Goodwill Without Limits
September 15, 2023

One of the Pali terms for the* brahmaviharas *is appamaññā. It means immeasurable, unlimited, and there are two ways in which it’s unlimited. One is that you extend these attitudes to everybody, no matter who: people you like, people you don’t like, people who’ve been behaving well, people who haven’t been behaving well. That gets to the second meaning. You spread it to people regardless of what they’ve been doing. After all, you have to remember: Why are you spreading these attitudes? The primary reason is to protect yourself from doing unskillful things. If you have ill will for anybody, it’s very easy to do unskillful things to those people. That then becomes your karma.

So remember, you’re not doing it for them. You’re doing it primarily for yourself. The question of whether they deserve your goodwill or don’t deserve your goodwill shouldn’t come into the equation. Questions of deserving don’t matter right here, because if you’re going to be skillful only to people you feel deserve your kindness or your goodness, there will be a lot of limitations on your goodness. Do you want that?

We’re not talking about love here, or even loving-kindness, just simple goodwill, wishing people to be happy. Now, this doesn’t mean wishing that they’ll be happy no matter what they do, or happy as they are, regardless of what they’re doing. Your metta is there for them regardless of what they’re doing, but the metta means that you hope they learn to behave in a skillful way themselves, and that you’ll be happy to help them in that direction.

After all, how does the Buddha say you harm other people? You harm them not so much by killing them, stealing their things, or breaking the precepts. You harm yourself by breaking the precepts. You harm them by getting them to break the precepts. You realize their happiness has to come from their actions. You help them by getting them not to break the precepts. You also help them by encouraging them to overcome their passion, their aversion, their delusion.

So those are the things you’re willing to do based on your goodwill.

Now, they’ll be times when you can’t help them, in which case you have to develop equanimity. But the underlying motive is always there: goodwill. So it’s good to practice making it immeasurable. There’s a passage in the Canon that’s often translated as, “Just as a mother loves her only child, you should have the same love for all beings.” That’s the translation, but it’s a wrong translation. A more accurate one is, “Just as a mother would protect her only child with her life, so should you protect your goodwill toward all beings.” That means regardless of what they do, regardless of who they are, you try to maintain this attitude of goodwill. You cherish it, you protect it, because you realize your own well-being depends on it. After all, you’re here meditating: That’s based on your goodwill for yourself, and then by extension, goodwill for others. The underlying motive for the practice all the way through is goodwill.

Think of that image of the bandits. The Buddha said that if bandits have pinned you down—two bandits with a two-handled saw—and they’re cutting you up into little pieces, they’ve overpowered you, there’s nothing you can do about what they’re doing, you still should have goodwill for them. And again, this is for your own good. This is for your own good. If you were to die with ill will in your heart at that moment, you’d go to a bad place. You’d be reborn with the motive of wanting to get revenge. That would be a waste of a good lifetime. So regardless of what people are doing, you want to maintain that attitude of goodwill.

In fact, you want to make it more reliable than a mother’s love. As we all know, our mothers love us up to a certain point. There are certain things that you can do that would make your mother exasperated with you, or more than exasperated, but you want to develop goodwill in a way that doesn’t have those limitations. The images the Buddha gives are large: goodwill like the entire earth. Goodwill like the river Ganges, which is a huge, broad river. Goodwill like space—space has no limitations at all.

So regardless of what other people do, your basic attitude has to be, “May this person be happy.” Now, that may mean, “May this person change his or her ways,” but you shouldn’t let their behavior get in the way of your goodwill, because that’s placing a limitation on your own heart and your own mind.

Remember, we’re training both the heart and the mind. The Pali term is citta. We talk about singleness of mind—cittass’ekagatta—but it’s also singleness of heart. You’re trying to create a heart that’s dedicated to one big purpose, which is to follow the noble path, to engage in the noble search, which is the search for a happiness that doesn’t die. It’s going to involve learning how to find that happiness in a way that doesn’t harm anybody. It requires both the heart and the mind: heart in the sense of your intentions, what you will, what you aspire to in life; and your mind in the sense of trying to figure things out: How do you find a happiness like that?

So in training yourself in the brahmaviharas, you’re training both the heart and the mind. The heart in the sense of realizing that if you want happiness, it can’t cause harm to anybody else. You have to include everybody in your wish for happiness. You then engage the mind in figuring out how you can reason with your heart so that it can be willing to have that attitude.

It’s all too easy to say, “Well, these are people for whom I just can’t have goodwill because they’ve been behaving so horribly.” That’s a human attitude; we’re trying to develop a Brahma attitude, and a Brahma attitude is limitless. As for human attitudes, the ones you see all over the world—“my group of people versus that group of people, the people I love versus the people I hate”: The human mind tends to be very divisive, very partial. The human heart tends to be very partial. So try to lift both the heart and the mind to a Brahma level, where you can see that you don’t gain any benefit from anybody’s suffering at all.

We read about investors saying that the economy is such that we have to inflict a little bit of pain on other people, so that we can gain what we want. Well, that’s the human attitude, and it’s nothing to admire. That’s writ large, but for a lot of us in our daily lives, we find individuals who are really hard to have goodwill for, and we just give up. That means we’re giving up on our own desire for true happiness. If you want to be truly happy, you have to figure out, “How can I have goodwill for everybody? And what does it mean to have goodwill for everybody?” You can learn to think in ways that make it possible. As I said, it’s not simply a wish that whatever people are doing, may they be happy doing that. It’s more, if they’re doing unskillful things, may they see the error of their ways and be inspired to voluntarily change their ways. That’s a wish you can have for anybody.

Now, part of the mind may say, “But I’d like to see so-and-so suffer first”—but why? Is that a part of your heart and mind you want to encourage?

So by holding yourself to an unlimited standard like this, you help to expose areas of the heart and of the mind that tend to get missed when you simply focus on the breath or whatever your topic of mindfulness might be. After all, this, too, is a kind of mindfulness. It doesn’t come under the four establishings of mindfulness but it’s an important form of mindfulness to inform the entirety of your practice. You want the entire heart and the entire mind to gain freedom, so both sides of the *citta *have to be trained.

Of course, there’s not just goodwill in the brahmaviharas. They also include compassion: You see somebody suffering, and instead of thinking, “Well, they’re getting what they deserve,” you remind yourself, “I could be in a situation like that myself, I have been in the past, many times, and I could be again, if I’m not careful. How would I like people to treat me?”

Then there’s empathetic joy. When you see someone who’s happy, that’s a real test for your goodwill. There are a lot of people who are happy receiving the results of their past good actions, but they’re abusing their happiness, they’re abusing their power, their beauty, their wealth. So here you are: You tell yourself you want all beings to be happy, well, this is what happy beings look like. This is how they often behave. So you realize, in a case like that, that your empathetic joy has to be paired with compassion. There are people who enjoy the results of their good past actions but they’re not using them wisely. They’re creating bad kamma with those good results. You have to feel sorry for them.

Then there’s equanimity for the times when you can’t make a change in other people’s behavior, or there are things in your own mind that you can’t change yet. You’re equanimous about them, but that doesn’t mean you give up on them. You certainly don’t give up on yourself. It means simply that you learn to have the right time and place for expressing your goodwill, acting on your goodwill, and other times when you have to hold back a little bit—not out of a lack of goodwill, but simply out of wisdom. You try to figure out: “What would be the best way to influence this person?” If the opportunity doesn’t come yet, then wait and look for the times when it will come.

As you hold your heart and mind to this standard, you find that you stretch yourself. You grow. And the limitations that seem only natural, only human, take on a new meaning. When we say something’s only natural, it’s usually an excuse: “Well, it’s just the natural way to do things.” But the phrase can also mean, “Well, that’s all it is, it’s *just *natural, nothing more than that,” and you want something better than that. The same with, “It’s only human.” You want something better than human. So you have to make your own heart and mind more than human. It may sound like a tall order, but it is possible. This is one of the Buddha’s gifts to us, stretching our ideas of what is humanly possible, and how we can transcend our normal limits of what’s ordinarily human.

Think of that story about Richard Feynman. In addition to be a physicist, he liked playing the bongos. Someone wrote a letter to him one time, saying, “I really appreciate the fact that you play the bongos. It makes you human.” Feynman wrote back a blistering letter, saying, “Isn’t doing physics human as well? It’s part of our human capability, that we can figure things out.”

And it’s the same with the path—and even more so with the path. It’s the best thing a human being can do, the best thing *any *being can do. After all, the Buddha transcended even the devas and the Brahmas. Those passages where he talks about consciousness without surface: Both of them come in contexts showing how the Buddha knows more than Brahmas know. He’s attained something that Brahmas can’t fathom.

So as we stretch ourselves to have a Brahma attitude, remember there’s more. Stretching ourselves to the Brahma level gets us closer to stretching ourselves even further and going beyond them.