The Merit of Pure Offerings

You wouldn’t take a bite out of an apple before you put it on the altar, would you? So why smell flowers or incense as well? In terms of sense gratification, it is the same thing.

We must keep our offerings pure by keeping our motivation pure, resisting the temptation to indulge in sense pleasures at the same time.

For instance, if you wish to cover up some bad smell in your space, you light some incense, then think “I will put it on the Buddhist altar at the same time as an offering.” Now you have a tainted motivation. Your original motivation is not offerings, but performing some action to make you feel more comfortable.

We must think in terms of lifetimes of accumulating merit. One way of doing this is making pure offerings. We already live in a reality that is dominated by sense pleasures and gross thought patterns.

If someone says “But I am the Buddha too, so why shouldn’t I enjoy the offerings as well?” By this reasoning, everything you do should accumulate merit. This is obviously not the case, since we have lifetimes of self indulgence that has created our delusional state of mind.

Everything in our life is about the mind, or stems from the mind. Everything.

If we remain mindful, our actions are pure, our motivation is pure, and we resist the urge to follow the habitual pattern of stimulating out senses, and rationalizing along the way that ‘by just smelling the flower before the offering takes nothing away from the flower, and is therefore harmless or benign.’

This is the kind of pure thinking and motivation that creates merit. If we diligently hold the Big Question of Life and Death in the forefront of our mind, we will always diminish our selfishness and see something that is much bigger than our individuality.

Thousands of dollars given with ulterior motives of gaining a good reputation, high social status, sense gratification, or some other worldly benefit garnishes zero merit, and only increases our sense of separateness, reinforcing our obstacles to Awakening.

The smallest offering made selflessly accumulates an immeasurable amount of merit and good karma.

A piece of dirt sincerely offered is priceless.