All Sentient Beings Rely on Food to Survive
(Dharma Notes #1)
This is the first of a series of a biweekly newsletter that will go along with my biweekly updates about new translations. In this newsletter, called Dharma Notes, I want to spend time on some of the translations that have already been published in the past four years with a focus on certain Dharma topics that are found in them.
Sabbe sattā āhāraṭṭhitikā. (DN 33)
一切眾生皆仰食存。(DĀ 9)
All sentient beings rely on food to survive.
This is Maryetta. She is an Eastern Fox Squirrel, one of the two most common kinds of tree squirrels in North America. She’s about a year old and visits us every day. I believe she is probably pregnant, so she is eating for more than one. Here she’s asking me for a pecan. Which she got, no worries about that! She checked it for cracks, made sure it wasn’t spoiled, and hopped off to store it somewhere for the future.
This is Maryetta caching a hazelnut last summer. She was just getting out into the world as an independent squirrel then. Squirrels leave the nest only halfway to full maturity.
Squirrels are intelligent animals, and they know to get the most they can from a good thing, like finding a generous human in the middle of a place like Los Angeles. They know how to watch for traffic before crossing the street or walk across the wires humans string up on telephone poles when there are too many cars. In short, they know how to survive in a world that has more humans than trees.
Every day, we’re visited by around a half dozen squirrels and several dozen birds who partake of the food we leave out for them every morning. Not all the squirrels trust us enough to approach like Maryetta does, but there are three or four discerning squirrels who understand the difference between a friendly human and an unfriendly one.
Nearly two years ago, back in April of 2023, I translated a short sūtra from the Ekottarika Āgama in which Anāthapiṇḍada expresses my own feeling about animals (cf. EĀ 10.5). When he visited, the Buddha asked him,
“How are you, wealthy man? Has your rich family continued to give to the needy?”
To which he replied,
“Yes, Bhagavān. We continue to give to the needy. We distribute gifts at the city’s four gates, and I also provide what they need from my home.
“Bhagavān, sometimes I think, ‘I’d like to be generous to the likes of wild birds, pigs, and dogs.’ But I don’t have this thought, ‘I should give to them,’ or ‘I shouldn’t give to them.’ Nor do I have the thought, ‘I should give more to them,’ or ‘I should give less to them.’ I always think, ‘All sentient beings depend on food to continue to live. With food, they survive. Without food, they die.’”
The Buddha proceeded to praise his generosity, likening it to a bodhisattva’s heart, which would seems to be a reference to the pāramitā practices described in the Jataka stories.
I immediately recognized the statement “all sentient beings depend on food to survive” from the Saṅgiti Sūtra (DĀ 9 and DN 33). It was the very first topic in the numerically recited list of topics having one to ten items each. And it is one of the topics all the extant versions of the Saṅgiti Sūtra have in common with each other. It’s clearly an old teaching from early Buddhism, but when I investigated it in Theravāda suttas, it seemed quite obscure, only appearing in a couple other places without much purpose.
It turns out that this expression occurs in five EĀ sūtras, and several are in a similar context of a prominent layman expressing a feeling of universal generosity.
EĀ 23.4 is a parallel to SN 3.19. In this sutta, King Prasenajit (P. Pasenadi) visits the Buddha and reports that a wealthy miser had passed away childless and his entire fortune was transferred to the royal treasury. He laments how this miser had not spent his wealth on either himself or his family and lived like an impoverished householder. The Buddha agrees and likens an unspent fortune to a lotus pond that no one visits and enjoys. A genuine person doesn’t behave like this: Instead, they are generous with their excess wealth, making themselves, their families, their workers, and the community as a whole more comfortable.
EĀ 23.4 contains this content that we find in SN 3.19, but it adds more to it. The King, for instance, asks the Buddha where the miser was reborn. The Buddha replies that he was born in the Great Hell of Beings Crying Out because he had cut his roots of goodness. The King asked,
“That wealthy man cut his good roots?”
To which the Buddha responds,
“Yes. The merits he had made before came to an end, and he didn’t make any new merits.”
The King doesn’t believe this and asks,
“Didn’t that wealthy man have some merits left?”
The Buddha replies,
“None, Great King. He did not have even a hair’s worth remaining. He was like a farmer’s family that harvests but doesn’t plant seed, and then afterward they are impoverished and eventually die. Why is that? Because they only ate their harvest and didn’t work to make a new one. That wealthy man was likewise. He only ate his previous merits and didn’t make new merits. Tonight, that wealthy man is sitting in the Hell of Crying Out.”
At this point, the Buddha relates for the King a previous life story about the wealthy miser to explain this fate. During the time of the Buddha Kāśyapa, he had been a wealthy farmer who gave a meal to a pratyeka buddha who came soliciting alms after the Buddha had passed away. Upon seeing the pratyeka buddha fly away, he marveled at such miraculous abilities. He vowed to always make the merits necessary to be born among the wealthy families of Śrāvastī. But after making this vow to himself, he then had the thought that he would rather give food to his own workers than to one of those bald-headed ascetics again. In this way, the inspiration he had felt was defeated by this prejudice.
King Prasenajit responds by saying,
“From this day forward, I will be broadly generous with ascetics, brahmins, and the four divisions of the saṅgha. Whoever comes from those other religions and trainings with requests, I won’t be able to give it to them.”
The Buddha chides the King against this type of discrimination:
“Great King, don’t think that. And why? All sentient beings survive because of food. Without food, they will die.”
EĀ 48.5 is another sūtra that contains the same expression. It does not seem to have a direct parallel with a sutta in Pali. The wealthy laymen Siṃha (P. Sīha) invites five hundred of the Buddha’s disciple including Rāhula to a meal. Afterward, Rāhula visits the Buddha and relates to him that he had gone to the meal.
The Buddha asks him what sort of meal Siṃha served, how many disciples had attended, and who was the most senior of them. Rāhula relates that the food was very good and there was plenty of it. There were five hundred disciples there, and Śāriputra was the most senior of them.
The Buddha then advises Rāhula that the merit that Siṃha has made is immeasurably large. Just inviting a single arhat to a meal makes a large amount of merit. How could the merit of serving five hundred be measured? Someone trying to measure it would be like someone trying to drink a river or an ocean, which is of course an impossible task. The Buddha then tells Rāhula that such merits are made when serving ten kinds of people: Those headed for or who had become a stream enterer, a once returner, a non-returner, or an arhat, and a pratyeka buddha or a buddha.
Word gets back to the layman Siṃha that the Buddha had praised giving meals to the noble saṅgha but not to other people. Siṃha visits the Buddha and tells him that going forward he would give only to the noble saṅgha and not to other people. The Buddha quickly corrects him, saying that he had only mentioned how large or small a gift to one person or another would be, not that one shouldn’t give to other people or animals. He concludes: “I do not teach that people should give to the noble saṅgha but not to others.”
Siṃha agrees not to pick and choose who he invites to meals. Afterward, when Siṃha wanted to do something to make merit, gods would come to him and inform him who was headed for stream entry or who had attained it. They would tell him that giving this gift would make more merit, and giving that gift would make less merit. Siṃha, however, remained silent and didn’t respond to them. They would tell him about people who kept the precepts, were once returners, non-returners, or arhats, and so forth, and Siṃha would still stay silent and not respond to them. The reason was that he kept in mind the Buddha’s instruction not to pick and choose who to give gifts.
Later, Siṃha visited the Buddha again and related to him how the gods had kept pointing out noble people to give gifts, how giving to one person would make more merit than another. He concludes:
“But again, I had the thought, ‘But wouldn’t that go against the Tathāgata’s instruction? How could I think of picking and choosing my gifts? I will never go against that thought by considering what is high or low.’ And then I also thought, ‘I will give to all sorts of sentient beings. You might keep the precepts yourself and receive merits without end, or you might break the precepts and receive misfortune for it, but I will have mercy on sentient beings that won’t survive if they don’t eat.’”
The Buddha praises Siṃha’s sentiment and again relates it to the attitude of a bodhisattva who doesn’t think, “This one should get alms; this one shouldn’t get alms.” He doesn’t consider whether people keep precepts or not, and so forth. Someone with such an equitable focus on generosity obtains measureless merits throughout the long night.
These three sūtras show that, for the tradition of EĀ, the sentiment “all sentient beings rely on food to survive” was the rationale for giving without regard to the relative merits of giving to one sentient being or another. The story of Siṃha definitely shows an attempt to steer the laity away from thinking of generosity as an exercise in making as much merit as possible and towards cultivating generosity as a general attitude. It was also a rationale for combating the type of sectarianism that sought to deprive other religions of charity and keeping it only to one’s own religion.
As for myself, I feel a little better about giving Maryetta the pecan she comes asking me for every morning. Or about giving to the beggars I see in front of the local grocer. If everyone gave evenly, society would be a better place. Not a perfect place, but a better one.
Take care, everyone!