Years back, I sat in on a class where a teacher was talking about the
Karaniya Metta sutta, the sutta we just chanted. He started with the
first line, “This is what should be done by someone who appreciates
the state of peace.” Immediately, a hand shot up. Someone in the class
said, “I thought there weren’t any shoulds in Buddhism.” And I …
Goodwill as a Guardian
June 7, 2021
The Buddha teaches three governing principles, three ways of thinking to keep yourself on the path, and two of them have to do with goodwill, or metta. The first one involves your goodwill for yourself. You remind yourself that you entered on this path because you wanted to put an end to your suffering. Basically, you loved …
… There’s a passage in the Karaniya Metta Sutta we chanted just now of
being resolved on this mindfulness of goodwill for all. When you’re
working on this path, it can’t be simply out of disgust for the world
or anger at people who’ve been difficult. It has to come out of
goodwill. You try to nurture that quality in your …
… Years back, when we were starting Wat Metta, we’d get people coming up
here and telling us, “Well, now that you’re in America, you have to
change the rules, you’ll have to change the way you do things.” My
thinking was, “Here I am, far away from my teachers, far away from the
place I was trained. If I abandon my …
… That’s one of the reasons why we have the chant on metta, because
often those issues involve other people: “This person said this, that
person said that, how could they do that?” You get yourself all
entangled in those issues. So ask yourself, do you really want to be
entangled over that person, that kind of issue, that kind of thought
in your …
… That’s what Ajaan Suwat liked to call Wat Metta: a corner of quietness. But he also talked about meditation as a corner of quietness, this place where the mind can really be solid and settled down and have a firm foundation, even in the midst of all the things that are infirm and unsettled in the rest of the world. After all, when …
… As he says, fighting the elephant off with metta,
with no holds barred. The elephant stares at him for a while, then
lowers its ears and walks away.
There are two lessons to be drawn here. One is the lesson if you’re
afraid to die, your fear is what’ going to keep you dying. This is a
theme throughout the practice. As the …
… When the Buddha is talking about
developing goodwill for people who have spoken harshly or lied to you,
he said, “Make your mind like space, make your *mettā—*your
goodwill—like space.” Space, he says, doesn’t have a surface; nothing
can be written on it. In other words, when people abuse you, you don’t
take it and keep it; you don’t …
… The second guardian meditation is metta, goodwill. Remember that you
have goodwill for yourself, and that’s why you’re practicing. The
Buddha said that when you start feeling discouraged, remind yourself
that you started this practice because you love yourself. You want to
put an end to suffering. Have you stopped wanting to put an end to
suffering? Well, no. It’s just …
… One, the quality of
metta is not necessarily love. The snakes didn’t want my love. They
wanted me to leave them alone, and I didn’t want to hang around with
them, either. If I had tried to pet them, of course, they would have
bitten me. And as Ajaan Fuang said, “We’re different species, and
there are so many different ways …
… I’ve been told that, according to the Thai Wat Metta social media
right now, the sala we’re in is apparently on the verge of collapsing
with the slightest little tremor. Whether that’s true or not, the fact
is that our bodies are designed in such a way that when they decide to
stop, they don’t give any warning. Perhaps a …
… Is the dirt on the other side
of the mountain different from the dirt over here? Are the rocks there
different from the rocks here?
The first month I came back to the States and settled down in Wat
Metta, a group of lay people had organized a trip for the monks to go
to Yellowstone. I didn’t go along. Ajaan Suwat went …
There are a couple of stories related to the chant we did just now,
the Karaniya Metta Sutta. It starts out: “This is what should be done
by one aiming at a state of peace.” I happened to be sitting in on a
course one time that was focused on translating the sutta. They took
it apart line by line, compared different translations, and …
We start each meditation session with chants on goodwill, metta, to
remind ourselves of why we’re here. It’s because we wish for true
happiness. As the Buddha once said, wisdom and discernment begin with
that question: What can we do that will lead to our long-term welfare
and happiness? The whole teaching comes out of that question. We
practice generosity, we …
… And so metta has its difficult side as well, because it requires you
to be very scrupulous, very thoughtful in how you deal with yourself
and with other people. It’s often thought of as a nice “feel good”
kind of practice—and it does create that energy of feeling good about
yourself: that you don’t have any evil intentions toward anyone.
You …
… There’s a passage in the beginning of the Karaniya Metta Sutta: “This is what should be done by one who appreciates the state of peace.”
I was sitting in on another course on the brahmaviharas one time. They were going over this sutta line by line, and they started with the first line. As soon as they hit the word should, a hand …
… Once, when I was in Barre, they were giving a course on the Karaniya
Metta Sutta, the one we chant often. I had taught my course the week
before, and I was staying on to do a little study, a little meditation
of my own, So they asked me to sit in on this other course. The
teacher got to the very first line …
That chant just now is called the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta because the
first words are* karaṇīya*, “what should be done.” The whole phrase
is, “what should be done by one skilled in aims.”
To be skilled in aims, you have to think about the long-term: What
would be conducive to a true, long-term happiness? Much of the sutta
is about goodwill. You …
… contemplation of the unattractiveness of the body, and
mindfulness of death. It sounds like a rather random collection and,
in the sense that they focus on different defilements, they are
diverse. Metta is usually used as the antidote to anger; contemplation
of the body as an antidote to lust; recollection of the Buddha as an
antidote to discouragement and nihilism; and recollection of death …
… For lay people, when you’re here in the relative wilderness of Metta as opposed to your homes, that reflection gets you started in the right direction. You see that the problem of suffering is not anything “out there.” It’s largely in the way you perceive things, the way you fabricate things. And the process of meditation is a progressively refined understanding of …
