Gender Equality and What Does it Mean to Truly Make Merit?

To Buddhists merit is understood to be the good fortune that is bestowed upon a person for making good action. It is believed that giving alms to a monk produces good merit. The belief in receiving merit in return for giving alms, to a monk, is essential to the relationship between the laity and monastic life.
Alms giving is a traditional Buddhist practice, where a lay person supports monasticism by donating food, clothes, money, or a myriad of other goods to a monk, nun or monastic community. Receiving alms is essential to the existence of monastic life. Without receiving alms from the laity, it would be impossible for monastics to renounce their household lives and perform rituals; this is the significance of alms giving.
Because monastics are dependent on the laity, the laity has immense influence over who within the monastic community has the most richness and power. It is said that the higher up in the monastic hierarchy a monk is, the greater merit they are capable of dispensing in return for an offering from the laity. It is also said that the less objective a lay person is when dispensing alms, the more merit they will receive. Given the integrity of this position on giving alms, it makes little sense that lay people make most of their offerings to monks that are high up in the monastic hierarchy. This fact suggests that there is a hidden objective to receive merit behind the lay peoples offerings, which may discount the amount of merit they receive from their offering.
This fact that most of the time alms are given with receiving merit as a motive and not given without expectation of merit is made especially obvious when looking at the amount of alms nuns are given in comparison to the amount of alms monks are given. If people are giving alms out of the goodness of their hearts with no hidden motive to receive merit, then why do nuns have to work so hard to receive any form of donation to their monastic communities.
If the laity was really giving alms based of the trust that they will receive merit because of their selflessness and willingness to donate freely instead of based on the notion that they will receive more merit for donating to a monastic person that is of a high position in the monastic hierarchy, one would think that the nuns would be doing much better off than they currently are.
Does anyone disagree and think that people are donating out of the purity of their heart? And therefore receiving full merit even if there donation was to a nun or lower ranking monk?
Any thoughts on this topic?

Gutschow, Kim. Being a Buddhist Nun the Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2004. Print.

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2 Responses to Gender Equality and What Does it Mean to Truly Make Merit?

  1. mkaur says:

    I think that a strong sense of purity and goodness is probably more closely tied to achieving merit than I can possible understand, as someone who does not practice Buddhism. It seems that unless lay people truly believe that receiving merit is key to their universal truth which in turn is usually bound to purity they would not be so staunch in giving alms to monks. Perhaps they do not view it as greed, but rather as duty and goodness to themselves.

  2. Cecely says:

    I think some people definitely are donating out of the purity of their heart. The real question is how many people do that vs. how many people donate with the receipt of merit in mind. I think the problem is that the vast majority of people who donate do so while trying to receive the most merit or the most prestigious merit rather than just giving for the sake of giving. It is so hard to fix the natural greed or the natural give and take mentality that some people have, the best way to fix this problem is just to make the nun’s blessing equally prestigious as the merits and blessings given by monks.

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