So this evening Thanksgiving Eve, we get to share in the reflection on generosity, which

has been in the Buddhist tradition is described as the first spiritual perfection, meaning that

the cultivation of generosity helps to awaken and free the heart, and it's an innate expression

of an awakened heart. So this is the first of the Buddhist teachings, and one of the reasons

I really enjoy reflecting on it is that when we get more mindful of generosity and more intentional

about it, it very directly affects all our relationships, and in a really deep way affects our whole

experience of being. So there's a lot of fruits from the reflection. In a way, there is that

question of will, if I'm being generous to have the fruits of generosity, isn't that kind of greedy,

or you know, it doesn't that cause trouble, but actually the deepest intentions we have towards

generosity actually come from a very pure place, as we'll explore. One of my favorite recent stories,

this is actually on NPR last year, was a research study that was conducted in Vancouver with

fourth and fifth graders, and the children were divided up into two groups, and one of the groups

was assigned to go to different places and go visit, just visit different parks and malls and

whatever they were drawn to, somebody else's house, and the other group of children were assigned to

random acts of kindness, and it could be anything. It could be hugging a parent or helping with the

dishes or sharing some lunch with a friend, whatever it was, and so they did before measures and

after measures, and as you might imagine the level of well-being and of feeling acceptance towards

others got notably heightened with the children that had been assigned to practice random acts of

kindness. What's interesting, it was all very intentional, they had a plan, their activity, and

think about how it was going to be, and then notice what it was like, so it was a very conscious,

mindful kind of a process for them. So there is a growing body of research on generosity, and you

probably heard some of it, that generosity is correlated with happiness, that the more people that

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