Do Good Without Conditions

“I would, but…” is the most expensive phrase in the language. It quietly buys us out of being good.

There was a man named Dhananjani who had drifted into cutting corners — taking a little from these people in the name of those people, and from those in the name of these, the way people do when they’ve decided the rules don’t quite apply to them. A friend, the teacher’s student Sariputta, came to check on him and gently asked: aren’t you living carelessly these days?

And Dhananjani had his reasons ready — a whole list of them. I have to support my parents. I have a wife and children to feed. I have workers depending on me, guests to receive, obligations to the king, this body to keep alive. How could I afford to be careful? Look at everything resting on me. Each excuse perfectly reasonable. Each one a door he’d propped open to let his own behavior slip through.

Sariputta didn’t argue with the list. He asked one quiet question instead. When the consequences of how you’ve lived finally arrive — when you’re standing in front of them — and you say, “but I did it for my family, I did it for my obligations, please let me off” — will that work? Will the consequences step aside because your reasons were good?

And Dhananjani, honest at last, admitted: no. They wouldn’t. The consequences come regardless. The reasons don’t buy you out.

If our excuses can’t protect us from the results of doing wrong, then they were never really reasons. They were just permission slips we wrote ourselves.

This is bracing, but it cuts both ways, and the kind way is the better one. It means real goodness doesn’t wait for conditions. It doesn’t wait until you have more money, more time, the right mood, the deserving person, the convenient moment. Those “buts” will always be available — there is no day on which all conditions are perfect. So the good has to be done anyway, on ordinary days, with imperfect resources, or it never gets done at all.

Drop the “but,” even once, and you’ll feel how much lighter unconditional goodness is than the constant negotiating we usually do with ourselves.

Take a breath. There's no rush to the next page.

Where this comes from

From “Doing Good Must Have No Conditions,” based on the Dhānañjāni Sutta.