view expressed in the work turns on the counterintuitive claim that there is nothing in the universe that has “intrinsic existence” (svabhāva). This is a complicated discussion that puzzles scholars since it entails that your sense of self is false.
A core ethical view follows from this point. For one with a mind that has been awakened to this truth must support it through the cultivation of virtues called perfections.
There are six of these perfections but in the BCA the Perfection of Generosity is distributed through the discussion of the other five. In his most direct discussion, Śāntideva states:
It is taught that the perfection of giving
is the intention to give to all beings
all of one’s possessions (BCA 5.10).
Unlike the Stoic approach which seeks to give discerningly, this Buddhist approach seeks to give with abandon.
This idea can be given a positive frame: transformation follows if you give without proportion. That is the path that follows when barriers between self and other are taken to be mere constructs. I know that sounds a bit incredible, but I will explain below.
Right now, what we have are two practices for giving, useful for two different contexts. Let’s approach each of them in turn.
Practice 1: Stoic Edification
The Stoic ideal for giving to people that we know is that we should give in order to help them be better people and live better lives. In Seneca’s words,
Whoever believes that giving is an easy matter errs. Provided that gifts are made discerningly and not scattered haphazardly and impetuously, it is a matter of great difficulty (On The Happy Life, 24.1).
In many ways, this is like the process my Learning by Giving students undertake, but the relationship is personal rather than institutional.
To give in this way you need to ask three questions:
- What resources do I have available?
- What would really help the other person?
- What are they ready to receive?
The first two are just like giving to charities, but the third point only matters when you are hoping to help a human being.
I think I can explain using a gift I received from Reynerio Tamayo, a Cuban artist.
In 2016, I was part of a delegation from my university to set up a student exchange program with the University of Havana when I traveled to Cuba. Mostly, I was the translator. At a certain point, after meeting the appropriate officials, our group visited Tamayo’s painting studio.
He welcomed us in and allowed us to walk around. We also asked about his work. It’s a whimsical mix of surrealism and cultural commentary. He has one painting, for example, of the Mona Lisa with a red Nike swoosh where her mouth is.
Our group clicked with him and we all posed for photographs with the up and coming star. Then, when we were set to depart, he told us that he wanted to give us a gift to remember our encounter. So he took out a set of prints from his backroom which featured the Statue of Liberty wearing an “I heart Cuba” T-shirt.
We laughed and tried to decline. It was too much already. But he insisted. Then he addressed each print to each member of the group individually, there were six of us, and signed the prints.
He did not ask us to think well of Cuba or anyone. It was only a gesture in solidarity and he thought we could receive it as such.
When I returned home, I purchased a nice frame and hung the print in my home office. My university president told me he did the same thing with his print.
The result was edifying. The prints continue to bring our group together and changed our outlook on a country with which the United States has had difficulty.
This is what Seneca means by giving in a way that edifies by understanding who will be receiving it. The practice is also not quite so deep-reaching as the Buddhist approach.
Practice 2: Buddhist Transformation
While the Stoic practice of giving aims to help a person grow, the Buddhist practice aims to help someone transform.
Just before explaining the goal of the Perfection of Generosity, Śāntideva considers an objection.
If the Perfection of Generosity
means the dispelling of the poverty of beings,
then how did the earlier protectors perfect it,
while still being poor? (BCA 5.9)
To explain, Sonam Tsemo comments: “This [statement] refutes the claim that one completes giving by external actions.” He elaborates to argue that real giving doesn’t follow external proportions, which is why the old masters were still (externally) poor. But neither does real giving exhaust itself in the intention of the agent. Its real perfection consists in transformation.
I think I can explain with a story that Marcus Luttrell recalls. He received the Navy Cross for his service as a Navy Seal in the events that make up Lone Survivor — the book and movie.
In 2005, his four-man reconnaissance team was ambushed in Afghanistan and he alone survived. Grievously wounded, he crawled for miles, falling in and out of consciousness, until he reached a few buildings in a town. There Mohammad Gulab and his family took him in and nursed him back to health.
But Taliban troops came looking for Marcus, so the family hid him. Then they moved him. And then hid him again. And they continued to do this, risking their lives each time, until Luttrell was well enough to be extracted.
Speaking at a convention years later (I was in the audience), Luttrell characterized the experience by saying that he was overwhelmed by the family’s generosity. Before that event, he thought of all Islamic followers as beneath him. Afterward, he could only hope to make good for having been so wrong.
The point about Gulab’s gift is that it lacked all proportion. It asked nothing and gave far too much. Who could ask a stranger to risk their life and family, repeatedly, for a man who might be their enemy?
The cognitive dissonance that the event provoked in Luttrell transformed him as a human being. It broke down the sense of division he had in mind before and so transformed his view of the region.
This is, at least, an inkling of Śāntideva’s perfection of generosity. Giving in the right way transforms for the better and so draws our human community together.
Giving Well and Living Well
The holidays are often an occasion to give to the ones that we love. Most of us aim to give them something that will bring a smile to their face. The warm feeling of connection that follows forms part of the basis for any good relationship.
The art of giving well is thus part of the art of living well.
A difficulty, however, lurks beneath the surface: do recipients really want what they think they want? Will they be disillusioned if they get it?
The social psychologist Dan Gilbert and his team discovered one way to figure out if you would really like what you want: ask people in your social network who have had a similar experience. If you use a “surrogate” to approximate your experience, evidence shows that you will reliably improve your estimation of how much you will actually enjoy the thing.
Want to know if you really will like having that new car? Ask a friend in your broader peer group. What about that trip abroad? Ask a friend. Eating a new brand of ice cream? Ask a friend for that too.
Of course, the basic problem with achieving happiness extends beyond getting what we want. That’s why neither Buddhist nor Stoic philosophy advocates simply giving that to other people.
The art of giving well thus involves meaningful action.
Meaningful gifts help a person along; they help (1) to edify another person and (2) to transform them. Stoicism helps us with the first of these tasks, Buddhism with the latter.
When I decided, as a child, to start building the race car track behind my house, I invited my friends over. To my parents’ amazement, we spent more time building the track than racing the cars after it was finished.
What we all enjoyed was the idea of the race, the creativity involved in building something, and the time spent together. The race car did make me happy, then, but not for the reasons I anticipated or in the way I had envisioned. It became a Stoic gift of edification.
What a philosophical approach to giving does is lay out a path to achieve those sorts of meaningful results in a way that isn’t haphazard. I’ll leave you, then, with a final quote from Seneca on that point.
The person who has practiced philosophy as a cure for the self becomes great of soul, filled with confidence, invincible — and greater as you draw near (Moral Letters, 111.2).
Thank you for reading and I hope you learned something.
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Sebastian Purcell’s research specializes in world comparative philosophy, especially as these ancient traditions teach us how to lead happier, richer lives. He lives with his wife, a fellow philosopher, and their three cats in upstate New York.