… You don’t have to look anywhere else, just look at the kitchen in Wat
Metta. Everybody’s commenting on everybody else—and everybody’s
causing themselves to suffer.
So we have to look at the things that we’re clinging to, and to see
that they’re not worth it. Our passion for these things is what makes
us suffer.
Now, the Buddha …
… Like the solar electric system here at Wat Metta: When we were first setting up the batteries, we were careless and put them on a couple of boards on the ground. Well, sure enough, a rain storm came. One of the wires shorted, and by the next day the batteries were totally dead. Even though the solar panels were pumping out energy, the batteries …
… Sometimes, you find you need to work with the 32 parts of the
body, or you need metta meditation, or contemplation of death for
specific problems that come up in the mind. But the home base here is
the breath.
After all, it’s where the Buddha found awakening. The breath is
something that’s always there and always immediately relevant to
whatever is …
… Ajaan Mun, they say, would do some metta meditation
every morning right after he woke up, every afternoon right after he
woke up from his afternoon nap, and then every evening before he went
to bed. You can do this by reciting different phrases of goodwill or
just stopping to think: What does it mean to have goodwill? What kind
of happiness are you …
… In the Metta Sutta in the Sutta Nipata, where the Buddha talks about how to express a thought of goodwill, he doesn’t simply say, “May all beings be happy.” That’s part of what he has to say, but not all. He goes through all the various categories of beings: long, middling and short; seen, unseen; big and small. But he also says …
… This is why we chant the passages for metta, or goodwill, before we meditate together: to remind ourselves that we really do wish for happiness, true happiness. Everyone wishes for happiness, but when you look at the way people go about looking for happiness in their lives, you wonder exactly how much serious thought they give to what they’re doing. True happiness has …
… He asked me a couple of questions about life here at Wat Metta. And one of them was, “When Westerners come to the monastery, what do they come for?” He’d been talking about virtue and generosity to the laypeople, so I mentioned that a lot of people don’t come thinking about generosity and virtue at the very beginning. Their first motivation for …
… This is why part of the Karaniya Metta Sutta says, “May no being
despise any other being anywhere.” Not simply, “May beings be happy,”
but may they not act on the causes that would lead to unhappiness.
Then the question is, to what extent can you influence that? There are
some people you can influence. As the Buddha said, when you become
generous, it …
… There’s the idea that by doing metta practice you burn
away your anger or by doing mindfulness practice or looking at things
in terms of the three characteristics, you burn away your old
sankharas. The Buddha heaped a lot of ridicule on the idea that you
could burn away your old karma, burn away your old defilements simply
through mindfulness or simply through …
… When he talks about the rewards of metta practice, the rewards
of goodwill, a lot of them have to do with the dangers that will not
come to you when your mind is spreading goodwill in all directions.
And here it’s useful to engage not only in the verbal fabrication of
goodwill but also the in mental fabrication, perceptions that help
strengthen your …
… There’s that verse in the Karaniya Metta Sutta where the Buddha says
that just as a mother would risk her life to protect her only child,
you should protect your attitude of goodwill. This doesn’t mean you’re
going to go out and cherish everybody the same way she would cherish
her child, or to fight off every injustice that’s going …
… It’s a distinction the Buddha makes in the Metta Sutta. He describes the ideal meditator as “not taken with views, but consummate in vision.” We spend most of our time talking about, “I think this about that, I think that about this, this is my opinion on politics, this is my opinion on the Michael Jackson feeding-fest in the media and whatever …
… We tend to be a little spoiled here at Wat Metta, but
there’s no guarantee that things will always be good. And even with
all the food that comes here, sometimes you want something sour and
there’s nothing sour at all for the day. You want something sweet,
there’s nothing sweet. I’ve had times in the past when I was …
… Learn this habit in all of your activities because it’s going to be
the habit that makes all the difference in your meditation—so that we
won’t hear horror stories about the monks from Wat Metta who don’t
observe things and don’t figure things out.
This habit of being observant, of noticing things, is one of the most
important gifts …
… If it doesn’t, you can go to metta, goodwill, both for yourself and
for people around you. This is ordinarily regarded as an antidote to
anger, but it’s an antidote to other things as well, like carelessness
and apathy. Remind yourself that you really do want to find true
happiness. Do you have any trouble wishing yourself true happiness?
You might want …
… One time I was at a Buddhist study center where they were giving a
course on the Karaniya Metta Sutta. I’d given a course the weekend
before and was staying on to meditate and
read in the library. I learned that at this particular course, they
were going through the sutta line by line, first in Pali, and then
through different translations of …
… Of course the more stringent side of metta is that if you really do wish yourself happiness, what are you doing? Why are you living this way? Why do you do these things? Why do you say these things? Why do you think these things? If you were really serious about your happiness, you’d change the way you live. In this way, thoughts …
… In the
Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta, the Buddha talks about
all that goes into living a life that makes it possible for your
goodwill to be honest and sincere.
It requires being restrained. In fact, the Buddha calls goodwill a
type of restraint. You don’t usually think of it that way. As an
unlimited attitude, how is it restrained? It’s restrained in that …
… Ajaan Suwat was once sitting in the sala at Wat Metta*. *He pointed to
Mount Palomar, which is across the large valley there, and asked some
of the lay people, “Is that mountain heavy?” Now, you know when an
ajaan asks a question like that, it’s a trick question. Nobody dared
to answer. So he provided the answer himself. He said, “If you …
… Is your way of
life really in line with that intention?
That chant we had just now, the Karaniya Metta Sutta: Go back and look
at the first several passages. It doesn’t start out immediately with
just saying goodwill for everybody. It talks about how you live: You
want to be someone who takes criticism easily, someone who’s not so
busy with …
