Offertories and recipient promote keen cetana

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Although offertories such as alms-food and recipients of offertories cannot follow the donor to the next life and bring benevolence, they certainly help to promote a keen cetana in the donors.

For example, offering specially prepared alms-food to the Sangha incites a vigorous cetana whilst offering alms-food incites somewhat feeable cetana. Again, charity given to worthy recipients incite strong cetana whereas charity given to nominal recipients incite a frail cetana.

In this way, offertories donated and the persons receiving the charity help promote a keen cetana in the mind of the donors.

The quality of offertories

The respective efforts exerted to offer different amount of offertories may differ accordingly. For the zealous efforts in procuring a large quantity of offertories there will arise a strong cetana. Procuring only a small quantity of offertories will naturally call for less efforts and the corresponding cetana will be relatively less.

In preparing for a large amount of offertories the pubba cetana (prior volition) will accordingly be immense and vice versa. Therefore, dana of large and small quantity differ effects because of the duration of cetana in each case.

If the dana be grand and lavish so also is the cetana. During the time of dana, the muncha cetana (the prevailing volition) will also be in proportion to the dana. After the charity has been made, apara cetana (the post-charity cetana) will also be of equal scale whenever you think of this dana again and again.

Such states of mind are of common occurrence.

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