In the kitchen you are faced with a pile of dirty pots and pans. It was you who emptied the bin last time, the time before that, and in fact it always seems to be you who empties the rubbish. The kids have left a trail of toys and crumbs all over the house and your partner sits, apparently oblivious to the fact that you are living in a pig- sty! You are beginning to feel distinctly taken advantage of. Any of this sound familiar? Well, whose turn is it anyway?

Living as I do, in a Buddhist community with five other men I have come to recognize a number of common reactions to these situations.

One response is the taking of our bat and ball and stomping off home. The task we have become aware of is left incomplete and we go off in a huff. But here we have lost on two fronts; firstly we continue living in the "pig-sty", and secondly we carry around resentment that has built up in relation to it. Not good!

Another response is to play the martyr - we mutter under our breath that they never bother doing the dishes, and then we set about clattering the pots angrily, crashing the Hoover into the furniture, and half hoping someone will come in and witness us doing the chores again! With this approach we do ourselves no favors either - we create more tension and unhappiness while doing the activity in such a state; most likely we will do it badly, and anyone who does happen to see us will only experience our irritability and touchiness rather than think we are genuinely being helpful.

There are, of course, creative ways of responding when a problem like this has arisen. Perhaps the simplest solution is to ask for some help. It sounds straight forward enough, but when our perspective has already begun to narrow and our energy become blocked, it can be remarkably difficult to reveal that we need help. If we can be aware that our mental state is slipping into negativity, we can resolve to discuss any feelings of resentment when an opportunity arises. Thus, having created some mental space, we can decide more objectively whether to do the task at hand or not.

But still the question hangs - whose turn is it anyway? I believe the question itself, set against the true spirit of generosity is flawed. In Buddhism we have the concept of giving unconditionally. This means to give with no thought of what one may receive. It means to no longer give as part of a barter system, to no longer catalogue, compare and tally ones acts of generosity in relation to others. (Of course certain social and domestic arrangements are maintained through a fare-share, "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" kind of system, and this is only effective if consciously set up, with explicit parameters clearly agreed upon by all parties.) But in the light of the Buddhist ideal of generosity as practiced by the Bodhisattva, the question of whose turn it is, evaporates.

But how can we make any use of this lofty ideal in our everyday dealings with others? Surely if we are not taking it in turns to give, if we can never sit back satisfied having done our fair-share, and any kind of reciprocity is an irrelevance - why should we bother to give? What do we get out of it? If not just for social and domestic convenience, why be generous? Even if our motivation for giving is pure, we can't even expect to receive thanks. (Perhaps we do get a degree of contentment knowing we have done "good works", but this is a limited satisfaction that will eventually crumble when we recognize there is no grateful God waiting to reward us. Similarly Buddhists can have the idea of a "Pure-Land" or a good re-birth as their motivation for doing good deeds holding to the idea that they are storing up merit to exchange at a later date. But here again we have slipped back into a limited, tit-for-tat approach to life.)

So how do we move toward the ideal? On a simple level we can consider that practicing generosity, dana, helps us undermine greed, thirst, trsna; the Second Noble Truth, the fundamental cause of all our suffering. But what is the Buddhist vision of the Perfection of Generosity?

The Buddha tells us that when we think of generosity in terms of a giver and a receiver, we miss the mark. We create a subject doing the giving and an object on the receiving end of the gift. At a certain level, when we give, we are habitually constructing a "self " that has paid out, and we will therefore at some point experience "other" as owing. But according to the Buddha's, the Enlightened ones, this is ultimately a wrong view, a delusion, a misinterpretation of the way things are.

"Tied by three ties he gives a gift.
Which three?
A perception of self, a perception of others,
a perception of the gift."

The Diamond Sutra states that generosity is only perfected when the sense of subject and object is no longer cluttering up the act.

Here we might feel like throwing in the towel and going back to looking after number one again! But perhaps at times we do get a glimpse of something beyond. There are those rare moments when our thoughts, concepts and rationalizations are quieted and we find ourselves moved to be generous through a sense that it is "right", that it is what this universe has designed us for. Occasionally we witness selfless action and we resonate positively with it, we admire it, we respond with faith.

We are capable of seeing that others happiness is our happiness, that to rejoice in someone's qualities is to reach out and touch their heart and at the same time open our own. Our awareness can expand such that it perceives "property" as the impermanent flow of the universe, and that to let go and go forth from possessiveness is to have a sense of abundance and freedom. We can develop an attitude that is constantly transferring up and giving out appropriately from a clear comprehension of what is most needed in any given moment.

A note of caution though. We are not turning ourselves into "transcendental doormats" i.e. people who habitually do everything in order to feel spiritual, and who then end up stressed and ineffectual. We must have a clear sense of boundaries and be able to recognize when our limit has been reached. Not that we can't stretch out into the zone where giving "hurts" but positive mental states need to be maintained as far as possible.

"The practice of Dana must be done in the spirit of Wisdom"
"Dana must be conjoined with Wisdom."

The above quote suggests we must imbue our practice of giving with awareness. It means we must become clear about our motives and try to move towards acts of generosity that are fueled less by an experience of separateness and more by inter-connectedness, that we need to be motivated less by theory and ideas and give more as a natural expression of our compassion and loving kindness for all beings. Ideally as a Buddhist I practice in order to loosen my fixed ego identity, and ultimately to transcend the distinction between self and other, subject and object. So any situation in which I find myself closing down and hardening into a fixed subject that feels he's been unjustly treated by an ungrateful object, can be an opportunity to break old, habitual patterns and awaken to something more in line with reality, an opportunity to let go, to reflect on the nature of my experience, and to take responsibility for it. Then I may be able to contact a deeper, more intuitive side of myself. I may begin to see the world as a mythic play-ground with abundant opportunity to give and give and give and give and give, endlessly, unconditionally, until eventually every act of body, speech and mind is a gift of the Dharma.