A metta meditation

[In re: Cloud Floating Free Sangha facilitation 26.02.15]

This is largely based on the metta we recited at the beginning of meditation in the first sangha I was involved in, in Lawrence Kansas, and then I’ve modified it over the years; as noted in my facilitation, I used this to conclude the guided meditations I did for the Insight Meditation Community of Charlottesville (along with a number of other people) remotely during COVID, and this style of metta meditation largely used by the Theravadan monks doing the fabulously successful Walk for Peace that concluded on Wednesday.

While the Buddha provided a couple of metta meditations recorded in the Pali Canon—see below—the form commonly used today comes from the Visuddhimaga—”The Path of Pureification”—a text by Buddhaghosa from the “golden age of Buddhist philosophy” around the 5th century CE, or about 1000 years after the time of the Buddha. The Visuddhimaga actually suggests that all four of the bharmaviharas—the “divine abodes” of compassion, metta, empathetic joy, and equanimity—can be used, but metta, and, I’m guessing, compassion, are the two most common.

In this form, the same set of aspirations are repeated for several different recepients:

• Yourself
• A benefactor (I use “Those who help me and those who are helping others”)
• A friend
• A neutral person (I combine “friend” and “neutral” into “my communities”)
• A difficult person: “those who annoy me”: see note 1
• All beings (lots of variations on this in the suttas but I’m just using “all beings, near and far, seen and unseen”)

Since going through all six of these takes a while, when tagging this onto the end of a guided meditation, I just choose two or three depending on what’s going on, then always ending with “All beings”.

The metta phrases

• May X be happy
• May X be safe, both in body and in spirit
• May X be free from suffering and understand the causes of suffering
• May X be free from reactivity and attachment to reactivity [sometimes as an alternative or addition to the above: see note 2]
• May X dwell in dignity, gratitude, compassion, [benevolence, good will, lovingkindness], joy, and equanimity. see note 3
• May X be peaceful and at ease (one of the several standard ways to end the phrases)

At one of the retreats I was on with Donald Rothberg, he passed out a list of something like 30 different possible phrases for metta meditation: none of these formulations were on there. So, obviously, lots of ways to do these, which I think makes it interesting. One of those advantages of Buddhism being experiential rather than having a fixed sacred text.

So, “loving kindness”??: is that even English?

Or hypenated? Well, no so much, and notice that of the four brahmaviharas, it is the only place where the Pali word is used instead of a perfectly common English word. While “loving-kindness” is in very common contemporary use in Buddhist practice, I will typically use the word “benevolence” or “good will”, and I think in terms of Western spiritual practice, the Christian New Testament term “agape” is quite close. While I’ve not practiced it, my sense is that Sufism has a very sophisticated similar practice.

The historical metta suttas

Well, as so often is the case, Wikipedia has a nice discussion. But, briefly, there are two suttas in the Pali canon dealing with metta, and while quite lovely, neither is similar in structure to the Visuddhimaga practice we typically use today. Instead, according to the commentaries, these were originally suggested by the Buddha to some monks who were having difficulties with the spirits of the forest where they were meditating, who wanted the monks to go away. Or, for the materialists among you, some monks were probably cold, lonely, tired, and hungry and wanted some reassurance. The words of the Buddha provided that or, to the nonmaterialists among you, reassured the forest spirits, who then accepted the monks.

Metta in contemporary practice

In contemporary US practice. metta meditation was popularized in the works of Sharon Salzberg, one of the founders of the Insight Meditation Society, notably in her first book, Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, and specifically in the therapeutic form of metta towards the self, the first object of Buddhaghosa’s rendition. As one teacher—I believe I heard this on a retreat with Mary Aubry—has put it, “Every day you should at least micro-dose on self-compassion.”

Hey, it’s not doing anything for me…

This being 21st century USA, land of instant gratification, I am a bit hesitant to mention this last point, but multiple very experienced national-level teachers have said that it took them about ten years to “get” metta, and before that, it was fake-it-’til-you-make-it. This also is completely consistent with my experience, and also, when you finally “get it”, it’s one of those “Oh, now I see what this is about!” things. I’m inclined to doubt that the ten year threshold is somehow special—which is to say, your returns may different, in either direction, depending on your practice and hey, maybe even past lives—but it doesn’t seem to come immediately.

For what it’s worth, in my experience the “metta” based on compassion feels distinctly different than metta based on, well, metta, and sometimes one works when the other doesn’t. I had a fairly profound experience on an extended silent retreat where, when we broke silence, someone came up and thanked me for having sent compassion a couple days earlier. Which I had in fact been doing on the occasion. Seems like there’s something real here.

Notes

1. In the Kansas sangha, we used “may my enemies…”, but that’s a bit intense, and instructions I’ve heard from various teachers always advise “‘difficult’, but not that difficult: say 8 out of 10.” And don’t immediately bring up someone political. Hence I came up with “Those who annoy me”, which seems about right.
2. I’ve played around with this over the years: “reactivity” is in lots of contexts a better translation of “dukha” than “suffering”—as Donald Rothberg has quipped, “a great deal of suffering has been caused by translating ‘duhka’ as ‘suffering’”, and “attachment” gets at craving, so this is essentially expressing the first and second Noble Truths. That said, the conventional sense of “suffering” may also be relevant as that conveys concern about physical suffering—poverty, hunger, pain, etc.—as well as psychological.
3. As noted, last four terms are the brahmaviharas, with the usual uncertainty about how to translate “metta”, and “empathetic joy” (mudita in Pali) is awkward, so I simplified to just “joy”. In the COVID-era meditations, I added “dignity” after the George Floyd protests, and I think I added gratitude about the same time: gratitude shows up a lot in the suttas, and definitely in Plum Village practice.