Practices
Merit-making (punya)
Devotional Practices
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Origin 400 BCE to 200 CE
Merit-making is the wide field of everyday Buddhist practice aimed at generating punna, wholesome karmic fruit, through giving, moral conduct and mental cultivation. Its commonest forms are giving to monastics and monasteries, supporting the ordination of a son, feeding monks, releasing captive animals, sponsoring the copying of texts and the building of shrines, and taking part in festivals. Merit made can also be shared: the practice of dedicating or transferring merit to others, above all to dead relatives, is central to Buddhist funerary and ancestral observance.
For most lay Buddhists across history, merit-making rather than meditation has been the substance of religious life, and it is a mistake, common in Western presentations that foreground meditation, to treat it as peripheral. It is the ordinary economy of the good life within samsara, undertaken in the hope of a better rebirth and a favourable footing for the long path.
Facts
Practice
Category of PracticeDevotional and ethical: generating wholesome karmic fruit through giving, moral conduct and mental cultivation, the ordinary substance of lay religious life rather than a peripheral practice. 1 Who Performs It ObligationRecommended and meritorious, not required 1Tradition: Buddhism FrequencyAs the occasion requires 1 Solitary or CommunalPerformed alone or together 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionFor most lay Buddhists across history merit making rather than meditation has been the substance of religious life, and Western presentations that foreground meditation and treat merit making as peripheral are mistaken on this point. 1 Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 2 Attributions
TraditionBuddhism, especially the Theravada traditions of Southeast Asia. 1 Origins
Origin Period Place of OriginRooted in the Buddha's own teaching on karma and rebirth. Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteWestern presentations of Buddhism that foreground meditation commonly treat merit-making as peripheral, which the historical record does not support: for most lay Buddhists across history it, rather than meditation, has been the substance of religious life. 1 Learn More
Making Merit
Merit-making is one of the most pervasive activities of lay Buddhist life, especially in the Theravada societies of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Punya (Pali punna), merit, is the positive karmic force generated by wholesome deeds, understood to bring good fortune in this life and favourable circumstances in future rebirths, and ultimately to support progress toward liberation. Where the arduous meditative path to awakening is followed fully by relatively few, the accumulation of merit through generosity, ethical conduct and devotion is the everyday religion of the many, and the framework within which most Buddhists relate their present efforts to their future welfare.
The classic sources set out three bases of merit-making, giving, moral discipline, and mental cultivation, and later lists expand these to ten, adding such acts as showing respect, offering service, sharing merit with others, rejoicing in others' merit, teaching and listening to the teaching. Of these, giving is the most visible and the most emphasised in popular practice.
The Economy of Giving and the Transfer of Merit
In practice, merit-making centres on the relationship between the lay community and the monastic order. Laypeople give food to monks on their morning alms round, support monasteries, sponsor ordinations, fund the building and repair of temples and images, and offer robes at the annual kathina ceremony after the rains retreat. The monastic community, by preserving and embodying the discipline and the teaching, is regarded as a "field of merit" in which such gifts bear the richest fruit, and the exchange, material support flowing to the monks, merit and teaching flowing to the laity, sustains Buddhist society.
A distinctive and important feature is the transfer or sharing of merit: the merit generated by a good deed can be dedicated to others, most commonly to deceased relatives, so that they may benefit from it. This practice, prominent at funerals and memorials, knits the living and the dead into the moral economy of merit and answers the natural wish to help those who have died. Scholars note that it sits in some tension with the strict doctrine that each being reaps only its own karma, a tension the tradition has reconciled in various ways.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
1. Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo
Richard Gombrich, Routledge, 2006On merit and lay Buddhist lifeView the Source 2. An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices, 2nd edition
Peter Harvey, Cambridge University Press, 2013On merit, giving and the transfer of meritView the Source Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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