… But as I got to know his teachings better, I realized that the word metta is not loving-kindness. It’s goodwill. The word for love, pema, is something else again.
The Buddha didn’t have much positive to say about pema, or love. There was a time when a group of Brahmans who had suddenly gotten faith in the Buddha came early one …
… In a few cases he advocates developing metta for people who are harming you, but more generally he cites all four Sublime Attitudes as antidotes to anger. In other words, the antidote includes metta but not just metta. You want to develop the other Sublime Attitudes, too. And the attitude the Buddha recommends most is equanimity: equanimity in the sense of stepping back from …
… The Mangala Sutta is basically general
auspiciousness; with the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta, you’re spreading
goodwill all around, and, especially with the Khandha Paritta,
goodwill for snakes and other creepy things.
There’s a story in the Canon. A monk was bitten by a snake and died.
The monks reported this to the Buddha, and he said, “Well, it’s
obvious he hadn’t …
… It was while we were in Massachusetts that the land was offered here
for Wat Metta. So Ajaan Suwat went back and came up with a compromise.
The image would be brought here. As he told me afterwards, if this had
been Thailand and the temple committee over there had acted in that
way, he would have left the monastery and never come back …
… He uses the word in contexts some places where we
would use the word heart in English, like a heart of metta,
metta-citta. Sometimes it refers to the thinking side, the thoughts
you have: That’s also the citta. It’s important to see there’s no
real distinction between the two. Your thoughts have desires that go
along with them, and your …
… Years back, I was talking to someone who worked at a meditation
retreat center back east, and I asked him if there was a difference
between the people on their metta retreats and the people on the
vipassana retreats. He said yes, two things. One was the people on the
metta retreats use a lot more honey when they fix tea for themselves,
and …
Sabbe satta sada hontu, avera sukhajivino: We chant that toward the
end of every chant in the evening, in the morning. That’s spreading
goodwill.
Katam puñña-phalam mayham sabbe bhagi bhavantu te: That’s dedicating
merit.
Both of these sentiments come basically from the goodness of the heart
that wants to share its goodness. But they go about it in different
ways.
When …
… Sometimes you
hear just nothing but metta, metta, or in some cases, compassion,
compassion, but you need all four: goodwill, compassion, empathetic
joy, and equanimity. That’s one of the reasons why we have that chant
at the beginning of every meditation to remind ourselves that all four
of these form our motivation. And these are the implications of that
motivation: that we want …
Metta Math
January 12, 2022
Every evening before we meditate, we have a chant on the sublime attitudes: universal goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. Because we do it every day, it’s all too easy for us to simply mouth the words without really thinking about what we’re saying, even though it’s translated into English. So it’s good to stop …
… You can’t just have a mantra of “let
go, let go” or “metta, metta”—or whatever, and hope that the mantra
will take care of everything. You’ve got to understand why is it that
you let yourself get disturbed and what the assumptions behind that
are.
If your peace of mind is disturbed by the world at large—by the heat,
by …
… 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 …
… Goodwill is metta. Metta is a wish for happiness. The reason we’re practicing is because we want a genuine happiness, a happiness that also doesn’t harm anybody. We want the happiness to spread around.
So you want to get that attitude firmly in place—that you really do want to be happy—because you’re going to be dealing with lots of …
… She was going through a bad time, so I sent some metta in her direction. The next day, she came to the monastery and said, “Did you send metta to me last night?” She had felt it, and she knew where it came from. So these aspects of consciousness: At the very least, leave your mind open to their being possible. One of those …
We just had a chant on metta: goodwill for yourself, goodwill for
the people around you. And it was expressed as a wish. Now we actually
put that wish into practice.
Concentration is a practice of being comfortable with yourself. If
there’s no sense of comfort in the present moment, you can’t really
settle down.
So you can use the breath as …
… In other words, metta is not just a process of repeating a phrase over and over in your head. You contemplate the quality of goodwill and what it really means to have goodwill in the context of kamma, in the context of that principle of heedfulness.
The same applies when you extend thoughts of goodwill to yourself. You say to yourself: “May I be …
There’s that phrase in the chant when you’re
spreading thoughts of goodwill to yourself: “May I look after myself
with ease.” As with all the thoughts of metta for yourself, it’s not
selfish. Think of times in the past, or sometimes in the present, when
you’re with someone you love, and they’re suffering. And there’s
nothing you can …
… That’s why, when we discuss issues like metta, goodwill, it’s not just
a matter of sitting with that determination—although that’s an
important part at the beginning, being mindful of our general goal.
But it’s also a matter of how we think about implementing that goal,
how we carry it through. We usually don’t think about this while we …
… When we first were setting up Wat Metta, a lot of Americans came and
said, “Well, now that you’re in America, you have to change things.
You can’t hold to the rules you held to in Thailand. You can’t do
things the way you did them in Thailand because now you’re in America.
Things are different here.” My response was …
… The first type is what Ajaan Fuang would call metta falling down the
well. You see somebody else down in the well, you try to pull them up,
but they’re heavier than you can pull. They end up pulling you down.
The second type is when someone else is getting out of the well. You
have your ideas about how they can get …
Traditionally, when you’re practicing metta meditation, you start with
people who are easy to feel metta or goodwill for: people close to
your heart, people you love. And then once you feel a sense of
well-being with that goodwill, you start spreading the same thoughts
to others who are more and more difficult until you find that you can
sincerely wish that …
