Metta Is a Call to Action
January 10, 2024

Even though this may be a short meditation, try to make up for the lack of time with the quality of your focus and the determination of your focus. You’re going to stay right here.

Then think thoughts of goodwill. Goodwill is a wish for true happiness. Considered in the light of karma, it means several things. One is that you’re wishing for other people to know the causes for true happiness —in other words, skillful actions—and be willing and able to act on them. And you’re wishing the same thing for yourself.

So it’s not just an idle thought, a pleasant pastime. It’s reminding you of what your motivation for the practice is and what your task is: You’re looking for happiness that doesn’t harm anybody.

If you’ve harmed people in the past, spread lots of goodwill to them and lots of goodwill to yourself: goodwill to them, to remind yourself that you don’t want to repeat that mistake; goodwill to yourself, so that you don’t get tied up in remorse. But at the same time, you do recognize the fact that you’ve made mistakes and they were harmful. So you’ve got to get your act together.

That’s another meaning of having goodwill for yourself. The Buddha talks about this as a kind of restraint. We don’t usually think of goodwill as restraint; we think of it as a boundless attitude. And it is boundless. It’s for everybody. But what it means in practice is you’ve got to plans boundaries on your actions, to restrain your thoughts, your words, your deeds. Anything that would harm anybody, you’ve got to say No.

The Buddha also talks about this as a form of mindfulness. You keep this in mind *all *the time as you go through the day. It’s a determination in which you make up your mind that you really do want to carry through with this. So it’s a call to action.

Years back, I wrote a piece on how metta doesn’t mean love or loving kindness. It means goodwill. I made the mistake of sending it to a magazine that was basically Tibetan, and their attitude was: What right does a Theravadan have to say what metta means? So they billed the article as: “For those of you who can’t manage love for everybody, try some goodwill.” Which was pretty insulting.

As the Buddha said, love, pema, is partial. When you really love somebody, then if anybody mistreats that person, you’re going to hate the person who mistreats the person you love. Or if there’s somebody you hate, and there’s somebody who loves that person, you’re not going to like that person either. So love is unreliable as a source for skillful action.

Goodwill, however, is reliable. That’s why the Buddha made the distinction. You wish for happiness, and you realize it has to come from causes. It requires restraint. It requires mindfulness and determination.

So think of goodwill as a call for action, not just a sweet sentiment. That way. you’ll begin to understand how it can be a powerful practice.

There’s the story of Ajaan Khao who, when he was a young man, never had any thought of ordaining. He went off on a business trip to buy and sell things, came back, and found that his wife had been cheating on him. His first impulse was to kill the guy who had been cheating with his wife. But then he realized, that’s not a good thing to do. So he ordained. Ajaan Mun assigned him goodwill in a very elaborate and extended way. It was an hour-long practice every morning, an hour-long practice every night, to remind himself that he wanted to make sure he didn’t give in to those kind of impulses ever again. He was able to use that as his motivation for a life of genuine and successful practice.

So. Don’t think of metta simply as something sweet to get out of the way. It’s a call to action—skillful action. When you understand it in that way, you can see how important it is.