The Four Debts of Gratitude

Outside a pagoda gate one morning in the seventh month, a small table stood covered with a yellow cloth. On it sat a basket of roses, red ones on one side and white ones on the other. A young child stood in front of the basket, hand reaching out and pulling back, unable to choose. The child turned to the grandfather and wanted to know what the roses were for.

The grandfather took the small hand and led the child to sit under a tree in the courtyard. It was Vu Lan, a Buddhist festival when people show gratitude to their parents. He said he would explain.

In the Buddhist faith, he began, there is something very precious called Tứ Ân. Tứ means four, and ân means a kindness received, a debt of gratitude. Tứ Ân names the four great debts that Vietnamese Buddhists remember and repay all their lives. The Buddhism website of the Vietnam Buddhist Sangha calls these four the moral foundation of a person. Gratitude, he said, is not a passing feeling. It is a deed, and it is done for a whole lifetime.

The first debt is the greatest, standing above all the rest: the debt to parents. It stands first because without parents there would be no self. The teachers say that the care of parents, in giving birth and raising a child, is as vast as the ocean. A mother carries the weight, stays awake in the night, and feeds her child spoonful by spoonful. A father shelters, worries, and shoulders the heavy work so that his child can live in peace. No deed, said the grandfather, could ever repay all of that. So to honor one's parents fully is to live fully as a human being.

The second debt is to teachers and forebears. The body, the teachers say, is a gift from one's parents, but becoming a person is the work of a teacher. A teacher shows what is right and what is wrong, and opens the mind. This runs from the teacher who taught the first written letters in the village to the master in the pagoda who taught what is good and wise. It runs further back still, to grandparents and ancestors, who left their descendants a spoken language, a written script, and ways of eating and living. Behind every folk verse the child knew, and behind every good thing the child had learned, stood the figure of a teacher.

The third debt is to the country. The grandfather told the child to look around. A river gives water, a field gives rice, and a mountain shelters the village. So many people poured out their sweat to protect this land, so that others could live in peace. A farmer grew the rice in the child's bowl. Those who came before kept the village safe, so that today the child has a place to call a homeland. To be grateful to the country is to love the place that took us in, and to cherish every road and every roof.

The fourth debt is to the Tam Bảo. These are the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. Long ago, the Buddha himself suffered and searched. Then he sat still beneath a tree and found the way out of suffering, just as the grandfather and the child were sitting there now. The Buddha found the way and pointed it out. The Dharma is his teaching, the truth. The Sangha are those who keep the teaching and hand it down through the ages. One day the child would be sad, or would stumble, and the Buddha's words would be like a lamp lighting the next step.

The grandfather paused, then went on. He said there was something fine about the Vietnamese Tứ Ân. It gathers into one the love and respect for father and mother, the love of homeland, and the kindness of the Buddha's teaching. Every Vietnamese person knows by heart the kindness of a father and the devotion of a mother. Buddhism teaches us to remember that debt from beginning to end, and to live with gratitude and loyalty.

The child, eyes still on the basket, asked what the rose had to do with all this.

The grandfather smiled. It was the first debt, he said, the one owed to parents. The custom of pinning a rose to the shirt was started by the Zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh, during the Vu Lan season in the 1960s. A person whose father and mother are still living pins a deep red rose to the chest, to celebrate the greatest blessing of life, having parents close by. A person whose parents have passed away pins a white rose, to turn the heart toward them, to remember, to love, and to be grateful to the ones who gave life.

The child ran back to the table. This time there was no hesitation. The child chose a red rose, because that morning both father and mother had brought the child to the pagoda and were waiting outside. The grandfather pinned the flower to the child's shirt and smoothed the petals into place. The red rose was small, but it warmed the whole season of Vu Lan.