Mundane right view "there is what is given" implies free will and human worth beyond this body

"“There is what is given.” This sounds perfectly obvious, but it had a special meaning in the time of the Buddha. For millennia, the brahmans had been preaching about the virtue of giving, especially when things were given to brahmans. In the texts of old brahmanical ceremonies for making merit for the dead, for example, there’s a part of the ceremony where the brahmans will address the bereaved and say, “We are speaking in the voice of your dead relatives: ‘Give to the brahmans!’” When the bereaved gave to the brahmans, the brahmans — again assuming the voice of the dead relatives — said, “Give more!”

You can imagine the reaction that eventually developed. Over the centuries, there sprang up schools of contemplatives who said, in reaction, that there is no virtue in giving. One of their arguments was that people do not have free will, therefore even when they give things, it doesn’t mean anything because they had no choice in the matter. Another argument against the merit of giving was that when people die, that’s the end, there’s nothing left over, so there’s no virtue in giving to something that will eventually die and be totally annihilated.

So when the Buddha was saying that there is what is given, he was basically saying two things. One is that we have free will. We have the choice of giving or not giving, so there is virtue in giving. Two, he was saying that there is something more to the human being than just the body. There’s something that goes beyond the body. When you give to a human being — or to any being, in fact — you’re giving something to someone who has worth.

An important point in the Buddhist approach to giving is that the Buddha never said to give only to Buddhists. Instead, he said, “Give wherever you feel inspired or you think the gift would be well used.” So by affirming the fact that “there is what is given,” the Buddha was affirming one of the basic social virtues, because “giving” here includes not only giving material things, but also more immaterial things. You give of your time, you give of your energy, you give of your knowledge, you can give of your forgiveness, you can give the gift of the Dhamma. It’s through these gifts that human life becomes worthwhile and human society becomes helpful for everyone within it."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Meditation on Kamma"

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