How should we understand the higher form of generosity – “perfect giving”? The answer can be found throughout the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras, because wisdom is precisely what is needed to perfect generosity. Wisdom is the sixth perfection, the most perfect of the perfections, and the essential ingredient in all the others. Therefore it will need to be considered here in order to complete our understanding of the ideal of perfect generosity.

Perfect wisdom, whether related to generosity or any other dimension of life, consists in the realization of “emptiness,” and it is this teaching that the sutras promulgate from beginning to end. Although emptiness Śūnyatā) was an infrequently used word in the earliest layers of Buddhist literature, when it did make its appearance as the central concept in Mahayana sutras, it was defined in terms that were already familiar in the Pali sutras. To say that something is “empty” is to say that it is subject to continual change, that its existence is wholly dependent on factors outside of itself, and that it has no unchanging core or permanent essence. Making that claim, Mahayana Buddhists invoked the basic Buddhist teachings of impermanence, dependent arising, and no-self. All things are “empty” of their own self-established permanent essence because they are always subject to alteration and revision and because they are composed and defined in terms of what lies outside of them.

The “perfection” of giving incorporates the wisdom of “emptiness” to transform the perspective from which acts of giving occur. When the impermanence, dependence, and insubstantiality of all things are absorbed into one’s worldview down to the level of daily comportment, everything changes. A new, non-self-centered identity gradually emerges, one that entails reciprocity with everything that previously seemed to be other than oneself. This identity dissolves previous habits of self-protection and self-aggrandizement, opening the “self” to others in a connection of compassionate identification. To see how the vision of “emptiness” transforms thinking about generosity or giving, we look closely at passages in the sutras.

Instructing his disciple, Subhūti, in the perfection of generosity, the Large Sutra has the Buddha say: “Do not imagine that the gift is one thing, its fruit another, the donor another, and the recipient another. . . . And why? Because this gift is empty of a gift, its fruit empty of a fruit, and also the donor is empty of a donor and the recipient empty of a recipient. For in emptiness no gift can be apprehended nor its fruit, no donor, and no recipient. And why? Because absolutely those dharmas are empty in their own-being.”

The Buddha says, “Do not imagine.” Imagine what? Do not imagine that the world is divided up into separate self-subsistent entities, the way we ordinarily assume it to be. Do not imagine yourself as one of these isolated entities. Why not? Because all of these seemingly separate “things” are what they are only in connection to other things that make them what they are. Nothing stands on its own, and that is what it means to be “empty” of “own-being.” Applied to the act of giving, we see that the gift is not a gift without a donor and a recipient. Likewise, without the gift, there is no donor, no recipient. Each depends on the others, and when one changes, so do the others.