Thoughts on Eleven

Material charity is at a completely different level than spiritual charity. If someone give me a dollar, it will help me out materially, but how much better I would feel to receive a smile. Furthermore, this chapter specifies that spiritual charity in the form of dissemination of the sutra's teaching is vastly superior to material charity. I am myself the benefit of such charity, as this sutra has been made easily available for me to read, study and compare translations, due to the efforts of many people. I find the teachings to be like a healing salve and a method of focusing myself to be a better person. If someone had instead given me a million dollars, the reverse effect may very well have happened, and it certainly wouldn't have given me spiritual peace of mind.

Just as a fun exercise, i'm curious how the numbers work out here. How many grains of sand in the Ganges? Let's estimate it. The river, let's assume is fifty miles long. (It's probably longer, but this is an estimate.) Let's assume that it's half a mile wide. Let's assume that the sand extends to a depth of one foot. Assuming 5000 feet per mile, there are 5000x50x5000x.5x1 cubic feet of sand, which is 6.25 x 10^8. Now, how big is a grain of sand. Red Pine says that the sand of the Ganges is very fine, almost like flour. To be on the safe side, let's estimate it to be about .1 mm in diameter. I am going to estimate this as 10^-4 feet. Every cubic foot can fit (10^4)^3=10^12 grains of sand. Thus we get a whopping total of 6.25 x 10^20 grains of sand in the Ganges: 625,000,000,000,000,000,000. Now the Buddha says imagine there are this many rivers with this many grains of sand in each. How much sand do we get? Well you need to square this number. 6.25x6.25 x 10^40 which is roughly
4x10^41 which can be written 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That is huge. Imagine filling 10^41 worlds with "precious substances." That's a lot, although not imeasurable and infinite as Subhuti says. Buddha subtly corrects Subhuti on this, employing Subhuti's own word choice to say that the dissemination of one four-line gatha (verse) is "immeasurably infinitely greater."