Wednesday — Introduction
Good evening. Welcome to our retreat on the sublime attitudes.
We hope that the retreat will be useful to you all.
The brahmavihāras, or sublime attitudes, are attitudes of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity that you spread to all beings, without limit. In other words, there’s no limit to the amount of goodwill, etc., that you spread, and no limit on the number of beings to whom you spread it. Each of these attitudes is an antidote for mental states that can get in the way of training the mind. For this reason, they play an important role in fostering the path to the end of suffering.
• Goodwill, mettā, a wish that beings will be happy, is an antidote for ill will, the desire to see beings suffer. Notice that we don’t translate mettā as love or loving-kindness, because, as the Buddha pointed out, love is partial, and can easily turn into hatred. When you’re advised to develop universal mettā, you’re not being asked to love everyone, or even to like everyone. Instead, you’re simply asked not to want to see anyone suffer, regardless of whether you like that person or not.
• Compassion, karuṇā, a wish that those who are suffering will be freed from their suffering, is an antidote to cruelty, the desire to actually harm others when they’re down.
• Empathetic joy, muditā, a wish that those who are already happy will continue to be happy, is an antidote to resentment and envy.
• Equanimity, upekkhā, the ability to maintain the mind on an even keel when events don’t fall in line with your goodwill, is an antidote to irritation.
These attitudes boil down to two—goodwill and equanimity—in that compassion and empathetic joy are basically extensions of goodwill. Compassion is what goodwill feels when encountering suffering; empathetic joy is what goodwill feels when encountering those who are already happy. The Buddha may have separated them out from goodwill in his list of the brahmavihāras because they’re good checks for the honesty and truthfulness of your goodwill. If someone whose behavior you don’t like is suffering the consequences of that behavior, is your goodwill sincere enough to want to see their suffering end? If someone whose behavior you don’t like is enjoying the fruits of past good actions, can you honestly say that you’re happy for that person?
Equanimity is the backup for cases where, for the time being at least, there’s nothing you can do to stop people from suffering or creating the causes of suffering. This means that you develop each of these qualities where appropriate. You don’t regard equanimity as the goal of the practice. It always has to be based on goodwill so that it doesn’t shade into apathy or indifference.
Notice that you practice developing these attitudes toward all beings—including yourself. To do this, you have to develop them consciously, because in the normal human heart these attitudes tend to be partial. It’s easy to feel goodwill, for example, for those you like, or equanimity toward those who have no connection to you. But it requires a conscious effort to be able to maintain these attitudes toward anyone and everyone. It’s not the case that the brahmavihāras are the heart’s innate nature. After all, their opposites can come just as naturally to the heart. It’s just as natural to feel ill will for those who have betrayed you or people you love as it is natural to feel goodwill for those who behave in ways you like. It’s just as natural to get irritated when things don’t go your way as it is to be equanimous when nothing disturbs you.
So in making your goodwill and equanimity limitless, you’re learning to take these human attitudes that tend to be partial and to intentionally erase any trace of partiality in how you apply them. In doing so, you lift your human mind to the level of the Brahmās, the highest level of heavenly beings, who have developed the sublime attitudes to the point where they can extend them to everyone, no matter who, no matter where.
Because this takes effort, and because you have to keep these heightened attitudes in mind, the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta tells you to determine on goodwill as a form of mindfulness, i.e., something you have to keep in mind. This point applies to all four brahmavihāras.
When it says to determine on these things, it’s good to remember what the Pali Canon has to say about determination.
Determination has four components: discernment, truth, generosity, and calm
When we look into the way the practice around goodwill is described in the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta, we can find all four.
Discernment: In the first line of the poem, it refers to what should be done by those who appreciate the state of peace as the most skillful aim. This is a reference to the third noble truth, the truth of the cessation of suffering. The Canon notes that you can practice the brahmavihāras in two ways: to lead to rebirth in the Brahmā worlds, or as part of a larger, nobler practice that develops the skills of the noble eightfold path, leading to the total end of suffering, free from rebirth anywhere at all. In particular, the brahmavihāras strengthen three of the factors of the path: right resolve, right mindfulness, and right concentration. If you’re really discerning, you’ll want to practice the brahmavihāras for the noble goal of the end of suffering. That’s how we’ll explain them here.
In particular, it’s important to note the relationship between the brahmavihāras and right resolve: This is where your heart enters into the practice, so that it’s not just an intellectual exercise. As you foster a mature desire for true happiness, and you see at the same time so much suffering around you, it impresses on the heart the need to find a way of practice that really leads to a way to put suffering to an end. So just as the noble path takes the brahmavihāras to a higher level, the brahmavihāras help strengthen the path in its work.
Truth is defined as not being deceptive, i.e., not changing into something else. In English, we say that you’re true to your primary intention. According to the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta, the brahmavihāras are true in that they’re attitudes to be maintained in all postures: sitting, standing, walking, and lying down, as long as you’re awake.
To be true to the brahmavihāras, you also have to carry through with precepts. This relates to the lines, “Don’t do slightest thing that the observant would later censure,” and “Be upright, straightforward.”
In other words, for the brahmavihāras to be genuine, they have to show in your actions. This means:
You don’t harm anyone.
You don’t harm yourself by breaking precepts or provoking passion, aversion, and delusion in yourself.
You don’t harm others by getting them to break precepts or by provoking passion, aversion, and delusion in them. Remember: you appreciate the state of peace, and you want others, for their own well-being, to appreciate it, too.
Generosity: The extension of goodwill, etc., to all is done for free. You’re not asking for anything in return from the people you give it to. You don’t give it only to people you think “deserve” your goodwill. As with all forms of generosity, the Buddha defines this expansive attitude as a form of wealth: When you give happily, you gain a generous heart in return. This is why it’s to be protected as mother would protect only child. In this case, the brahmavihāras are a form of a wealth you can create from within your own heart without having to take anything away from anyone else. The more you create and extend to others, the richer you are.
Calm: In the words of the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta, you’re:
“easy to instruct, gentle, not conceited,
content, easy to support,
with few duties, living lightly,
peaceful faculties, modest”
The phrase “peaceful faculties” refers to the practice of sense restraint.
Not conceited: When developing compassion, you don’t look down on people who are poor or suffering
Content: You’re content with material requisites that are enough for the sake of the practice. However, you’re NOT content to watch unskillful states arise in your mind. That’s an area where the Buddha said you should practice staying discontent until you’ve freed yourself from suffering.
Not taken with views: You don’t hold to views that are designed to lead to arguments—such as views addressing the question as to whether the world was or wasn’t created by a god or by how many gods. These views don’t just stay in cafés. They can get people to attack one another.
Instead, you’re consummate in vision: You see clearly what’s skillful, what’s not, and, in particular, what needs to be done to put an end to suffering. This is a way of seeing things that gets you out of arguments and focused on your own behavior.
In this way, calm leads back to discernment.
So as you can see, developing the brahmavihāras requires more than just sitting here and repeating phrases, “May all beings be happy.” It requires that you understand what you’re doing:
how to develop and maintain a mind state, and
how beings will actually become happy.
It also requires that you live in a way that is in harmony with a genuine expression of the brahmavihāras.
So, during this retreat, in addition to spending time taking the brahmavihāras as a meditative theme, we’ll also be discussing issues of discernment, truth, generosity, and calm as they relate to keeping yourself determined to be constantly mindful of the brahmavihāras in thought, word, and deed.
This evening, we’ll focus on getting started on how to develop goodwill as a mind state.
You may remember from our previous retreats that there are three types of fabrication:
bodily—the in-and-out breath,
verbal—the way you talk to yourself, and
mental—perceptions and feelings.
To extend a wish that others will be happy, you have to be able to make yourself happy—to provide yourself with a sense of well-being through these three forms of fabrication.
We can do that by first focusing on the breath. This will be our basic meditation method throughout the retreat—getting centered with a sense of well-being focused on breath, then using verbal and mental fabrication to extend the wish that others will experience well-being as well. We recommend that you go back and forth between these two themes of meditation—thinking thoughts of the brahmavihāras to clear the mind, then focusing on the breath to give a sense of well-being, and then using that strengthened concentration and mindfulness to give more power to your goodwill, etc., then back to the breath, and so forth. That way, you strengthen both your practice of breath meditation and your practice of the brahmavihāras.
So let’s finish this evening with a guided meditation.
