Loving Kindness
Tuesday July 18, 2006
I’ve been thinking lately about the metta-bhavana, the meditation practice for the cultivation of loving kindness. The metta-bhavana is the systematic practice of cultivating a heartfelt desire for the welfare of others. There’s a fuller explanation of the practice, with links, on Wikipedia.
There are various approaches to metta practice, but most of them begin with a reflection upon oneself, before extending out to include those with whom the meditator is in some kind of relationship, and then finally broadening this metta to all living beings. What I want to do here is offer a few reflections on the practice, drawn from a reading of Buddhaghosha’s The Path of Purification (see here), under three headings: metta for oneself; metta for your neighbours; and metta for all beings. The practice, as I see it, is not at all about feelings of lovingkindness (I always think of Leonard Cohen’s line: “I don’t trust my inner feelings / Inner feelings come and go”...), but about something else: a kind of recognition of the truth of things. In this light, the practice of metta is very clearly an insight or vipassana practice (however it is traditionally classified).
Oneself.
Buddhaghosha says that first of all metta should be developed ‘only to oneself’. But he immediately cautions that on the subject of this systematic cultivation of loving kindness towards oneself, the earlier Pali texts are silent. Nevertheless, Buddhaghosha’s inclusion of the first person in the metta practice is vital and is there for a very specific purpose, one significantly different from the pop-psychology idea (made painfully memorable by Whitney Houston) of ‘learning to love yourself.’ For Buddhaghosha, this first stage is important because it gives us a real, living, existential sense what it means to be happy, what it means to suffer, what it means to be in dread of pain. We cannot get this from anywhere else but from our own experience. If we don’t start here, then we will be cut adrift from the urgent reality that this practice attempts to bring to light.
Even if [the monk] developed lovingkindness for a hundred or a thousand years in this way, ‘I am happy’ and so on, absorption would never arise. But if he develops it in this way: ‘I am happy. Just as I want to be happy and dread pain, as I want to live and not to die, so do other beings, too,’ making himself the example, then desire for other beings welfare and happiness arises in him (Buddhaghosha, The Path of Purification IX 10)
Buddhaghosha then goes on to quote the Udana, where the Buddha says,
I visited all quarters with my mind
Nor found I any dearer than myself;
Self is likewise to every other dear;
Who loves himself will never harm another.
You could put it like this: only with a full recognition of the depths of our own self-cherishing is it possible to recognise the depth of our obligations and responsibilities towards others.
This may come as something of a shock. Buddhists often spend their time fretting over their self-cherishing, worrying that they have too much of it, berating themselves for it. But the Udana quote suggests that self-cherishing is a fact of life, and is not something to be got rid of. It is not something to be resisted, but to be explored, to be inquired into, to be understood. Through investigating our own self-cherishing, we become more intimately familiar with the pleasures and the sufferings of existence. And we become more able to respond to the pleasures and sufferings of others.
Neighbours.
Next Buddhaghosha encourages us to explore our relationships with those with whom we are in contact: our neighbours. He begins with the easier ones – those to whom we are grateful or dearly loved friends. With the strong basis of recognising our own self-cherishing, we then recognise that these others too are like us, they too fear pain and suffering and wish for happiness. And from there we move on: maintaining this recognition of this common basis, we turn our minds and our hearts towards somebody to whom we feel neutral, then towards somebody towards whom we feel hostile, if there be any such at the moment (Buddhaghosha cautions against inventing hostilities where none exist!). Once the mind has been made malleable, the meditator should “break down the barriers by practising lovingkindness over and over again, accomplishing mental impartiality towards the four persons, that is to say, himself, the dear person, the neutral person and the hostile person.’ (IX 40)
Love your neighbours: the more I reflect upon this injunction, the more impressed I am by it. We do not choose our neighbours. They simply rub up against us – in the bus queue, in the street in which we live, on the train. Some of them we like, a great many of them we are neutral towards, some we are hostile towards. The Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig points out that we are never without neighbours: that the “nighest is really always found” (Rosenzweig 270). The danger with talking about universal lovingkindness is that in our commitment to the ideal, we may find ourselves ‘leaping over’ our inconvenient neighbours. In this way, Rosenzweig points out, “the tyrants of the kingdom of heaven, far from hastening the advent of the kingdom, only delay it. They leave their nighest unloved, and long for the next-but-one…” (Rosenzweig 271).
Buddhaghosha, too, seems aware of this danger. He suggests a test: let us imagine that the four people – oneself, a friend, a neutral person, an enemy – have been set upon by bandits who ask for the sacrifice of one individual. If and only if the meditator cannot make any distinction between the four (IX 41), then the work on this stage of the meditation should continue. Even if the meditator thinks, ‘Let the bandits take me, but not these three others,’ it is a sign that there is more work to be done. But if the meditator can make no distinction – these four are all simply beings who fear suffering and long for happiness, who are vulnerable, subject to pain, soft and liable to wounding, longing for some kind of peace – then, and only then, can the meditation proceed to the final stage.
But is this a practicable goal, this equality of response towards all? I think it probably is, but only if we recognise in a genuinely real, existential sense the common shared basis that Buddhaghosha has been so keen to stress from the outset – the fact that we all alike fear pain and want happiness. It is nothing to do with liking or disliking. The point of the meditation is to put these on one side and to see, for a while, a more fundamental truth about what unites us as living beings.
Universal Love?
If this truth has – just for the time being, perhaps – been recognised, Buddhaghosha says that ‘the sign [of] and access [to absorption]’ have been attained by the meditator (IX 43), the barriers broken down. At this point it is possible to extend metta more broadly, through the power of the imagination, reaching out in all directions, taking in all beings without exception (IX 53).
This final stage seems to me to be another kind of recognition. If the first stage is a recognition of my own longing for peace, my own fear of suffering and death, my own self cherishing, and if the second stage is a recognition of the same things in others, the third stage is a recognition that there is life – with its joys and sufferings – beyond our own sphere of experience. There are those whom we may never meet, whom we have yet to meet, whom we met long ago and will never meet again, whose lives continue, who cherish themselves every bit as much as we do.
Image: Duane
Quotes from Rosenzweig from The Star of Redemption
Read Sharon Salzburg’s book on Loving Kindness
Looking at the two articles ‘Metta’ and ‘Sociality and solitude’ made me reflect more deeply on my own practice.
When I practise metta bhavana, there is first inner solitude. A friendly space to just breathe. Perhaps, a sigh of relief. Sooner or later the guests arrive – thoughts, feelings. The four usual suspects ’ self, friend, casual acquaintance and enemy’are at this party of one. Sociality has sneakily replaced solitude. As my metta progresses, it seems more like a masked ball.
p.s. in the story you gave, was the bandit not included in the metta ?
— Pramila · Jul 22, 11:28 AM · #
I like the idea of “guests”, Pramila. Metta practice as a kind of hospitality. This is worth some thought.
As for the bandits, Buddhaghosha doesn’t include him them the metta, but I see no reason not to.
All the best,
Will
Hello: in todays day and age there is need for peace…and it is not enough to say it..we have to go and practice it. Spread this thought. For those reasons we recommend the film Buddha Wild Monk in the Hut www.buddhawild.com now available on Amazon.
