Metta Isn’t Love

I read a Dhamma talk by someone saying that metta shouldn’t be translated as “loving-kindness,” because loving-kindness is too weak. It should be translated as “love.” Part of the reason, he said, was that nobody writes songs about loving-kindness, but everybody writes songs about love.

I didn’t know that we were in the business of taking love songs as our guide in translating the Buddha’s words. We have to realize that love and metta are two very different things. To begin with, they’re different words in Pali. Metta basically means goodwill, wishing for happiness. Love is pema. As the Buddha said, love has its restrictions. To begin with, it’s very possessive. You’re laying claim to someone, and your love goes only to people you like. If someone mistreats the person you love, you’re going to hate that person. If someone is nice to a person you love, you’re going to love that person. That can be pretty arbitrary—and it’s very partial. Similarly, if there’s somebody you hate, and someone is good to the person you hate, you’re going to hate that person. Which is not fair at all. If someone is bad to someone you hate, you’re going to love that person. Which is not fair, either. You can end up living, as they say, with strange bedfellows.

So love builds partiality and it gets in the way of metta, especially when trying to develop metta as a universal attitude. You have to realize that happiness comes from where? It comes from your actions. People are going to be happy because of their actions if their actions are skillful. That means that there doesn’t have to be only x amount of happiness in the world that you portion out to some people and not to others. Everyone has the capacity to act skillfully, and it’s possible to wish that all beings behave skillfully. There’s no conflict, there’s no hypocrisy in that attitude.

At the same time, you’re basically renouncing your claims on those people. You realize it’s going to be up to them to develop skillful attitudes. It’s going to be up to you to develop skillful attitudes in your own mind. You want to make sure that your mind is not partial. Otherwise, you’re going to be good to the people you like and not good to the people you don’t like. That’s going to create bad karma.

So as you develop metta as a universal attitude, you have to realize that you’re abandoning possessiveness. That’s an important aspect of dealing with other people. We’re not possessive of our ideas of what we want out of them. We just want them to be happy. But understanding karma, which is part of developing metta in a correct way, you also realize that it’s going to be beyond your power to make other people truly happy. You can have an influence, you can do what you can to help them understand what would be good karma, and do your best to arouse and encourage and urge them to be skillful in their actions, but it’s going to be up to them to decide to do that or not.

Look at the Buddha himself.

I was talking recently to a group of people who were very wound up in the politics of the world right now. One of them was saying, “You can’t just let evil survive in the world.” Well, evil has been surviving for a long time in the world. When the Buddha left the world, there was evil in the world. There’s been evil all along. The problem is if you try to wipe evil out of the world, you can become pretty evil yourself.

You have to realize that there’s a lot in the world that’s beyond our power. In this way, metta can live with equanimity. Love cannot. It’s hard to be equanimous about people you love, especially when they’re being mistreated by others or when they simply age, grow ill, and die—which is sure to happen to all of us.

Metta is the attitude that allows you to live in the world in a mature way, in a wise way, if you see it as goodwill and you develop your goodwill in line with an understanding of karma. That way, your goodwill doesn’t have to create suffering. After all, if we don’t have equanimity to back up our goodwill, we’re going to suffer. We want beings to be happy, and look what they do: all kinds of things that are the opposite of the causes for happiness. Then there are those who are already happy, and look at what they do with their good fortune—all sorts of horrible things. There are a lot of people out there over whom you have no power, but you can’t let that get you down. You have to realize that that’s the way of the world. We’re here to do our best within the world, developing our perfections in an imperfect world, which involves developing the proper attitude toward everyone: people are acting skillfully; people are acting unskillfully. We have to have goodwill for them all.

This is why the Buddha talked in so many ways about how we suffer if we hold anyone dear—in other words, if we love them. There’s that story in the Canon where a man has lost his only little son. He goes to the cemetery every day and cries out, “Where have you gone, my only son? Where have you gone, my only son?” One day, on the way back from the cemetery, he stops off to see the Buddha. The Buddha says, “Where have you come from? You look like someone out of your mind.” The man tells him what has happened, and the Buddha replies, “Yes, so much suffering comes from those we love.”

The man gets offended. He says, “No, happiness comes from those we love.” Here he’s been suffering every day since the loss of his son, so he is out of his mind. He leaves the Buddha and happens to run across a group of gamblers. He tells them what the Buddha said, and they say, “Oh no, he’s wrong. Happiness comes from those we love.” The guy decides that he agrees with the gamblers. Of course, that’s symbolic. Love is a gamble.

This conversation gets to the King, King Pasenadi, who at time was not yet a follower of the Buddha. He calls in his queen, Mallika. He knows she’s a follower of the Buddha and he says, “This Buddha of yours: Listen to what he said now.” Mallika says, “Well, if he says it, it must be true.” Then he yells at her, “Get out of here. You’re not thinking for yourself at all.”

So she sends a brahman to the Buddha to ask him, “What did you mean when you said that?” The Buddha replies by telling stories of people going crazy when a loved one has died—so crazy that, in one case, a man who’s afraid that his wife is going to be taken away from him by her relatives and given to somebody else kills her and kills himself, thinking that they’ll be together after death. Whatever can get you to do something like that is obviously not a skillful attitude.

So the brahman goes back to tell the queen what the Buddha said. The queen goes to see the King and, instead of quoting the Buddha’s words, comes up with a lesson of her own. She says, “Do you love your other queens?” “Yes.” “Do you love your son?” “Yes.” “Do you love me?” “Yes.” “If anything happened to any of us, what would that do to you?” He replied, “My very life depends on you. It would have a huge impact on me.” She said, “That’s what the Buddha meant.” Love means setting yourself up for a fall.

Goodwill, however, can survive death. It can deal with death, it can deal with separation—all the facts of life. When someone is born, you can have goodwill for them. When they die, you can still have goodwill for them. So that’s the attitude you want to develop. Goodwill.

When I first came back to the States, I gave my first interviews for a group I was teaching in Orange County. The very first interview was with a woman whose very first question was, “This practice is all about love, right?” I said, “No, it’s all about freedom.” She seemed shocked by my answer. I was pretty shocked by her question, too. But it comes down to that: The Buddha is teaching us to be free, so we should try to avoid getting involved in things that would tie us down. And love is one of them.

Of course, there are going to be people that you’re close to, but your attitude has to be one of goodwill. Your time together is short, so you want to do what you can to help that other person find happiness inside. It can’t be happiness that depends on you, because you’re going to have to leave that person. Whatever you can do to help others develop strength inside: That helps you end a relationship—when it inevitably ends—without any regret.

So it’s important to realize that we’re not here to write songs or to appeal to people’s emotions—or to appeal to our own emotions. We’re here to learn some maturity. Goodwill is something you can have for everybody. And it’s something, as I said, that can withstand the facts of aging, illness, and death because you’re not laying claim. You’re looking for your own freedom, and you’re allowing other people to be free as well.