Merit · Pāli: puñña; Skt: puṇya

Merit is the good that wholesome action leaves behind. The Pali word is puñña, which Access to Insight glosses as “Merit; worth; the inner sense of well-being that comes from having acted rightly or well and that enables one to continue acting well”. It is not a currency to hoard, and the early texts are cheerful about it rather than anxious. In the Itivuttaka the Buddha tells the monks, “don’t be afraid of acts of merit. This is another way of saying what is blissful, desirable, pleasing, endearing, charming” (Iti 22).

The same passage names three ordinary ways of making it. “Train in acts of merit that bring long-lasting bliss”, it says: “develop giving, a life in tune, a mind of good-will.” Generosity, an ethical life and the cultivation of the heart, in other words, are the daily shape of practice rather than a preliminary to it, which is one reason giving is so often where a Buddhist life begins. The Buddha in the same discourse traces his own long-ago merit-making to “giving, self-control, & restraint”.

Traditions handle merit differently. Mahayana thought characteristically gives it away: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes “giving or transferring merit (Jp. ekō)” as “a direct expression of the nature of bodhisattvas, for they undertake their practice in nondichotomous wisdom”. Japanese Pure Land teaching goes further still. In Hōnen’s account the merit that matters is not the practitioner’s but Amida’s, since the nembutsu “has been prepared for beings as effective practice”, already fulfilled by Amida, so that the practice is received rather than earned.