As with many Pāli words (e.g., dhamma, samkhāra, etc.), it's hard to provide a simplistic one-dimensional translation of the phrase "mettā", often crudely translated as loving-kindness. When you read through the Sutta Nipata and the early texts, it comes across more as unconditional or unconstrained friendliness which is far easier to practice in real life, even when you can't make yourself feel loving-kindness.
There are several other passages from the oldest strata of Pāli texts, e.g., the SNP (Sutta Nipata) and some of the connected discourses (Samyutta Nikāya) that talk more about metta, a rich and complex tapestry that paints a picture of the actual and original intent behind the word or phrase.
This talk by Prof. John Peacock has some good insights into the phrase mettā, and provides a good overall context.
Mettā is part of the four brahmavihārās or practises to cultivate wholesome states of mind, the others being karuṇā (compassion & kindness for oneself and for others), muditā (simplistically translated as "empathetic joy") and upekkhā (equanimity).
Interesting to see this here, without any context attached. I've been practicing loving kindness meditation for a few months now and the results have been incredible.
I'm atheist, pretty sure reincarnation is bullshit, but the method described in this sutta works. In mundane terms, you can train your brain to be happier and more joyful by those simple visualizations.
I'm not quite sure what is the role of spreading kindness in all directions, perhaps it somehow ties our perception of space and time, which is always present, with good feelings - what fires together, wires together - making them more likely to appear in future.
> I'm atheist, pretty sure reincarnation is bullshit...
It is fairly easy to conclude that existence is bullshit. The evidence is that the whole world is a soup of atoms and any particular group of atoms that believes it is distinct from the rest is just confused.
If that makes sense to you, then either you don't exist now and you won't exist again ... or you do exist now and you will exist again. Or, to repeat that with different words, if you exist now you will reincarnate later. This perspective meshes extremely neatly with Buddhist philosophy. Although the idea that people can remember past lives is highly suspect.
I have fantasized about a secular technological possibility for reincarnation (or afterlife). It's not outrageous nowadays to consider a future tech that allows taking a backup of your brain and restoring it later in a compute substrate other than your brain. The effect would be you waking up with your memories and personality in some other place out in the far future. Now, perhaps, our brain is being constantly backed up in the nature. Perhaps, if physics gets to the bottom of everything, we can travel far enough out into outer space in an instant, and look back at the brains of people on earth as they were an arbitrarily long time ago when light bounced off of them to reach that far out, and that with insane optical zoom and perfect neural resolution, so they can restore them? Whether you wake up in a hell or a heaven, is another question.
First impression may not be great. It's kind of cringey at first. It helps to think about this on biological level - there are parts of brain that give meaning to our lives, and this is how we train them.
It is said there are 3 jewels in 'Buddhism' the Buddha, the Dhamma (The Teachings - the so called laws of nature/reality) and the Sangha.
The word Sangha gets bandied about like nobodies business these days.. and nobody seems to care either.. talk about cultural appropriation! In my opinion westerners who are not ordained and are not true aupasikas have no right to use this word, but alas they do, in droves. I think in this context it means Maha-Sangha .. that is 8 pairs or individuals 4 types of special people:
Of pure conduct is the Order of Disciples of the Blessed One. Of upright conduct is the Order of Disciples of the Blessed One. Of wise conduct is the Order of Disciples of the Blessed One. Of generous conduct is the Order of Disciples of the Blessed One. Those four pairs of persons, the eight kinds of individuals, that is the Order of Disciples of the Blessed One. They are worthy of offerings. They are worthy of hospitality. They are worthy of gifts. They are worthy of reverential salutations. The incomparable field of merit for the world.
That is where to start in my opinion. find the true Sangha. there are millions of Buddhist Monks, especially in Asia. I have heard though unfortunately there are only a few thousand perhaps, a handful, practising the true way now. That sadly is the times we are living in. The end of days.. But that is where to start in my opinion. Good luck finding them.
Two very nice meditation teachers, very skilled. They practice and teach for many years, long time based in Thailand. I like their approach of Compassionate Understanding, compared with some of the more achievement minded approaches we find often in Buddhism in the West.
I still find myself going back to Ram Dass and Alan Watts. There is magic in their experiences which shows in their storytelling. They know very well the limits of their experiences. There is a talk in which Ram Dass is telling story about his Guru and at the same time deconstructing it in a funny way.
Love Alan Watts lectures, the way he explains things they just seem to make sense. He’s very good at translating the meaning of eastern philosophies into western concepts
My meditation teacher described two types of meditation practices designed to train your mind to be more loving and compassionate and therefore happier. I'd like to share a little about them in the off-chance they're beneficial.
One type is to envision the pain and suffering of people and respond compassionately in a way that eliminates their pain and suffering. When I was suffering terribly myself I constantly wished for others who were in similar difficulties to be freed immediately. This actually made me feel a lot better. The problem is that for some people dwelling on suffering is a real bummer.
The second type is similar to the text linked above: cherishing all beings as they are, as if they were your very children that you love so so much. Lately, my meditations have started to transition toward this type and I've felt spontaneous feelings of bliss and love toward others that grows the more I do it. And this kindness is naturally starting to come out in my behavior and interactions with others.
In both cases, the meditations develop "bodhicitta", which is a word that describes the attitude of wishing others well. It's said that this attitude, when trained, nourished, and grown is the very cause of all happiness and when perfected causes happiness to bloom uninterruptedly. Therefore, it is an extremely beneficial and powerful practice.
It's fantastic to see this text linked on Hacker News even without much context. Wishing you all well!
Nice to see you name them as a pair. Very often, people seem to focus on Metta only, maybe due to the focus on this Sutta.
To my understanding, Compassion / Lovingkindness are linked and often arise together, and it's a bit odd to wish to separate them too strongly: When contemplating other's and out own Dukkha, Compassion may arise, wishing for it to cease. Lovingkindness may then arise, wishing for there to be happiness and peace instead. They both work together.
By contemplating Dukkha we better understand this Characteristic of existence, and develop Compassion/Lovingkindess. To avoid getting too "down" by too much Dukkha meditation, Sympathetic Joy with one's and other's good qualities or good actions we can brighten the mind. and Equanimity helps us from falling into grief/anger on one side, and euphoria and avoiding the truth of existence on the other.
So the Brahma Viharas work together and aren't too artificially / forcefully separated.
Abhidhamma Lessons: A Top-Down Approach Using Computer Science
Author is a former programmer who uses computer science methods to discuss Buddhism's approach to understanding the mind and reality. I found it interesting!
Although the prose is beautiful, the word lovingkindness has a different meaning. It was an English word invented to translate hesed in Hebrew into English. The Word of God, esp in King James Bible, uses this word to explain how God loves His chosen people.
We are undeserving, evil people who deserve justice for our sins. Instead, God offers us a chance to repent and follow Him out of pure grace. He makes a covenant backed by His own name. Within that covenant, He preserves us in eternal life forever while using us to His glory in this life. If we fall, He’ll discipline us but never let us go. That’s out of His love and character.
This undeserved grace for those following Jesus Christ is what the Bible calls hesed, or lovingkindness.
Grace is anything that’s not deserved that is given. You could tell your kid they get a new car so long as they do their homework every night. They could do this and still not deserve a car. You don’t have to give it. So, that would still be an act of grace even in conditional.
Whereas, while we were still sinners (enemies of God), Christ died for us. He laid His life down for us. He left everything He had in heaven to save those He loved. At every point, we were undeserving enemies. If we repent and trust Him, we still keep turning on Him and failing. Yet, nobody can snatch us out of His hand.
That’s grace upon grace that God lavishes upon those who believe in Jesus Christ.
We all tell ourselves that. God is holy, loving, and just. He’s that all of the time. Heaven will be life without a single act of evil. God’s definition of good is that you obey Him and love others without failure.
In your case, you can test yourself using Romans 1:
Have you ever lied, stolen, cheated, shown apathy, lusted, or wished evil on someone? Have you rejected the true God or tried to live your own way instead of His? These are evil per the God that defines what morality is.
“The wages of sin is death but the free gift of God us eternal life in Jesus Christ.”
Fortunately for you and I, the only good person to ever live… tempted in all ways we are but having committed no sin… earned God’s favor for you, died for your sins, was raised again, and offered you eternal life in His name. You just have to repent and put your trust in what He did. He’ll also transform you from the inside out when the Spirit of God dwells in you.
Nor am I. And I don't appreciate the implied equating of "justice" with punishment.
More broadly, I don't think "evil" is a useful word; it refers to (a) the embodiment of everything that is irremediably bad, and (b) to people or actions that are irremediably bad. I don't think such people and actions exist, and I don't think pure badness is embodied anywhere.
I love how this sutta makes it clear what its definition of pure love is (wishing that everyone is well, unconditionally), and that this should be cultivated towards all beings, including animals.
Sadly though most Buddhist laypeople are not vegan, though some popular teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh did promote minimising the suffering of animals via such practical means as making vegan choices..
Regarding meditation, Ajahn Brahm from the Thai Forest Tradition has taught extensively not just focused Metta Meditation, but how Metta (i.e. love/acceptance) towards the present moment is a key part of other techniques like meditation of breathing. One of his books, "Kindfulness", really gets into this.
Like nearly all Buddhist teachings, there are practices you can do to develop these faculties. For example, you can reflect that all beings have at one time or another been your mother, or your child; realizing this, how can you feel hatred towards any other being?
It doesn't work for me, of course; I don't believe in rebirth.
Imo the belief in rebirth is not needed to practice metta, you just need to realize that every being wants to be happy, just like you.
Yet all of them are mired in delusion and most of the time do things which go the opposite way of generating real happiness, we all do.
Everyone is mired in delusion and most of the time react to feelings of anger and craving (vedana), which are generated based on their history, social norms and whatnot. They are just being manipulated by those all the time, unless they're very mindful of what's happening in their mind temporarily. Realizing this you can't really hate anybody, and in fact you realize they are 100% like you.
> the belief in rebirth is not needed to practice metta
That's not what I was saying; I was commenting on that suggested technique for developing metta, in particular, which is dependent on belief in rebirth.
Yeah, I don't buy the "remembering past lives" business, but "life after death" seems like a physical certainty if you're not necessarily attached to the "self"[1]. I suppose it's sort of how life works, on our planet anyway, for the last two billion years when we invented sex to outpace the viruses. Some sort of sentient planetary slime mold might have different ideas.
One thing that's interesting is that Indian philosophy of the 800-400 BCE era had a concept congruous to the Greek atomos, the kanu. One of the neat things about kanu is that it knows where it's been, in a moral sense. This was posited as one explanation for reincarnation, all your bits fly around according to these moral laws, creating new points of awareness. Bad people burn all their energy whoring around, drinking, eating, so the kanu don't have a place to go (pigs, lower castes, etc), but good people spread their lives around, and kanu get higher life forms to coalesce into (brahmins, nice people, gods, etc). Obviously there's no morals at the Planck length, but it's an interesting notion.
Auschwitz ashes in our lungs, tears of Christ in our blood. One of Buddha's "memories" of past lives was as a man who sacrificed himself to feed a starving tiger and cubs. I've always thought that locking corpses in eternal tupperware was a little creepy.
Always keep in mind, though, at the heart of a lot of Indian philosophy is a certain brutality. I mean, the word for heaven is "non-existence"; as an old professor of mine[2] once quipped, "that's a perfectly reasonable posture if you've ever been to Bangalore". The entire notion of "higher" and "lower" life forms - including different kinds of PEOPLE - sort of gives away the game. Important to remember that AAALLL of these old systems were built to justify the civilization they emerged from, and it wasn't always purty.
[1] Whatever that is. Some sort of recursive system that simulates outcomes for a given range of choices? That seems way too pat.
[2] Who was also a minister, so there's that. He already believed in a Big Rock Candy Mountain with fluffy beards and chubby wingbabies.
Regarding "the self": Buddhism is seriously conflicted about that idea. The self is said to be illusory, but we constantly apply all of our energies to defending it. Why do they go on so much about it, if it isn't real?
It's been described to me as a pathetic, insignificant thing, absolutely in need of a defender. Western (or I should say, english-speaking) Buddhist teachers call it "ego", but I'm pretty sure that's wrong, in that Freud and Jung coined the term "ego" (they had different definitions, but it's not the self from Buddhism that either of them defined).
For traditional Buddhists, the experience of "self" or atta is considered an illusion, like a mirage, or perhaps a rainbow. The argument is that the phenomenological world is impermanent and formless, so the things that we experience via the senses are not representative of the "real stuff" out there. The self is built on these, so itself is also impermanent, and not an eternal quality. It's not bad exactly - later traditions posit that these aggregates or skandas of the self are the root of personality - but clinging to the impermanent self or samsaric phenomenon is, well, the root of suffering. And Buddha's all about suffering; if hypocrisy was Christ's kryptonite, then suffering is definitely the Shakya Buddha's. There's also another word for "self" that identifies with a sort of universal self, which is actually eternal, but it's also completely incomprehensible, by definition of its being infinite. And there's a whole bunch of later traditions. It's a lot to unpack.
I'd recommend picking up a good survey, some I remember as an undergrad were :
The First Cities, D. Hamblin
The Wonder that was India, A. Bassam
Indian Atheism, D. Chattopadhyaya, who also did a survey on Lokayata, an early Materialist movement in the subcontinent.
It's a useful shared illusion, but not 'real' once you reach a certain level of meditative concentration.
If you look at a bicycle wheel in motion, you don't see the spokes. If you and everyone you knew had only ever seen wheels in motion, you'd talk about a semi transparent field from the centre to the rim. You would all describe the same phenomena.
I was at a meditation retreat, and I caught a glimpse of the spokes. That's how I've explained it to others.
Does the self seem real? Yes. Is it a useful construct? Can we predict it and manipulate it? Yes. Once you've followed the meditation practices, do you see that it's an illusion? That was absolutely my experience.
Which is a round about way of saying, the conflict you perceive in Buddhism is rooted in the ongoing struggle to perceive the nature of the self, and to notice when your practice becomes entangled in its illusions.
> For example, you can reflect that all beings have at one time or another been your mother, or your child; realizing this, how can you feel hatred towards any other being?
What's the exact cosmology again?
1. Every being is likely to be your mother
2. Every being has been your mother with certainty (beginningless time)
Buddhist cosmology holds that the cycle of rebirth is endless, so all beings have been your mother and your child at some time in the past, and will be again in the future.
So it's 2.
And for clarity, the view is that time is both beginningless and endless.
Well, honestly I don't know. If I had feelings of loving kindness, I'd know that; but that would be just feelings. I don't have a loving-kindness detector, and I wouldn't know how to calibrate it if I did.
I suppose one could work from hatred; people generally know if they hate something. So if one has reduced the incidence of hatred, then perhaps you could say the technique worked. I used the technique (along with others) over a period of a couple of decades, during which I "suspended belief" concerning rebirth. But over a couple of decades, it's quite possible that my personality changed for other reasons - such as other techniques, or watching my children grow up, or simply maturing.
Sorry, but I don't think metta amounts to feeling "a bit happier" or "being in a good mood".
Metta is one of the four Brahma Viharas (foundations of Brahma). Another is karuna, or compassion; wishing others not to suffer. The standard practice in Tibet for generating compassion is called tong len ("sending and receiving", sorry, I don't know any Sanskrit word for it). You imagine someone else's suffering as a black cloud, breathe it in, and breathe out all your goodness and happiness as a white cloud, which you imagine going into them. It's a simple bolt-on for ordinary meditation on the breath. [Edit] If you have a real, suffering person to practise on, I was told that helps a lot.
Practising tong len is liable to cause depression in the practitioner, or so I was told. It's not tantric, you don't need permission to do it; but it's probably not a good idea to try it unless you have an experienced meditation instructor.
"Feeling good" is not a sign of progress in meditation.
I'm sure there are well established practices in Tibet but IMO there is nothing special about them, which is why there are multiple schools of Buddhism instead of just one.
I had a real suffering person to practice on (me) which is why I'm quite certain about what I wrote. If you have capability to improve your mood on demand, your entire approach to life changes. You can be selfless, take risk, work long hours, even if entire world collapses, you will always have metta to support you. This is how I understand equanimity at the moment.
I can't help but feel happiness and goodwill for a cute cat or bunny. Once I have that feeling, I can pay attention to it, keep it going, sit with it, or wish that feeling for myself or to others. If I lose it, I just bring up an endearing image or thought of the cat/bunny/my kiddo and pay attention to that feeling again.
Both of my "children" are adults in their 30s; either of them could kill me with their bare hands if they chose to.
I don't think loving kindness manifests when I smile at someone; I think it manifests when I forgive them for some outrage that has left me seething. That is, I don't associate loving-kindness particularly with good feelings.
> Both of my "children" are adults in their 30s; either of them could kill me with their bare hands if they chose to.
My friend, if this is truly the state of your relationship with your children then I'm so sorry. I wish you a swift resolution to any and all ill-will.
> I don't think loving kindness manifests when I smile at someone; I think it manifests when I forgive them for some outrage that has left me seething. That is, I don't associate loving-kindness particularly with good feelings.
It sounds like loving-kindness practices don't work particularly well for you but forgiveness does so that's great. Still, I hope you get to feel a sense of warm-heartedness toward yourself and others. Even the Dalai Lama, one of the preeminent Buddhist figures in the world, says his true religion is kindness.
> Warm-heartedness is my favourite subject. As human beings our mothers gave birth to us and we survived because of her care and affection. Warm-heartedness is not only the key factor for human survival, it’s also the basis for being able to live as peaceful, happy human beings.
Always a pleasure to see ATI links on here, especially when it's something like this, which has to be one of the most beautiful and practical suttas in the Pali canon.
Transcribing buddha-dharma has long been praised as a meritorious act. In the modern era, it'd be hard to beat John Bullitt in his practice of it.
Yeah, practical hermeneutics involve a healthy sprinkle of our reality into those texts.
And it makes sense that modern problems aren't well treated by sutras or vedic texts. Deadlines are ever shortening, everything is vying for our attention.
A project that we're very attached to because the failure of delivering means you could get sacked (usually, our minds jump straight to the worst case: we WILL get sacked) is probably something unheard of in the times of the Buddha. But it's just hard-mode life compared to what they wrote. The patterns are the same, but you have less HP, and you're full of debuffs.
Under that lens, those texts are mostly timeless and independent of which era you read it on. If you understand that you're working on a team, that your agency is only one part of the success. There's all sort of factors that go into the success or failure of the project, and all you can do is the work you've been assigned to. That's where you can care and do the best work that you can while still being dispassionate about the project's success or failure, and thus less affected by the pressures of the deadlines, less stressed by the pressures from the higher ups, the estimates you know are completely wrong, etc.
Of course, all of this is assuming you're working on the kind of project I'm imagining, but it should apply to other things too
There are several other passages from the oldest strata of Pāli texts, e.g., the SNP (Sutta Nipata) and some of the connected discourses (Samyutta Nikāya) that talk more about metta, a rich and complex tapestry that paints a picture of the actual and original intent behind the word or phrase.
This talk by Prof. John Peacock has some good insights into the phrase mettā, and provides a good overall context.
https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/2600
Mettā is part of the four brahmavihārās or practises to cultivate wholesome states of mind, the others being karuṇā (compassion & kindness for oneself and for others), muditā (simplistically translated as "empathetic joy") and upekkhā (equanimity).