4👑☸4bv☮️🔬

25.1 – results for (STED 4bv) Brahma vihāra formula

Results for:

mettāsahagatena cetasā

DN: 8

MN: 18

SN: 10

AN: 10

KN: 5

mettāsahagatena cetasā (51)

AN 3.63 Buddha does 4bv in all 4 postures

AN 3.63

AN 3, 2. dutiyapaṇṇāsakaṃ, (7) 2. mahāvaggo, 3. venāgapurasuttaṃ AN 3.64, para. 8 ⇒

“katamaṃ pana taṃ, bho gotama, brahmaṃ uccāsayanamahāsayanaṃ, yassa bhavaṃ gotamo etarahi nikāmalābhī akicchalābhī akasiralābhī”ti? “idhāhaṃ, brāhmaṇa, yaṃ gāmaṃ vā nigamaṃ vā upanissāya viharāmi, so pubbaṇhasamayaṃ nivāsetvā pattacīvaramādāya tameva gāmaṃ vā nigamaṃ vā piṇḍāya pavisāmi. so pacchābhattaṃ piṇḍapātapaṭikkanto vanantaññeva pavisāmi. so yadeva tattha honti tiṇāni vā paṇṇāni vā tāni ekajjhaṃ saṅgharitvā nisīdāmi pallaṅkaṃ ābhujitvā ujuṃ kāyaṃ paṇidhāya parimukhaṃ satiṃ upaṭṭhapetvā. so mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharāmi, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ, iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjhena {abyāpajjhena (sabbattha)} pharitvā viharāmi. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharāmi, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ {catutthiṃ (sī.)}, iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjhena pharitvā viharāmi. so ce ahaṃ, brāhmaṇa, evaṃbhūto caṅkamāmi, brahmā me eso tasmiṃ samaye caṅkamo hoti. so ce ahaṃ, brāhmaṇa, evaṃbhūto tiṭṭhāmi. pe. nisīdāmi. pe. seyyaṃ kappemi, brahmaṃ me etaṃ tasmiṃ samaye uccāsayanamahāsayanaṃ hoti. idaṃ kho, brāhmaṇa, brahmaṃ uccāsayanamahāsayanaṃ, yassāhaṃ etarahi nikāmalābhī akicchalābhī akasiralābhī”ti.

SN 3.65 famous Kālāma (kesamutti) sutta, won 4 assurances

AN 3.65

AN 3, 2. dutiyapaṇṇāsakaṃ, (7) 2. mahāvaggo, 5. kesamuttisuttaṃ AN 3.66, para. 42 ⇒

“sa kho so {yo kho (ka.)}, kālāmā, ariyasāvako evaṃ vigatābhijjho vigatabyāpādo asammūḷho sampajāno patissato {sato (ka.)} mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ, iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjhena pharitvā viharati. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ, iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjhena pharitvā viharati.

AN 3.66 Sāḷha sutta, similar to kalama, using 4bv to attain arahantship

AN 3.66

AN 3, 2. dutiyapaṇṇāsakaṃ, (7) 2. mahāvaggo, 6. sāḷhasuttaṃ AN 3.67, para. 46 ⇒

“sa kho so, sāḷhā, ariyasāvako evaṃ vigatābhijjho vigatabyāpādo asammūḷho sampajāno patissato mettāsahagatena cetasā. pe. karuṇā. pe. muditā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ, iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjhena pharitvā viharati. so evaṃ pajānāti — ‘atthi idaṃ, atthi hīnaṃ, atthi paṇītaṃ, atthi imassa saññāgatassa uttari {uttariṃ (sī. syā. kaṃ. pī.)} nissaraṇan’ti. tassa evaṃ jānato evaṃ passato kāmāsavāpi cittaṃ vimuccati, bhavāsavāpi cittaṃ vimuccati, avijjāsavāpi cittaṃ vimuccati; vimuttasmiṃ vimuttamiti ñāṇaṃ hoti. ‘khīṇā jāti, vusitaṃ brahmacariyaṃ, kataṃ karaṇīyaṃ, nāparaṃ itthattāyā’ti pajānāti.

AN 4.125 leading to rebirth in brahma realms

AN 4.125

AN 4, 3. tatiyapaṇṇāsakaṃ, (13) 3. bhayavaggo, 5. paṭhamamettāsuttaṃ AN 4.125, para. 1 ⇒

125. “cattārome, bhikkhave, puggalā santo saṃvijjamānā lokasmiṃ. katame cattāro? idha, bhikkhave, ekacco puggalo mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ tathā tatiyaṃ tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. so tadassādeti, taṃ nikāmeti, tena ca vittiṃ āpajjati. tattha ṭhito tadadhimutto tabbahulavihārī aparihīno kālaṃ kurumāno brahmakāyikānaṃ devānaṃ sahabyataṃ upapajjati. brahmakāyikānaṃ, bhikkhave, devānaṃ kappo āyuppamāṇaṃ. tattha puthujjano yāvatāyukaṃ ṭhatvā yāvatakaṃ tesaṃ devānaṃ āyuppamāṇaṃ taṃ sabbaṃ khepetvā nirayampi gacchati tiracchānayonimpi gacchati pettivisayampi gacchati. bhagavato pana sāvako tattha yāvatāyukaṃ ṭhatvā yāvatakaṃ tesaṃ devānaṃ āyuppamāṇaṃ taṃ sabbaṃ khepetvā tasmiṃyeva bhave parinibbāyati. ayaṃ kho, bhikkhave, viseso ayaṃ adhippayāso idaṃ nānākaraṇaṃ sutavato ariyasāvakassa assutavatā puthujjanena, yadidaṃ gatiyā upapattiyā sati.

AN 4.126 combining 11 contemplations with nonreturn brahma realm

AN 4.126

AN 4, 3. tatiyapaṇṇāsakaṃ, (13) 3. bhayavaggo, 6. dutiyamettāsuttaṃ AN 4.126, para. 1 ⇒

126. “cattārome, bhikkhave, puggalā santo saṃvijjamānā lokasmiṃ. katame cattāro? idha, bhikkhave, ekacco puggalo mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ tathā tatiyaṃ tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. so yadeva tattha hoti rūpagataṃ vedanāgataṃ saññāgataṃ saṅkhāragataṃ viññāṇagataṃ te dhamme aniccato dukkhato rogato gaṇḍato sallato aghato ābādhato parato palokato suññato anattato samanupassati. so kāyassa bhedā paraṃ maraṇā suddhāvāsānaṃ devānaṃ sahabyataṃ upapajjati. ayaṃ, bhikkhave, upapatti asādhāraṇā puthujjanehi.

AN 4.190 doing 4bv is attaining the state of a brahma, state of deva = 4 jhānas

AN 4.190

AN 4, 4. catutthapaṇṇāsakaṃ, (19) 4. brāhmaṇavaggo, 10. uposathasuttaṃ AN 4.190, para. 5 ⇒

“kathañca, bhikkhave, bhikkhu brahmappatto hoti? idha, bhikkhave, bhikkhu mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ tathā tatiyaṃ tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. karuṇā. muditā. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ tathā tatiyaṃ tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. evaṃ kho, bhikkhave, bhikkhu brahmappatto hoti.

AN 5.192 teaches brahman 5 ancient lost distinctions

AN 5.192

AN 5, 4. catutthapaṇṇāsakaṃ, (20) 5. brāhmaṇavaggo, 2. doṇabrāhmaṇasuttaṃ AN 5.192, para. 6 ⇒

“tattha ca, doṇa, ko dhammo? neva kasiyā na vaṇijjāya na gorakkhena na issatthena {na issattena (ka.)} na rājaporisena na sippaññatarena, kevalaṃ bhikkhācariyāya kapālaṃ anatimaññamāno. so ācariyassa ācariyadhanaṃ niyyādetvā {nīyyādetvā (sī.), nīyādetvā (pī.), niyyātetvā (katthaci)} kesamassuṃ ohāretvā kāsāyāni vatthāni acchādetvā agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbajati. so evaṃ pabbajito samāno mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ tathā tatiyaṃ tathā catutthaṃ {catutthiṃ (sī.)}, iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena {abyāpajjhena (ka.) abyābajjhena (?)} pharitvā viharati. karuṇā. pe. muditā. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ tathā tatiyaṃ tathā catutthaṃ, iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. so ime cattāro brahmavihāre bhāvetvā kāyassa bhedā paraṃ maraṇā sugatiṃ brahmalokaṃ upapajjati. evaṃ kho, doṇa, brāhmaṇo brahmasamo hoti.

AN 9.18 eight uposatha sila + metta (but not other 3)

AN 9.18

AN 9, 1. paṭhamapaṇṇāsakaṃ, 2. sīhanādavaggo, 8. navaṅguposathasuttaṃ AN 9.18, para. 3 ⇒

“mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ tathā tatiyaṃ tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena {abyāpajjhena (ka.), abyābajjhena (?)} pharitvā viharati. iminā navamena aṅgena samannāgato hoti. evaṃ upavuttho kho, bhikkhave, navahaṅgehi samannāgato uposatho mahapphalo hoti mahānisaṃso mahājutiko mahāvipphāro”ti. aṭṭhamaṃ.

AN 10.219 kamma, rebirth, mind, The Deed-Born Body

AN 10.219

AN 10, 5. pañcamapaṇṇāsakaṃ, (21) 1. karajakāyavaggo, 9. karajakāyasuttaṃ AN 10.219, para. 2 ⇒

“sa kho so, bhikkhave, ariyasāvako evaṃ vigatābhijjho vigatabyāpādo asammūḷho sampajāno paṭissato mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati tathā dutiyaṃ tathā tatiyaṃ tathā catutthaṃ {catutthiṃ (?)} . iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati.

AN 11.16 same as MN 52, 11 doors to deathless

AN 11.16

AN 11, 2. anussativaggo, 6. aṭṭhakanāgarasuttaṃ AN 11.16, para. 6 ⇒

“puna caparaṃ, gahapati, bhikkhu mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati tathā dutiyaṃ tathā tatiyaṃ tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. so iti paṭisañcikkhati — ‘ayampi kho mettā cetovimutti abhisaṅkhatā abhisañcetayitā’. ‘yaṃ kho pana kiñci abhisaṅkhataṃ abhisañcetayitaṃ tadaniccaṃ nirodhadhamman’ti pajānāti. so tattha ṭhito āsavānaṃ khayaṃ pāpuṇāti; no ce āsavānaṃ khayaṃ pāpuṇāti, teneva dhammarāgena tāya dhammanandiyā pañcannaṃ orambhāgiyānaṃ saṃyojanānaṃ parikkhayā opapātiko hoti tattha parinibbāyī anāvattidhammo tasmā lokā. ayampi kho, gahapati, tena bhagavatā jānatā.pe.. ananuppattaṃ vā anuttaraṃ yogakkhemaṃ anupāpuṇāti.

DN 13 Tevijja: teaches brahmins how to meet the god Brahma

DN 13

DN 1, 13. tevijjasuttaṃ, brahmalokamaggadesanā DN 13.8, para. 2 ⇒

“so mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati. tathā dutiyaṃ. tathā tatiyaṃ. tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati.

DN 17 Mahāsudassana: King does 4j then 4bv

DN 17

DN 2, 4. mahāsudassanasuttaṃ, jhānasampatti DN 17.12, para. 4 ⇒

262. “atha kho, ānanda, rājā mahāsudassano mahāviyūhā kūṭāgārā nikkhamitvā sovaṇṇamayaṃ kūṭāgāraṃ pavisitvā rūpiyamaye pallaṅke nisinno mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā vihāsi. tathā dutiyaṃ tathā tatiyaṃ tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā vihāsi. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā vihāsi tathā dutiyaṃ tathā tatiyaṃ tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā vihāsi.

DN 19 Buddha talks about past life as steward

DN 19

DN 2, 6. mahāgovindasuttaṃ, mahāgovindapabbajjā DN 19.15, para. 2 ⇒

327. “mahāgovindo, bho, brāhmaṇo mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā vihāsi, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā vihāsi. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā. pe. abyāpajjena pharitvā vihāsi sāvakānañca brahmalokasahabyatāya maggaṃ desesi.

DN 25 ascetics practicing austerities

DN 25

DN 3, 2. udumbarikasuttaṃ, parisuddhatacappattakathā DN 25.5, para. 3 ⇒

71. “so ime pañca nīvaraṇe pahāya cetaso upakkilese paññāya dubbalīkaraṇe mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati. tathā dutiyaṃ. tathā tatiyaṃ. tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati. tathā dutiyaṃ. tathā tatiyaṃ. tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati.

DN 25

DN 3, 2. udumbarikasuttaṃ, parisuddhaphegguppattakathā DN 25.6, para. 1 ⇒

72. “kittāvatā pana, bhante, tapojigucchā aggappattā ca hoti sārappattā ca? sādhu me, bhante, bhagavā tapojigucchāya aggaññeva pāpetu, sāraññeva pāpetū”ti. “idha, nigrodha, tapassī cātuyāmasaṃvarasaṃvuto hoti. kathañca, nigrodha, tapassī cātuyāmasaṃvarasaṃvuto hoti. pe. yato kho, nigrodha, tapassī cātuyāmasaṃvarasaṃvuto hoti, aduṃ cassa hoti tapassitāya. so abhiharati no hīnāyāvattati. so vivittaṃ senāsanaṃ bhajati. pe. so ime pañca nīvaraṇe pahāya cetaso upakkilese paññāya dubbalīkaraṇe mettāsahagatena cetasā. pe. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. so anekavihitaṃ pubbenivāsaṃ anussarati seyyathidaṃ — ekampi jātiṃ dvepi jātiyo tissopi jātiyo catassopi jātiyo pañcapi jātiyo dasapi jātiyo vīsampi jātiyo tiṃsampi jātiyo cattālīsampi jātiyo paññāsampi jātiyo jātisatampi jātisahassampi jātisatasahassampi anekepi saṃvaṭṭakappe anekepi vivaṭṭakappe anekepi saṃvaṭṭavivaṭṭakappe — ‘amutrāsiṃ evaṃnāmo evaṃgotto evaṃvaṇṇo evamāhāro evaṃsukhadukkhappaṭisaṃvedī evamāyupariyanto, so tato cuto amutra udapādiṃ, tatrāpāsiṃ evaṃnāmo evaṃgotto evaṃvaṇṇo evamāhāro evaṃsukhadukkhappaṭisaṃvedī evamāyupariyanto, so tato cuto idhūpapanno’ti. iti sākāraṃ sauddesaṃ anekavihitaṃ pubbenivāsaṃ anussarati.

DN 25

DN 3, 2. udumbarikasuttaṃ, parisuddhāggappattasārappattakathā DN 25.7, para. 1 ⇒

73. “kittāvatā pana, bhante, tapojigucchā aggappattā ca hoti sārappattā ca? sādhu me, bhante, bhagavā tapojigucchāya aggaññeva pāpetu, sāraññeva pāpetū”ti. “idha, nigrodha, tapassī cātuyāmasaṃvarasaṃvuto hoti. kathañca, nigrodha, tapassī cātuyāmasaṃvarasaṃvuto hoti. pe. yato kho, nigrodha, tapassī cātuyāmasaṃvarasaṃvuto hoti, aduṃ cassa hoti tapassitāya. so abhiharati no hīnāyāvattati. so vivittaṃ senāsanaṃ bhajati. pe. so ime pañca nīvaraṇe pahāya cetaso upakkilese paññāya dubbalīkaraṇe mettāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. so anekavihitaṃ pubbenivāsaṃ anussarati. seyyathidaṃ — ekampi jātiṃ dvepi jātiyo tissopi jātiyo catassopi jātiyo pañcapi jātiyo. pe. iti sākāraṃ sauddesaṃ anekavihitaṃ pubbenivāsaṃ anussarati. so dibbena cakkhunā visuddhena atikkantamānusakena satte passati cavamāne upapajjamāne hīne paṇīte suvaṇṇe dubbaṇṇe sugate duggate, yathākammūpage satte pajānāti — ‘ime vata bhonto sattā kāyaduccaritena samannāgatā vacīduccaritena samannāgatā manoduccaritena samannāgatā ariyānaṃ upavādakā micchādiṭṭhikā micchādiṭṭhikammasamādānā. te kāyassa bhedā paraṃ maraṇā apāyaṃ duggatiṃ vinipātaṃ nirayaṃ upapannā. ime vā pana bhonto sattā kāyasucaritena samannāgatā vacīsucaritena samannāgatā manosucaritena samannāgatā ariyānaṃ anupavādakā sammādiṭṭhikā sammādiṭṭhikammasamādānā. te kāyassa bhedā paraṃ maraṇā sugatiṃ saggaṃ lokaṃ upapannā’ti. iti dibbena cakkhunā visuddhena atikkantamānusakena satte passati cavamāne upapajjamāne hīne paṇīte suvaṇṇe dubbaṇṇe sugate duggate, yathākammūpage satte pajānāti.

DN 26 gradual training with 4bv following 4j

DN 26

DN 3, 3. cakkavattisuttaṃ, bhikkhunoāyuvaṇṇādivaḍḍhanakathā DN 26.11, para. 5 ⇒

“kiñca, bhikkhave, bhikkhuno bhogasmiṃ? idha, bhikkhave, bhikkhu mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati tathā dutiyaṃ. tathā tatiyaṃ. tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati. tathā dutiyaṃ. tathā tatiyaṃ. tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. idaṃ kho, bhikkhave, bhikkhuno bhogasmiṃ.

DN 33 abhidhamma style definitions, 4 appamañña

DN 33

DN 3, 10. saṅgītisuttaṃ, catukkaṃ DN 33.7, para. 11 ⇒

308. “catasso appamaññā. idhāvuso, bhikkhu mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati. tathā dutiyaṃ. tathā tatiyaṃ. tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena {abyāpajjhena (sī. syā. kaṃ. pī.)} pharitvā viharati. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati. tathā dutiyaṃ. tathā tatiyaṃ. tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati.

KN

KN Nidd I, 16. sāriputtasuttaniddeso, para. 244 ⇒

mettāya phasse tasathāvarānīti. mettāti yā sattesu metti mettāyanā mettāyitattaṃ anudayā anudayanā anudayitattaṃ {anuddayā (sī.) evamīdisesu dvīsu padesupi dvibhāvavasena. anudā anudāyanā anudāyitattaṃ (syā. ka.)} hitesitā anukampā abyāpādo abyāpajjo {abyāpajjho (syā. ka.)} adoso kusalamūlaṃ. tasāti yesaṃ tasitā taṇhā appahīnā, yesañca bhayabheravā appahīnā. kiṃkāraṇā vuccanti tasā? te tasanti uttasanti paritasanti bhāyanti santāsaṃ āpajjanti; taṃkāraṇā vuccanti tasā. thāvarāti yesaṃ tasitā taṇhā pahīnā, yesañca bhayabheravā pahīnā. kiṃkāraṇā vuccanti thāvarā? te na tasanti na uttasanti na paritasanti na bhāyanti santāsaṃ na āpajjanti; taṃkāraṇā vuccanti thāvarā. mettāya phasse tasathāvarānīti. tase ca thāvare ca mettāya phasseyya phareyya, mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā vihareyyāti — mettāya phasse tasathāvarāni.

KN Nidd II, khaggavisāṇasutto, paṭhamavaggo, para. 135 ⇒

cātuddiso appaṭigho ca hotīti. cātuddisoti so paccekasambuddho mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena {abyāpajjhena (syā.) passa dī. ni. 3.308} pharitvā viharati. karuṇāsahagatena. pe. muditāsahagatena. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ. pe. abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. cātuddiso appaṭigho ca hotīti mettāya bhāvitattā ye puratthimāya disāya sattā te appaṭikūlā {appaṭikulā (bahūsu)} honti, ye dakkhiṇāya disāya sattā te appaṭikūlā honti, ye pacchimāya disāya sattā te appaṭikūlā honti, ye uttarāya disāya sattā te appaṭikūlā honti, ye puratthimāya anudisāya sattā te appaṭikūlā honti, ye dakkhiṇāya anudisāya sattā te appaṭikūlā honti, ye pacchimāya anudisāya sattā te appaṭikūlā honti, ye uttarāya anudisāya sattā te appaṭikūlā honti, ye heṭṭhimāya disāya sattā te appaṭikūlā honti, ye uparimāya disāya sattā te appaṭikūlā honti, ye disāsu vidisāsu sattā te appaṭikūlā honti; karuṇāya bhāvitattā muditāya bhāvitattā upekkhāya bhāvitattā ye puratthimāya disāya sattā te appaṭikūlā honti. pe. ye disāsu vidisāsu sattā te appaṭikūlā hontīti — cātuddiso appaṭigho ca hoti.

KN Nidd II, khaggavisāṇasutto, catutthavaggo, para. 86 ⇒

mettaṃ upekkhaṃ karuṇaṃ vimuttiṃ, āsevamāno muditañca kāleti so paccekasambuddho mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati tathā dutiyaṃ tathā tatiyaṃ tathā catutthaṃ, iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati; karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharatīti — mettaṃ upekkhaṃ karuṇaṃ vimuttiṃ, āsevamāno muditañca kāle.

KN Paṭis, 1. mahāvaggo, 5. vimokkhakathā, 2. niddeso, para. 16 ⇒

kathaṃ “subha”nteva adhimutto hotīti — vimokkho? idha bhikkhu mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena {abyāpajjhena (syā.)} pharitvā viharati. mettāya bhāvitattā sattā appaṭikūlā honti. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. karuṇāya bhāvitattā sattā appaṭikūlā honti. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāya bhāvitattā sattā appaṭikūlā honti. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati. pe. upekkhāya bhāvitattā sattā appaṭikūlā honti. evaṃ “subhaṃ” teva adhimutto hotīti — vimokkho.

KN Mil, 6. opammakathāpañho, 1. gadrabhavaggo, 6. kummaṅgapañho, para. 1 ⇒

6. “bhante nāgasena, ‘kummassa pañca aṅgāni gahetabbānī’ti yaṃ vadesi, katamāni tāni pañca aṅgāni gahetabbānī”ti? “yathā, mahārāja, kummo udakacaro udakeyeva vāsaṃ kappeti, evameva kho, mahārāja, yoginā yogāvacarena sabbapāṇabhūtapuggalānaṃ hitānukampinā mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ pharitvā viharitabbaṃ. idaṃ, mahārāja, kummassa paṭhamaṃ aṅgaṃ gahetabbaṃ.

MN 7 cloth simile, gradual training 4bv follows samadhi

MN 7

MN 1, 1. mūlapariyāyavaggo, 7. vatthasuttaṃ MN 7.1, para. 9 ⇒

77. “so mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ {catutthiṃ (sī. pī.)} . iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati; karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati.

MN 21 famous saw simile – even if bandits cut off your limbs

MN 21

MN 1, 3. opammavaggo, 1. kakacūpamasuttaṃ MN 21.1, para. 17 ⇒

227. “pañcime, bhikkhave, vacanapathā yehi vo pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ — kālena vā akālena vā; bhūtena vā abhūtena vā; saṇhena vā pharusena vā; atthasaṃhitena vā anatthasaṃhitena vā; mettacittā vā dosantarā vā. kālena vā, bhikkhave, pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ akālena vā; bhūtena vā, bhikkhave, pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ abhūtena vā; saṇhena vā, bhikkhave, pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ pharusena vā; atthasaṃhitena vā, bhikkhave, pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ anatthasaṃhitena vā; mettacittā vā, bhikkhave, pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ dosantarā vā. tatrāpi vo, bhikkhave, evaṃ sikkhitabbaṃ — ‘na ceva no cittaṃ vipariṇataṃ bhavissati, na ca pāpikaṃ vācaṃ nicchāressāma, hitānukampī ca viharissāma mettacittā, na dosantarā. tañca puggalaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā pharitvā viharissāma, tadārammaṇañca sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cittena vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena {abyāpajjhena (sī. syā. pī.), abyāpajjena (ka.) aṅguttaratikanipātaṭīkā oloketabbā} pharitvā viharissāmā’ti. evañhi vo, bhikkhave, sikkhitabbaṃ.

MN 21

MN 1, 3. opammavaggo, 1. kakacūpamasuttaṃ MN 21.1, para. 18 ⇒

228. “seyyathāpi, bhikkhave, puriso āgaccheyya kudālapiṭakaṃ {kuddālapiṭakaṃ (sī. syā. pī.)} ādāya. so evaṃ vadeyya — ‘ahaṃ imaṃ mahāpathaviṃ apathaviṃ karissāmī’ti. so tatra tatra vikhaṇeyya {khaṇeyya (sī. syā. pī.)}, tatra tatra vikireyya, tatra tatra oṭṭhubheyya, tatra tatra omutteyya — ‘apathavī bhavasi, apathavī bhavasī’ti. taṃ kiṃ maññatha, bhikkhave, api nu so puriso imaṃ mahāpathaviṃ apathaviṃ kareyyā”ti? “no hetaṃ, bhante”. “taṃ kissa hetu”? “ayañhi, bhante, mahāpathavī gambhīrā appameyyā. sā na sukarā apathavī kātuṃ; yāvadeva ca pana so puriso kilamathassa vighātassa bhāgī assā”ti. “evameva kho, bhikkhave, pañcime vacanapathā yehi vo pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ — kālena vā akālena vā; bhūtena vā abhūtena vā; saṇhena vā pharusena vā; atthasaṃhitena vā anatthasaṃhitena vā; mettacittā vā dosantarā vā. kālena vā, bhikkhave, pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ akālena vā; bhūtena vā bhikkhave, pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ abhūtena vā; saṇhena vā, bhikkhave, pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ pharusena vā; atthasaṃhitena vā, bhikkhave, pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ anatthasaṃhitena vā; mettacittā vā, bhikkhave, pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ dosantarā vā. tatrāpi vo, bhikkhave, evaṃ sikkhitabbaṃ — ‘na ceva no cittaṃ vipariṇataṃ bhavissati, na ca pāpikaṃ vācaṃ nicchāressāma, hitānukampī ca viharissāma mettacittā na dosantarā. tañca puggalaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā pharitvā viharissāma, tadārammaṇañca sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ pathavisamena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā viharissāmā’ti. evañhi vo, bhikkhave, sikkhitabbaṃ.

MN 21

MN 1, 3. opammavaggo, 1. kakacūpamasuttaṃ MN 21.1, para. 21 ⇒

231. “seyyathāpi, bhikkhave, biḷārabhastā madditā sumadditā suparimadditā, mudukā tūlinī chinnasassarā chinnabhabbharā. atha puriso āgaccheyya kaṭṭhaṃ vā kathalaṃ {kaṭhalaṃ (sī. syā. pī.)} vā ādāya. so evaṃ vadeyya — ‘ahaṃ imaṃ biḷārabhastaṃ madditaṃ sumadditaṃ suparimadditaṃ, mudukaṃ tūliniṃ, chinnasassaraṃ chinnabhabbharaṃ kaṭṭhena vā kathalena vā sarasaraṃ karissāmi bharabharaṃ karissāmī’ti. taṃ kiṃ maññatha, bhikkhave, api nu so puriso amuṃ biḷārabhastaṃ madditaṃ sumadditaṃ suparimadditaṃ, mudukaṃ tūliniṃ, chinnasassaraṃ chinnabhabbharaṃ kaṭṭhena vā kathalena vā sarasaraṃ kareyya, bharabharaṃ kareyyā”ti? “no hetaṃ, bhante”. “taṃ kissa hetu”? “amu hi, bhante, biḷārabhastā madditā sumadditā suparimadditā, mudukā tūlinī, chinnasassarā chinnabhabbharā. sā na sukarā kaṭṭhena vā kathalena vā sarasaraṃ kātuṃ bharabharaṃ kātuṃ; yāvadeva ca pana so puriso kilamathassa vighātassa bhāgī assā”ti. “evameva kho, bhikkhave, pañcime vacanapathā yehi vo pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ kālena vā akālena vā; bhūtena vā abhūtena vā; saṇhena vā pharusena vā; atthasaṃhitena vā anatthasaṃhitena vā; mettacittā vā dosantarā vā. kālena vā bhikkhave pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ akālena vā; bhūtena vā, bhikkhave, pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ abhūtena vā; saṇhena vā, bhikkhave, pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ pharusena vā; atthasaṃhitena vā, bhikkhave, pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ anatthasaṃhitena vā; mettacittā vā, bhikkhave, pare vadamānā vadeyyuṃ dosantarā vā. tatrāpi vo, bhikkhave, evaṃ sikkhitabbaṃ — ‘na ceva no cittaṃ vipariṇataṃ bhavissati, na ca pāpikaṃ vācaṃ nicchāressāma hitānukampī ca viharissāma mettacittā na dosantarā. tañca puggalaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā pharitvā viharissāma, tadārammaṇañca sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ biḷārabhastāsamena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā viharissāmā’ti. evañhi vo, bhikkhave, sikkhitabbaṃ.

MN 21

MN 1, 3. opammavaggo, 1. kakacūpamasuttaṃ MN 21.1, para. 22 ⇒

232. “ubhatodaṇḍakena cepi, bhikkhave, kakacena corā ocarakā aṅgamaṅgāni okanteyyuṃ, tatrāpi yo mano padūseyya, na me so tena sāsanakaro. tatrāpi vo, bhikkhave, evaṃ sikkhitabbaṃ — ‘na ceva no cittaṃ vipariṇataṃ bhavissati, na ca pāpikaṃ vācaṃ nicchāressāma, hitānukampī ca viharissāma mettacittā na dosantarā. tañca puggalaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā pharitvā viharissāma tadārammaṇañca sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā viharissāmā’ti. evañhi vo, bhikkhave, sikkhitabbaṃ.

MN 40 naked ascetic, gradual training, 4bv follows samadhi

MN 40

MN 1, 4. mahāyamakavaggo, 10. cūḷāssapurasuttaṃ MN 40.1, para. 7 ⇒

“so mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā viharati. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā viharati. seyyathāpi, bhikkhave, pokkharaṇī acchodakā sātodakā sītodakā setakā supatitthā ramaṇīyā. puratthimāya cepi disāya puriso āgaccheyya ghammābhitatto ghammapareto kilanto tasito pipāsito. so taṃ pokkharaṇiṃ āgamma vineyya udakapipāsaṃ vineyya ghammapariḷāhaṃ. pe. pacchimāya cepi disāya puriso āgaccheyya. pe. uttarāya cepi disāya puriso āgaccheyya. pe. dakkhiṇāya cepi disāya puriso āgaccheyya. yato kuto cepi naṃ puriso āgaccheyya ghammābhitatto ghammapareto, kilanto tasito pipāsito. so taṃ pokkharaṇiṃ āgamma vineyya udakapipāsaṃ, vineyya ghammapariḷāhaṃ. evameva kho, bhikkhave, khattiyakulā cepi agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbajito hoti, so ca tathāgatappaveditaṃ dhammavinayaṃ āgamma, evaṃ mettaṃ karuṇaṃ muditaṃ upekkhaṃ bhāvetvā labhati ajjhattaṃ {tamahaṃ (ka.)} vūpasamaṃ {tamahaṃ (ka.)} . ajjhattaṃ vūpasamā ‘samaṇasāmīcippaṭipadaṃ paṭipanno’ti vadāmi. brāhmaṇakulā cepi. pe. vessakulā cepi. pe. suddakulā cepi. pe. yasmā kasmā cepi kulā agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbajito hoti, so ca tathāgatappaveditaṃ dhammavinayaṃ āgamma, evaṃ mettaṃ karuṇaṃ muditaṃ upekkhaṃ bhāvetvā labhati ajjhattaṃ vūpasamaṃ. ajjhattaṃ vūpasamā ‘samaṇasāmīcippaṭipadaṃ paṭipanno’ti vadāmi.

MN 43 4bv defined as appamāṇā cetovimutti

MN 43

MN 1, 5. cūḷayamakavaggo, 3. mahāvedallasuttaṃ MN 43.1, para. 70 ⇒

“idhāvuso, bhikkhu mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā viharati. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā viharati. ayaṃ vuccatāvuso, appamāṇā cetovimutti”.

MN 50 Māra harrassses a previous Buddha

MN 50

MN 1, 5. cūḷayamakavaggo, 10. māratajjanīyasuttaṃ MN 50.1, para. 8 ⇒

509. “atha kho, pāpima, kakusandho bhagavā arahaṃ sammāsambuddho bhikkhū āmantesi — ‘anvāviṭṭhā kho, bhikkhave, brāhmaṇagahapatikā dūsinā mārena — etha, tumhe bhikkhū sīlavante kalyāṇadhamme akkosatha paribhāsatha rosetha vihesetha, appeva nāma tumhehi akkosiyamānānaṃ paribhāsiyamānānaṃ rosiyamānānaṃ vihesiyamānānaṃ siyā cittassa aññathattaṃ, yathā taṃ dūsī māro labhetha otāran’ti. etha, tumhe, bhikkhave, mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharatha, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā viharatha. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharatha, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā viharathā’ti.

MN 50

MN 1, 5. cūḷayamakavaggo, 10. māratajjanīyasuttaṃ MN 50.1, para. 9 ⇒

“atha kho te, pāpima, bhikkhū kakusandhena bhagavatā arahatā sammāsambuddhena evaṃ ovadiyamānā evaṃ anusāsiyamānā araññagatāpi rukkhamūlagatāpi suññāgāragatāpi mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā vihariṃsu, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā vihariṃsu. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā vihariṃsu, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā vihariṃsu.

MN 52 4bv are part of 11 doors to deathless

MN 52

MN 2, 1. gahapativaggo, 2. aṭṭhakanāgarasuttaṃ MN 52.1, para. 9 ⇒

“puna caparaṃ, gahapati, bhikkhu mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ {catutthiṃ (sī. pī.)} . iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena {abyāpajjhena (sī. syā. pī.), abyāpajjena (ka.) aṅguttaratikanipātaṭīkā oloketabbā} pharitvā viharati. so iti paṭisañcikkhati — ‘ayampi kho mettācetovimutti abhisaṅkhatā abhisañcetayitā. yaṃ kho pana kiñci abhisaṅkhataṃ abhisañcetayitaṃ tadaniccaṃ nirodhadhamman’ti pajānāti. so tattha ṭhito. pe. anuttaraṃ yogakkhemaṃ anupāpuṇāti.

MN 55 eating meat and 4bv

MN 55

MN 2, 1. gahapativaggo, 5. jīvakasuttaṃ MN 55.1, para. 3 ⇒

53. “idha, jīvaka, bhikkhu aññataraṃ gāmaṃ vā nigamaṃ vā upanissāya viharati. so mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā viharati. tamenaṃ gahapati vā gahapatiputto vā upasaṅkamitvā svātanāya bhattena nimanteti. ākaṅkhamānova {ākaṅkhamāno (syā. kaṃ.)}, jīvaka, bhikkhu adhivāseti. so tassā rattiyā accayena pubbaṇhasamayaṃ nivāsetvā pattacīvaramādāya yena tassa gahapatissa vā gahapatiputtassa vā nivesanaṃ tenupasaṅkamati; upasaṅkamitvā paññatte āsane nisīdati. tamenaṃ so gahapati vā gahapatiputto vā paṇītena piṇḍapātena parivisati. tassa na evaṃ hoti — ‘sādhu vata māyaṃ {maṃ + ayaṃ = māyaṃ} gahapati vā gahapatiputto vā paṇītena piṇḍapātena pariviseyyāti! aho vata māyaṃ gahapati vā gahapatiputto vā āyatimpi evarūpena paṇītena piṇḍapātena pariviseyyā’ti — evampissa na hoti. so taṃ piṇḍapātaṃ agathito {agadhito (syā. kaṃ. ka.)} amucchito anajjhopanno {anajjhāpanno (syā. kaṃ. ka.)} ādīnavadassāvī nissaraṇapañño paribhuñjati. taṃ kiṃ maññasi, jīvaka, api nu so bhikkhu tasmiṃ samaye attabyābādhāya vā ceteti, parabyābādhāya vā ceteti, ubhayabyābādhāya vā cetetī”ti?

MN 83 King Makhādeva

MN 83

MN 2, 4. rājavaggo, 3. maghadevasuttaṃ MN 83.1, para. 2 ⇒

309. “atha kho, ānanda, rājā maghadevo kappakassa gāmavaraṃ datvā jeṭṭhaputtaṃ kumāraṃ āmantāpetvā etadavoca — ‘pātubhūtā kho me, tāta kumāra, devadūtā; dissanti sirasmiṃ palitāni jātāni; bhuttā kho pana me mānusakā kāmā; samayo dibbe kāme pariyesituṃ. ehi tvaṃ, tāta kumāra, imaṃ rajjaṃ paṭipajja. ahaṃ pana kesamassuṃ ohāretvā kāsāyāni vatthāni acchādetvā agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbajissāmi. tena hi, tāta kumāra, yadā tvampi passeyyāsi sirasmiṃ palitāni jātāni, atha kappakassa gāmavaraṃ datvā jeṭṭhaputtaṃ kumāraṃ sādhukaṃ rajje samanusāsitvā kesamassuṃ ohāretvā kāsāyāni vatthāni acchādetvā agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbajeyyāsi. yena me idaṃ kalyāṇaṃ vattaṃ nihitaṃ anuppavatteyyāsi, mā kho me tvaṃ antimapuriso ahosi. yasmiṃ kho, tāta kumāra, purisayuge vattamāne evarūpassa kalyāṇassa vattassa samucchedo hoti so tesaṃ antimapuriso hoti. taṃ tāhaṃ, tāta kumāra, evaṃ vadāmi — yena me idaṃ kalyāṇaṃ vattaṃ nihitaṃ anuppavatteyyāsi, mā kho me tvaṃ antimapuriso ahosī’ti. atha kho, ānanda, rājā maghadevo kappakassa gāmavaraṃ datvā jeṭṭhaputtaṃ kumāraṃ sādhukaṃ rajje samanusāsitvā imasmiṃyeva maghadevāmbavane kesamassuṃ ohāretvā kāsāyāni vatthāni acchādetvā agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbaji. so mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā vihāsi, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena {abyāpajjhena (sī. syā. kaṃ. pī.), abyāpajjena (ka.)} pharitvā vihāsi. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. muditāsahagatena cetasā. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā vihāsi, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā vihāsi.

MN 83

MN 2, 4. rājavaggo, 3. maghadevasuttaṃ MN 83.1, para. 5 ⇒

“atha kho, ānanda, rañño maghadevassa putto kappakassa gāmavaraṃ datvā jeṭṭhaputtaṃ kumāraṃ āmantāpetvā etadavoca — ‘pātubhūtā kho, me, tāta kumāra, devadūtā; dissanti sirasmiṃ palitāni jātāni; bhuttā kho pana me mānusakā kāmā; samayo dibbe kāme pariyesituṃ. ehi tvaṃ, tāta kumāra, imaṃ rajjaṃ paṭipajja. ahaṃ pana kesamassuṃ ohāretvā kāsāyāni vatthāni acchādetvā agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbajissāmi. tena hi, tāta kumāra, yadā tvampi passeyyāsi sirasmiṃ palitāni jātāni, atha kappakassa gāmavaraṃ datvā jeṭṭhaputtaṃ kumāraṃ sādhukaṃ rajje samanusāsitvā kesamassuṃ ohāretvā kāsāyāni vatthāni acchādetvā agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbajeyyāsi. yena me idaṃ kalyāṇaṃ vattaṃ nihitaṃ anuppavatteyyāsi, mā kho me tvaṃ antimapuriso ahosi. yasmiṃ kho, tāta kumāra, purisayuge vattamāne evarūpassa kalyāṇassa vattassa samucchedo hoti so tesaṃ antimapuriso hoti. taṃ tāhaṃ, tāta kumāra, evaṃ vadāmi — yena me idaṃ kalyāṇaṃ vattaṃ nihitaṃ anuppavatteyyāsi, mā kho me tvaṃ antimapuriso ahosī’ti. atha kho, ānanda, rañño maghadevassa putto kappakassa gāmavaraṃ datvā jeṭṭhaputtaṃ kumāraṃ sādhukaṃ rajje samanusāsitvā imasmiṃyeva maghadevāmbavane kesamassuṃ ohāretvā kāsāyāni vatthāni acchādetvā agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbaji. so mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā vihāsi, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā vihāsi. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. muditāsahagatena cetasā. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā vihāsi, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā vihāsi. rañño kho panānanda, maghadevassa putto caturāsītivassasahassāni kumārakīḷitaṃ kīḷi, caturāsītivassasahassāni oparajjaṃ kāresi, caturāsītivassasahassāni rajjaṃ kāresi, caturāsītivassasahassāni imasmiṃyeva maghadevāmbavane agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbajito brahmacariyamacari. so cattāro brahmavihāre bhāvetvā kāyassa bhedā paraṃ maraṇā brahmalokūpago ahosi.

MN 83

MN 2, 4. rājavaggo, 3. maghadevasuttaṃ MN 83.1, para. 6 ⇒

311. “rañño kho panānanda, maghadevassa puttapaputtakā tassa paramparā caturāsītirājasahassāni {caturāsītikhattiyasahassāni (sī. pī.), caturāsītisahassāni (syā. kaṃ.)} imasmiṃyeva maghadevāmbavane kesamassuṃ ohāretvā kāsāyāni vatthāni acchādetvā agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbajiṃsu. te mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā vihariṃsu, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā vihariṃsu. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. muditāsahagatena cetasā. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā vihariṃsu, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā vihariṃsu. caturāsītivassasahassāni kumārakīḷitaṃ kīḷiṃsu, caturāsītivassasahassāni oparajjaṃ kāresuṃ, caturāsītivassasahassāni rajjaṃ kāresuṃ, caturāsītivassasahassāni imasmiṃyeva maghadevāmbavane agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbajitā brahmacariyamacariṃsu. te cattāro brahmavihāre bhāvetvā kāyassa bhedā paraṃ maraṇā brahmalokūpagā ahesuṃ. nimi tesaṃ rājā {rājānaṃ (sī. pī.)} pacchimako ahosi dhammiko dhammarājā dhamme ṭhito mahārājā; dhammaṃ carati brāhmaṇagahapatikesu negamesu ceva jānapadesu ca; uposathañca upavasati cātuddasiṃ pañcadasiṃ aṭṭhamiñca pakkhassa.

MN 83

MN 2, 4. rājavaggo, 3. maghadevasuttaṃ MN 83.1, para. 10 ⇒

315. “atha kho, ānanda, nimi rājā kappakassa gāmavaraṃ datvā jeṭṭhaputtaṃ kumāraṃ sādhukaṃ rajje samanusāsitvā imasmiṃyeva maghadevāmbavane kesamassuṃ ohāretvā kāsāyāni vatthāni acchādetvā agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbaji. so mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā vihāsi, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā vihāsi. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. muditāsahagatena cetasā. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā vihāsi, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā vihāsi. nimi kho, panānanda, rājā caturāsītivassasahassāni kumārakīḷitaṃ kīḷi, caturāsītivassasahassāni oparajjaṃ kāresi, caturāsītivassasahassāni rajjaṃ kāresi, caturāsītivassasahassāni imasmiṃyeva maghadevāmbavane agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbajito brahmacariyamacari. so cattāro brahmavihāre bhāvetvā kāyassa bhedā paraṃ maraṇā brahmalokūpago ahosi. nimissa kho panānananda, rañño kaḷārajanako nāma putto ahosi. na so agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbaji. so taṃ kalyāṇaṃ vattaṃ samucchindi. so tesaṃ antimapuriso ahosi.

MN 97 Sariputta teaches dying man way to Brahma world

MN 97

MN 2, 5. brāhmaṇavaggo, 7. dhanañjānisuttaṃ MN 97.1, para. 26 ⇒

atha kho āyasmato sāriputtassa etadahosi — “ime kho brāhmaṇā brahmalokādhimuttā. yaṃnūnāhaṃ dhanañjānissa brāhmaṇassa brahmānaṃ sahabyatāya maggaṃ deseyyan”ti. “brahmānaṃ te, dhanañjāni, sahabyatāya maggaṃ desessāmi; taṃ suṇāhi, sādhukaṃ manasi karohi, bhāsissāmī”ti. “evaṃ, bho”ti kho dhanañjāni brāhmaṇo āyasmato sāriputtassa paccassosi. āyasmā sāriputto etadavoca — “katamo ca, dhanañjāni, brahmānaṃ sahabyatāya maggo? idha, dhanañjāni, bhikkhu mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā viharati. ayaṃ kho, dhanañjāni, brahmānaṃ sahabyatāya maggo”.

MN 99 way to brahma world

MN 99

MN 2, 5. brāhmaṇavaggo, 9. subhasuttaṃ MN 99.1, para. 40 ⇒

471. “katamo ca, māṇava, brahmānaṃ sahabyatāya maggo? idha, māṇava, bhikkhu mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā viharati. evaṃ bhāvitāya kho, māṇava, mettāya cetovimuttiyā yaṃ pamāṇakataṃ kammaṃ na taṃ tatrāvasissati, na taṃ tatrāvatiṭṭhati. seyyathāpi, māṇava, balavā saṅkhadhamo appakasireneva cātuddisā viññāpeyya {evameva kho māṇava evaṃ bhāvitāya mettāya (sī. syā. kaṃ. pī. dī. ni. 1.556) tathāpi idha pāṭhoyeva upamāya saṃsandiyamāno paripuṇṇo viya dissati}; evameva kho, māṇava. pe. evaṃ bhāvitāya kho, māṇava, mettāya {evameva kho māṇava evaṃ bhāvitāya mettāya (sī. syā. kaṃ. pī. dī. ni. 1.556) tathāpi idha pāṭhoyeva upamāya saṃsandiyamāno paripuṇṇo viya dissati} cetovimuttiyā yaṃ pamāṇakataṃ kammaṃ na taṃ tatrāvasissati, na taṃ tatrāvatiṭṭhati. ayampi kho, māṇava, brahmānaṃ sahabyatāya maggo. “puna caparaṃ, māṇava, bhikkhu karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā viharati. evaṃ bhāvitāya kho, māṇava, upekkhāya cetovimuttiyā yaṃ pamāṇakataṃ kammaṃ na taṃ tatrāvasissati, na taṃ tatrāvatiṭṭhati. seyyathāpi, māṇava, balavā saṅkhadhamo appakasireneva cātuddisā viññāpeyya; evameva kho, māṇava. pe. evaṃ bhāvitāya kho, māṇava, upekkhāya cetovimuttiyā yaṃ pamāṇakataṃ kammaṃ na taṃ tatrāvasissati, na taṃ tatrāvatiṭṭhati. ayampi kho, māṇava, brahmānaṃ sahabyatāya maggo”ti.

MN 127 Anuruddha explains difference between immeasurable and exalted

MN 127

MN 3, 3. suññatavaggo, 7. anuruddhasuttaṃ MN 127.1, para. 4 ⇒

“katamā ca, gahapati, appamāṇā cetovimutti? idha, gahapati, bhikkhu mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ tathā tatiyaṃ tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā viharati. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. muditāsahagatena cetasā. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ tathā tatiyaṃ tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyābajjhena pharitvā viharati. ayaṃ vuccati, gahapati, appamāṇā cetovimutti.

SN 41.7 4bv is one of several types of ceto vimutti

SN 41.7

SN 4, 7. cittasaṃyuttaṃ, 7. godattasuttaṃ SN 41.7, para. 2 ⇒

“katamo ca, bhante, pariyāyo yaṃ pariyāyaṃ āgamma ime dhammā nānatthā ceva nānābyañjanā ca? idha, bhante, bhikkhu mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ {catutthiṃ (?)} . iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena {abyāpajjhena (sī. syā. kaṃ. pī.), abyābajjhena (?)} pharitvā viharati. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ. iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. ayaṃ vuccati, bhante, appamāṇā cetovimutti.

SN 42.8 after 5niv abandoned, 4bv 4cv with conch blowing simile

SN 42.8

SN 4, 8. gāmaṇisaṃyuttaṃ, 8. saṅkhadhamasuttaṃ SN 42.8, para. 12 ⇒

SN 42.13 4bv and dhamma-samādhi, citta-samādhiṃ

SN 42.13

SN 4, 8. gāmaṇisaṃyuttaṃ, 13. pāṭaliyasuttaṃ SN 42.13, para. 22 ⇒

“sa kho so, gāmaṇi, ariyasāvako evaṃ vigatābhijjho vigatabyāpādo asammūḷho sampajāno paṭissato mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ, iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. so iti paṭisañcikkhati — ‘yvāyaṃ satthā evaṃvādī evaṃdiṭṭhi — natthi dinnaṃ, natthi yiṭṭhaṃ, natthi hutaṃ, natthi sukatadukkaṭānaṃ kammānaṃ phalaṃ vipāko, natthi ayaṃ loko, natthi paro loko, natthi mātā, natthi pitā, natthi sattā opapātikā, natthi loke samaṇabrāhmaṇā, sammaggatā sammāpaṭipannā ye imañca lokaṃ parañca lokaṃ sayaṃ abhiññā sacchikatvā pavedentī’ti. ‘sace tassa bhoto satthuno saccaṃ vacanaṃ, apaṇṇakatāya mayhaṃ, yvāhaṃ {yohaṃ (sī. syā. kaṃ. pī.)} na kiñci {kañci (?)} byābādhemi tasaṃ vā thāvaraṃ vā? ubhayamettha {ubhayattha me (?) ma. ni. 2.95 pāḷiyā saṃsandetabbaṃ} kaṭaggāho, yaṃ camhi kāyena saṃvuto vācāya saṃvuto manasā saṃvuto, yañca kāyassa bhedā paraṃ maraṇā sugatiṃ saggaṃ lokaṃ upapajjissāmī’ti {paraṃ maraṇā na upapajjissāmīti (?)} . tassa pāmojjaṃ jāyati. pamuditassa pīti jāyati. pītimanassa kāyo passambhati. passaddhakāyo sukhaṃ vedayati. sukhino cittaṃ samādhiyati. ayaṃ kho, gāmaṇi, dhammasamādhi. tatra ce tvaṃ cittasamādhiṃ paṭilabheyyāsi, evaṃ tvaṃ imaṃ kaṅkhādhammaṃ pajaheyyāsi.

SN 42.13

SN 4, 8. gāmaṇisaṃyuttaṃ, 13. pāṭaliyasuttaṃ SN 42.13, para. 23 ⇒

“sa kho so, gāmaṇi, ariyasāvako evaṃ vigatābhijjho vigatabyāpādo asammūḷho sampajāno paṭissato mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ, iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. so iti paṭisañcikkhati — ‘yvāyaṃ satthā evaṃvādī evaṃdiṭṭhi — atthi dinnaṃ, atthi yiṭṭhaṃ, atthi hutaṃ, atthi sukatadukkaṭānaṃ kammānaṃ phalaṃ vipāko, atthi ayaṃ loko, atthi paro loko, atthi mātā, atthi pitā, atthi sattā opapātikā, atthi loke samaṇabrāhmaṇā, sammaggatā sammāpaṭipannā ye imañca lokaṃ parañca lokaṃ sayaṃ abhiññā sacchikatvā pavedentī’ti. ‘sace tassa bhoto satthuno saccaṃ vacanaṃ, apaṇṇakatāya mayhaṃ, yvāhaṃ na kiñci byābādhemi tasaṃ vā thāvaraṃ vā? ubhayamettha kaṭaggāho, yaṃ camhi kāyena saṃvuto vācāya saṃvuto manasā saṃvuto, yañca kāyassa bhedā paraṃ maraṇā sugatiṃ saggaṃ lokaṃ upapajjissāmī’ti. tassa pāmojjaṃ jāyati. pamuditassa pīti jāyati. pītimanassa kāyo passambhati. passaddhakāyo sukhaṃ vedayati. sukhino cittaṃ samādhiyati. ayaṃ kho, gāmaṇi, dhammasamādhi. tatra ce tvaṃ cittasamādhiṃ paṭilabheyyāsi, evaṃ tvaṃ imaṃ kaṅkhādhammaṃ pajaheyyāsi.

SN 42.13

SN 4, 8. gāmaṇisaṃyuttaṃ, 13. pāṭaliyasuttaṃ SN 42.13, para. 24 ⇒

“sa kho so, gāmaṇi, ariyasāvako evaṃ vigatābhijjho vigatabyāpādo asammūḷho sampajāno paṭissato mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ, iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. so iti paṭisañcikkhati — ‘yvāyaṃ satthā evaṃvādī evaṃdiṭṭhi — karoto kārayato, chindato chedāpayato, pacato pācāpayato, socayato socāpayato, kilamato kilamāpayato, phandato phandāpayato, pāṇamatipātayato, adinnaṃ ādiyato, sandhiṃ chindato, nillopaṃ harato, ekāgārikaṃ karoto, paripanthe tiṭṭhato, paradāraṃ gacchato, musā bhaṇato, karoto na karīyati pāpaṃ. khurapariyantena cepi cakkena yo imissā pathaviyā pāṇe ekaṃ maṃsakhalaṃ ekaṃ maṃsapuñjaṃ kareyya, natthi tatonidānaṃ pāpaṃ, natthi pāpassa āgamo. dakkhiṇañcepi gaṅgāya tīraṃ gaccheyya hananto ghātento chindanto chedāpento pacanto pācāpento, natthi tatonidānaṃ pāpaṃ, natthi pāpassa āgamo. uttarañcepi gaṅgāya tīraṃ gaccheyya dadanto dāpento, yajanto yajāpento, natthi tatonidānaṃ puññaṃ, natthi puññassa āgamo. dānena damena saṃyamena saccavajjena natthi puññaṃ, natthi puññassa āgamo’ti. ‘sace tassa bhoto satthuno saccaṃ vacanaṃ, apaṇṇakatāya mayhaṃ, yvāhaṃ na kiñci byābādhemi tasaṃ vā thāvaraṃ vā? ubhayamettha kaṭaggāho, yaṃ camhi kāyena saṃvuto vācāya saṃvuto manasā saṃvuto, yañca kāyassa bhedā paraṃ maraṇā sugatiṃ saggaṃ lokaṃ upapajjissāmī’ti {paraṃ maraṇā na upapajjissāmīti (?)} . tassa pāmojjaṃ jāyati. pamuditassa pīti jāyati. pītimanassa kāyo passambhati. passaddhakāyo sukhaṃ vedayati. sukhino cittaṃ samādhiyati. ayaṃ kho, gāmaṇi, dhammasamādhi tatra ce tvaṃ cittasamādhiṃ paṭilabheyyāsi, evaṃ tvaṃ imaṃ kaṅkhādhammaṃ pajaheyyāsi.

SN 42.13

SN 4, 8. gāmaṇisaṃyuttaṃ, 13. pāṭaliyasuttaṃ SN 42.13, para. 25 ⇒

“sa kho so, gāmaṇi, ariyasāvako evaṃ vigatābhijjho vigatabyāpādo asammūḷho sampajāno paṭissato mettāsahagate cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharati, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ, iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharati. so iti paṭisañcikkhati — ‘yvāyaṃ satthā evaṃvādī evaṃdiṭṭhi — karoto kārayato, chindato chedāpayato, pacato pācāpayato, socayato socāpayato, kilamato kilamāpayato, phandato phandāpayato, pāṇamatipātayato, adinnaṃ ādiyato, sandhiṃ chindato, nillopaṃ harato, ekāgārikaṃ karoto, paripanthe tiṭṭhato, paradāraṃ gacchato, musā bhaṇato, karoto karīyati pāpaṃ. khurapariyantena cepi cakkena yo imissā pathaviyā pāṇe ekaṃ maṃsakhalaṃ ekaṃ maṃsapuñjaṃ kareyya, atthi tatonidānaṃ pāpaṃ, atthi pāpassa āgamo. dakkhiṇañcepi gaṅgāya tīraṃ gaccheyya hananto ghātento chindanto chedāpento pacanto pācāpento, atthi tatonidānaṃ pāpaṃ, atthi pāpassa āgamo. uttarañcepi gaṅgāya tīraṃ gaccheyya dadanto dāpento, yajanto yajāpento, atthi tatonidānaṃ puññaṃ, atthi puññassa āgamo. dānena damena saṃyamena saccavajjena atthi puññaṃ atthi puññassa āgamoti. sace tassa bhoto satthuno saccaṃ vacanaṃ, apaṇṇakatāya mayhaṃ, yvāhaṃ na kiñci byābādhemi tasaṃ vā thāvaraṃ vā? ubhayamettha kaṭaggāho, yaṃ camhi kāyena saṃvuto vācāya saṃvuto manasā saṃvuto, yañca kāyassa bhedā paraṃ maraṇā sugatiṃ saggaṃ lokaṃ upapajjissāmī’ti. tassa pāmojjaṃ jāyati. pamuditassa pīti jāyati. pītimanassa kāyo passambhati. passaddhakāyo sukhaṃ vedayati. sukhino cittaṃ samādhiyati. ayaṃ kho, gāmaṇi, dhammasamādhi. tatra ce tvaṃ cittasamādhiṃ paṭilabheyyāsi, evaṃ tvaṃ imaṃ kaṅkhādhammaṃ pajaheyyāsi.

SN 46.54 4bv associated with formless attainments

SN 46.54

SN 5, 2. bojjhaṅgasaṃyuttaṃ, 6. sākacchavaggo, 4. mettāsahagatasuttaṃ SN 46.54, para. 3 ⇒

“samaṇo, āvuso, gotamo sāvakānaṃ evaṃ dhammaṃ deseti — ‘etha tumhe, bhikkhave, pañca nīvaraṇe pahāya cetaso upakkilese paññāya dubbalīkaraṇe mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharatha, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ mettāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharatha. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharatha, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ karuṇāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharatha. muditāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharatha, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ muditāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharatha. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharatha, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharathā’”ti.

SN 46.54

SN 5, 2. bojjhaṅgasaṃyuttaṃ, 6. sākacchavaggo, 4. mettāsahagatasuttaṃ SN 46.54, para. 4 ⇒

“mayampi kho, āvuso, sāvakānaṃ evaṃ dhammaṃ desema — ‘etha tumhe, āvuso, pañca nīvaraṇe pahāya cetaso upakkilese paññāya dubbalīkaraṇe mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharatha. pe. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. muditāsahagatena cetasā. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharatha, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharathā’ti. idha no, āvuso, ko viseso, ko adhippayāso, kiṃ nānākaraṇaṃ samaṇassa vā gotamassa amhākaṃ vā, yadidaṃ — dhammadesanāya vā dhammadesanaṃ, anusāsaniyā vā anusāsanin”ti?

SN 46.54

SN 5, 2. bojjhaṅgasaṃyuttaṃ, 6. sākacchavaggo, 4. mettāsahagatasuttaṃ SN 46.54, para. 8 ⇒

“samaṇo, āvuso, gotamo sāvakānaṃ evaṃ dhammaṃ deseti — ‘etha tumhe, bhikkhave, pañca nīvaraṇe pahāya cetaso upakkilese paññāya dubbalīkaraṇe mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharatha. pe. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. muditāsahagatena cetasā. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharatha, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharathā’”ti.

SN 46.54

SN 5, 2. bojjhaṅgasaṃyuttaṃ, 6. sākacchavaggo, 4. mettāsahagatasuttaṃ SN 46.54, para. 9 ⇒

“mayampi kho, āvuso, sāvakānaṃ evaṃ dhammaṃ desema — ‘etha tumhe, āvuso, pañca nīvaraṇe pahāya cetaso upakkilese paññāya dubbalīkaraṇe mettāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharatha. pe. karuṇāsahagatena cetasā. pe. muditāsahagatena cetasā. pe. upekkhāsahagatena cetasā ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā viharatha, tathā dutiyaṃ, tathā tatiyaṃ, tathā catutthaṃ; iti uddhamadho tiriyaṃ sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ upekkhāsahagatena cetasā vipulena mahaggatena appamāṇena averena abyāpajjena pharitvā viharathā’ti. idha no, āvuso, ko viseso, ko adhippayāso, kiṃ nānākaraṇaṃ samaṇassa vā gotamassa amhākaṃ vā, yadidaṃ, dhammadesanāya vā dhammadesanaṃ, anusāsaniyā vā anusāsanin”ti?

95.1.1 - The Sublime Attitudes (2003)

The Sublime Attitudes
Thanissaro Bhikkhu July, 2003

The Buddha’s teachings on skillful qualities of mind come in clusters:
five this, seven that.
Even the one quality that’s always appropriate—mindfulness—is always taught in the context of clusters.
To begin with, it’s paired with alertness:
Mindfulness means keeping something in mind, as when we keep reminding ourselves to stay with the breath as we meditate;
alertness means noticing what’s going on, being alert to what you do and to the results of what you’re doing.
For mindfulness to be effective in training the mind, it always has to be paired with alertness.
And both of them have to play a role in larger clusters as well.
They’re part of the five strengths, the seven factors of Awakening, and the noble eightfold path.
The reason the Buddha teaches skillful qualities in clusters is because unskillful qualities come in clusters, too.
The three roots of unskillfulness— greed, aversion, and delusion—can branch out into five hindrances, seven obsessions, ten fetters, 108 forms of craving.
They grow exponentially.
No one skillful quality can take them all on.
Each skillful quality has to be strengthened by others to be effective, to play its part in the training of the whole mind.
At the same time, each has to be balanced by others to make sure it doesn’t go overboard and end up as a tool for the opposing forces.
This is why the Buddha left teachings like the four bases of success, the seven factors for Awakening, and the four sublime attitudes:
armies of skillful qualities to do battle with the armies of Mara.
When you see the various lists placed down—one, two, three, four, five, six, whatever—it gives the impression that you start with one skillful quality and then drop it to move on to the next.
Actually the process is more a question of gathering all the qualities together, and then leaning in the direction of one or another as is appropriate so that the mind can maintain its balance.
This is the principle that applies to the sublime attitudes:
immeasurable goodwill, immeasurable compassion, immeasurable appreciation, and immeasurable equanimity.
We start out with goodwill not because it’s the least advanced of the qualities but because it’s the most essential, the most basic.
On top of that you build the others:
compassion, appreciation or sympathetic joy, and finally equanimity.
A balanced mind is one that knows when to emphasize which of the four.
It’s not that you abandon number one to move to number two or number four;
you’re trying to keep all four of them on hand so that you can use whichever one is appropriate for the occasion.
Goodwill lies at the basis of everything.
In fact you could say that it lies at the basis of the whole practice.
If we didn’t have goodwill for ourselves and the people around us, the four noble truths wouldn’t make any sense as an important teaching.
It’s because we would like to see suffering end, not only for ourselves but for the people around us, that we want to follow the path to the end of suffering.
We’re concerned to find out what suffering is, how we can abandon its causes and help to realize its cessation.
So goodwill is where everything starts.
Think about it:
Why would you want anyone else to suffer?
You might think about the evil or cruel things they’ve done in the past, but even then why would you want them to suffer?
To learn a lesson?
Well, they’re going to learn their lesson because the principle of karma is going to take care of that—that’s why the teaching on equanimity is there—so you don’t have to go out and be God’s vengeful sword to make sure that everyone gets their just punishments.
Your only job is to make sure there are no limits on your goodwill.
When people have done horrible things, you don’t have to like them;
you don’t have to condone their behavior.
That’s not what goodwill means.
Goodwill means that you don’t wish anyone harm.
If they’re doing horrible things, you have every right to stop them if you can—after all, in doing horrible things, they’re creating bad karma, more suffering for themselves.
Just make sure that you don’t harm them in trying to stop them.
So try to make your goodwill limitless—or as the texts say, immeasurable.
Take this as a challenge.
When you spread thoughts of goodwill, test to see where the limits are.
Don’t just pretend that your goodwill is immeasurable.
Everyone’s goodwill starts out with limits.
What are the limits of yours?
After spreading goodwill to people you already feel it for—your friends, your family— start spreading it to people for whom you don’t spontaneously feel it.
Does your heart object when you try spreading goodwill to people you dislike?
Stop and ask it:
Why?
What would you gain from seeing them suffer?
Look at the little voice inside that resents their happiness.
Is that a voice you want to identify with?
Can you drop that attitude?
This is where the practice of developing goodwill really makes a difference in the mind:
When it forces you to challenge any smallness or narrowness in your heart.
If you think of goodwill as a billowing pink cloud of cotton candy covering the world in all directions, what you’re really doing is covering up your actual attitudes, which is of no help at all in gaining insight into the mind.
Goodwill is meant as a challenge, as a way of searching out and working through your smallhearted attitudes one by one so that you can examine them, uproot them, and really let them go.
Only when you work through the particulars like this can goodwill become more and more limitless.
That’s when your compassion can become limitless as well.
If you feel goodwill for people, then when they’re suffering the ill effects of their bad karma you can’t help but have compassion for them.
You want them not only to stop experiencing whatever pain or suffering they’re undergoing at the time, but also to stop doing whatever’s going to cause them to continue to suffer.
This is an important part of compassion.
It’s not simply a soft spot in your heart for people who are suffering.
It also means also trying to find some way to help them to stop doing the things that are causing them to suffer to begin with.
When you can help them, you appreciate their happiness.
You feel sympathy for the happiness they encounter.
Even in cases where people are experiencing happiness that has nothing to do with you at all, you appreciate the fact that they’re experiencing the results of their past good actions or present good actions.
You don’t resent their happiness.
Even if you’re in a contest and they come in first and you come in second and you felt that you really deserved to come in first, this is where you have to practice sympathetic joy.
There’s a larger framework for things than the one you’re probably aware of.
Notice in all these cases that there comes a point where you have to leave things for what they are, cases where you want to help someone and you can’t, or you would rather see yourself gain the happiness that somebody else has.
This is where you have to develop equanimity.
Notice that the teaching on equanimity is a reflection on the principle of karma.
Of the four chants we have for the sublime attitudes, it’s the only one that’s simply a statement of fact.
The others say:
“May all beings be happy.
May they be free from stress and pain.
May they not be deprived of the good fortune they’re experiencing.
” The first three are wishes, attitudes, things you would like to see happen.
“May… May… May….
” The fourth one is simply a reflection on the way things are.
“All living beings are the owners of their actions, heir to their actions….
Whatever they do, for good or for evil, to that will they fall heir.
” This reflection actually turns up in lots of different contexts.
In the five reflections, the reflection on karma is the one that gives hope.
You realize that you’re in charge of your actions.
You’re not simply a victim of fate or of the stars or of some other being acting through you.
You’re the one who’s making the choices.
That’s what gives you hope.
But it’s hope coupled with heedfulness.
You’ve got the power to do good with your actions, but also the power to cause harm.
The principle of karma is a double-edged sword.
If you’re not careful, you can use it to cut your own throat.
This is why the Buddha recommends reflecting on the principle of karma as a way of inspiring heedfulness.
Taken a little further, the universality of the principle of karma is a reflection for developing equanimity both toward yourself and toward other people.
In other words, you come across incidents in your life where you can’t gain the happiness you’d like.
There’s a karmic block there.
So you learn to accept it with equanimity.
That doesn’t mean that you give up and become totally passive and indifferent.
You look for the areas where your actions can make a difference.
Don’t waste your time and energy, butting your head against the wall in areas where you can’t make any change.
Focus on the areas where you can.
So equanimity is not hopelessness, it’s not passive indifference.
It’s there to redirect your energies in the proper direction, to the areas where you can act for your own wellbeing and for the wellbeing of others.
The reflections on karma are also used as a basis for developing wisdom and insight.
They form the background for all the teachings on discernment.
The central insight of the Buddha’s Awakening was that pain and pleasure come from your actions.
There are actions that bring pain, actions that bring pleasure, actions that bring both, and then special actions, that put an end to action, an end to suffering, and bring total happiness.
That’s the essence of the Buddha’s discernment.
So it’s an interesting combination:
equanimity, hope, heedfulness, discernment.
These things all go together.
They hover around that same reflection:
“I am the owner of my actions.
All beings are the owners of their actions.
” In other words, all beings are responsible for what they do.
Ajaan Suwat once gave a Dhamma talk on this reflection, focusing on the difference between the anatta teaching and this one statement.
Form, feeling, perceptions, thoughtconstructs, consciousness:
These are not self.
But we are the owners of our actions.
“Think about that,” he said.
In other words, don’t latch on to the results of your actions;
latch on to the fact that you’re making the decisions right now, all the time.
Once a decision has been made, it’s been put into a larger circle of cause and effect beyond your control;
but you do have a chance to make a decision again the next moment, and the next moment, and then the next.
Focus on that.
Don’t get caught up in the results of past actions.
Focus on what you can do now to make the present actions skillful.
That’s the focus of the teaching, “We’re the owners of our actions.
” “We’re the heir to our actions” We’re going to be receiving the results of these actions.
So act in a way whose results you’d like to receive.
Be concerned about that:
That’s what’s meant by the Pali word, ottappa.
It can be translated either as fear of the results of your actions or concern for the results of your actions.
However you translate it, it means that you’re not apathetic;
you know that whatever you do is going to bear results.
Here again the quality of discernment comes in.
There are lots of things we like to do that will give bad results and things we don’t like to do that will give good results.
The Buddha said the measure of whether we’re a fool or a wise person lies in how we handle situations like that.
In other words this is where the quality of discernment really shows its worth.
You can talk about discernment, you can describe the three characteristics, the five khandhas, the six sensespheres, dependent co-arising, emptiness, all these wonderful concepts;
you can talk about them, but if they can’t help you make the right decision when you’re faced with a hard decision, your discernment’s useless.
Useful discernment is the type that enables you to talk yourself out of doing things you would like to do but that you know would give bad results, or to talk yourself into doing things you don’t like to do but would give good results.
That’s where discernment shows its stuff.
“We’re born of our actions.
” Our actions are the source of everything we experience.
If you want experiences to be good, focus on the source.
If you don’t like the kind of experiences you’re having, turn back and focus again on the source.
It’s constantly right here, right here in the present moment.
The Buddha’s teachings on time are interesting in that even though they do talk about time, they don’t talk about a beginning point in time.
The beginning point for your experience is right here in the present moment.
It all comes springing out of right here;
so instead of trying trace things back to first causes someplace way back in the past, the Buddha has you look for first causes right here and right now.
Dig down deep inside into the area of the mind where intention and attention and perception play against each other, for that’s the point from which all things are born.
“We’re related through our actions” The connections we have in life with different people are created by our actions:
things that we’ve done together with other people or to other people or for other people.
These create the connections that we have with the people around us.
Interconnectedness is a very popular teaching in Buddhism, especially nowadays, but it’s funny that people like to talk about interconnectedness without the teaching on karma.
They turn to dependent co-arising as a model for interconnectedness, this web of connections where one factor can’t exist without a whole lot of other factors, but they neglect to realize that dependent co-arising is a teaching on how ignorance is connected with suffering, how craving is connected with suffering.
It’s the kind of connectedness you want to cut, not the kind you want to celebrate.
Connectedness through karma can go either way—the connections can be good, or they can be bad.
So you want to foster the good ones.
And again, where do you look?
You look at what you’re doing right here and right now.
How are you behaving with other people?
How are you treating them?
These create the relationships you’re going to be able to enjoy or you’re going to be stuck with, now and on into the future.
So choose your actions carefully.
“We have actions as our arbitrator.
” Our actions decide our lives.
In other words there’s no judge up there someplace in the sky sitting on a big throne passing judgment on us.
We’re passing judgment on what kind of life we want to have by the way we act— which is both empowering and also a little scary.
Think of how many times you’ve acted on unskillful motives.
Think of the unskillful motives you still have lurking around in your mind that could form the basis for future unskillful actions.
Think hard about that.
It means there’s work to be done—not just to escape unskillful actions but also to foster skillful ones.
This is where the hope comes in.
Even though we may be suffering in our lives, there’s a way out through our own actions.
We don’t have to sit around waiting for somebody else to come and save us.
We’re not victims of fate.
We can make the choices, we can order our priorities so that we can reshape our lives in a positive direction through our thoughts, words, and deeds.
This is why we meditate, because meditation creates good qualities, skillful qualities in the mind:
mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment, persistence, truthfulness, perseverance.
As we work at these qualities, as we put them into action, they get strengthened and become more and more the wise arbitrators of our lives, pointing our lives in the direction we really want to go.
Then the final reflection builds on that:
“Whatever we do for good or for evil, to that will we fall heir.
” This is a reminder to be heedful, that we really want to act on our good impulses, our skillful intentions.
We want to develop the qualities in our minds that will foster these skillful intentions, because these are the things that really make a difference.
These teachings foster equanimity in reminding us to be equanimous toward our past actions, toward the results from past actions.
Certain things we can’t change because they’ve already been done.
We can’t turn back the clock.
But the teachings foster hope in that we can make a difference in what we’re doing right here and right now.
There’s that opening for us to design our lives, to point them in a better direction.
In that balance among equanimity, heedfulness, and hope, learning how to make proper use of this principle of karma:
That’s where the discernment comes in.
The teachings on karma have gotten a bad rap, largely because they’ve been mangled, turned into a simplistic caricature:
either fatalistic or tit for tat.
But if you understand the complexity and also the purpose of the teaching, you begin to realize that it’s not what we thought it was.
It’s not an excuse to justify the suffering that people are going through or for our being indifferent to that suffering.
When you really understand the workings of karma, you see other people’s suffering as an opportunity to help them.
You don’t know how much longer their karma for suffering is going to last.
Wouldn’t it be a good thing if you could be the agent to help bring their suffering to an end?
Put yourself in their place:
Wouldn’t you like to have somebody come and help?
And someday you may actually be in their place too.
After all, as the Buddha said, you’ve already been there before and if you don’t get out of the cycle of rebirth, you’ll probably be there again.
Karma is not a teaching meant to make us feel superior to other people.
You never know:
Maybe the results of their past bad karma are simply coming faster than the results of your past bad karma, and you may someday be in a similar place to where they are—or even worse.
So you can’t be complacent.
And the teaching on karma is not designed to make you complacent.
If anything, just the opposite:
It’s meant to make you uncomplacent.
I once read someone saying that September 11th burst his complacent Buddhist bubble.
Well, that’s an oxymoron:
“complacent Buddhist.
” The whole purpose in following the Dhamma is that it teaches you not to be complacent.
As long as there’s suffering in your heart, there’s work to be done.
So, on the one hand, the principle of karma makes you heedful, reminding you that you’ve got work to do.
But it also means that there’s a way to work with suffering so that you can go beyond it:
That’s where the hope lies.
If you understand how to use the teaching on karma, you see how really useful it is, how relevant it is to the meditation we’re doing right now.
The prime factor you want to dig down and find in your meditation is just that:
the karma, the factor of intention.
Watch to see how it moves.
See how you can make it more skillful.
See how you can perfect that factor so that it takes you not only into more pleasant places in space and time, but also—when you get really skillful— outside of space and time, to the end of karma, to the point where there’s no more work to be done.
That’s one of the descriptions of an arahant:
katam karaniyam, someone who’s done the task, done what had to be done.
The burden is laid down.
Understanding the principle of karma, and using it the right way, is what makes all that possible.

95.1.2 - Head & Heart Together

Head & Heart Together
Bringing Wisdom to the Brahmaviharas
by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu‍
The brahmaviharas, which are sometimes translated as “sublime attitudes,” are the Buddha’s primary heart teaching—the teaching that connects most directly with our desire for true happiness.
The term brahmavihara literally means dwelling place of brahmas.
Brahmas are gods who live in the higher heavens, dwelling in an attitude of unlimited good will, unlimited compassion, unlimited empathetic joy, and unlimited equanimity.
Of these four emotions, goodwill is the most fundamental, for it relates most directly to the heart.
It’s the wish for true happiness, a wish that can be directed to yourself or to others.
It’s also fundamental in that it was the underlying motivation that led the Buddha to search for Awakening and to teach the path to Awakening to others after he had found it.
The next two emotions in the list are essentially applications of good will.
Compassion is what good will feels when it encounters suffering:
It wants the suffering to stop.
Empathetic joy is what good will feels when it encounters happiness:
It wants the happiness to continue.
Equanimity is a different emotion, in that it acts as an aid to and check on the other three.
When you encounter suffering that you can’t stop no matter how hard you try, you have to develop equanimity so that you don’t create additional suffering and so that you can channel your energies to areas where you can be of help.
All four of these attitudes are emotions we’ve encountered throughout human life.
But to become brahmaviharas, they have to become limitless.
That takes work.
It’s easy to feel good will, compassion, and empathetic joy for people you like and love, but there are bound to be people you dislike for one reason or another—often for very good reasons.
Similarly, there are many people for whom it’s easy to feel equanimity:
people you don’t know or don’t really care about.
But it’s hard to feel equanimous when people you love are suffering.
Yet if you’re developing the brahmaviharas, you have to include all of these people within the scope of your awareness so that you can apply the proper attitude no matter where or when.
This is where your heart needs the help of your head.
All too often, meditators believe that if they can simply add a little more heart juice, a little more emotional oomph, to their brahmavihara practice, their attitudes can become limitless.
But if something inside you keeps churning up reasons for liking this person or hating that one, your practice starts feeling hypocritical.
You wonder who you’re trying to fool.
Or, after a month devoted to the practice, you still find yourself thinking black thoughts about people who cut you off in traffic—to say nothing of people who’ve done the world serious harm.
2 This is where the head comes in.
If we think of the heart as the side of the mind that wants happiness, the head is the side that understands how things actually work, the principle of cause and effect.
If your head and heart can learn how to work together— i.
e., if your head can give priority to finding the causes for true happiness, and if the heart can learn to respect the need to embrace those causes—the training of the mind can go far.
This is why the Buddha taught the brahmaviharas in a context of head teachings:
the principle of causality as it plays out in (1) karma and (2) the process of fabrication that shapes emotions within the body and mind.
The more we can get our heads around these teachings, the easier it will be to put our whole heart into developing attitudes that truly are sublime.
An understanding of karma helps to explain what we’re doing as we develop the brahmaviharas and why we might want to do so in the first place.
An understanding of fabrication helps to explain how we can take our human heart and convert it into a place where brahmas could dwell.
The teaching on karma starts with the principle that people experience happiness and sorrow based on their intentions, both past and present.
This is because our experience of the present moment is composed of three things:
1) the results of past intentions;
2) present intentions;
and 3) the results of present intentions.
The results register in terms of pleasure or pain, happiness or sorrow.
The intentions both past and present are the causes.
Those are the factors you need to master.
If we act with unskillful intentions either for ourselves or for others, we’re going to suffer.
If we act with skillful intentions, we’ll experience happiness.
So if we want to experience happiness, we have to train our intentions to always be skillful.
This is the first reason for developing the brahmaviharas:
so that we can make our intentions more trustworthy.
Some people say that unlimited good will comes naturally to us, that our Buddha nature is intrinsically compassionate.
But if anyone would have been qualified to talk about Buddha nature, it would have been the Buddha himself, and yet he didn’t.
He never said a word about Buddha nature.
He never said that human beings are basically good;
he never said they’re basically bad.
What he did say is that the mind is even more variegated than the animal world.
We’re capable of anything.
So what are we going to do with this capability?
We could do—and have done—almost anything, but the one thing the Buddha does assume across the board is that we all desire happiness, that deep down inside we want to take our capability for anything and devote it to happiness.
So the first lesson of karma is that, if you really want to be happy, you can’t trust your basic goodness to tell you the right thing to do, for that would simply foster complacency.
Unskillful intentions would take over and you wouldn’t even know it.
Instead, you have to be heedful to recognize unskillful intentions for what they are, and to act only on skillful ones.
The way to ensure that you’ll stay heedful in this way is to make your desire for happiness universal.
Spread it around.
3 The second lesson of karma is that just as you’re the primary architect of your own happiness and suffering, other people are the primary architects of theirs.
If you really want them to be happy, you don’t just treat them nicely.
You also want them to learn how to create the causes for happiness.
If you can, you want to show them how to do that.
This is why the gift of Dharma—lessons in how to give rise to true happiness—is the greatest gift.
In the Buddha’s most famous example of how to express an attitude of unlimited good will, he doesn’t just express the following wish for universal happiness:
“Happy, at rest, may all beings be happy at heart.
Whatever beings there may be, weak or strong, without exception, long, large, middling, short, subtle, blatant, seen & unseen, near & far, born & seeking birth:
May all beings be happy at heart.
” He immediately adds a wish that all beings avoid the causes that would lead them to unhappiness:
“Let no one deceive another or despise anyone anywhere, or through anger or resistance wish for another to suffer.
” — Khp 9 So if you’re using visualization as part of your good will practice, don’t visualize people simply as smiling, surrounded willy‐nilly by wealth and sensual pleasures.
Visualize them acting, speaking, and thinking skillfully.
If they’re currently acting on unskillful intentions, visualize them changing their ways.
Then act to realize those visualizations if you can.
A similar principle applies to compassion and empathetic joy.
Learn to feel compassion not only for people who are already suffering, but also for people who are engaging in unskillful actions that will lead to future suffering.
This means trying to stop them from those actions if you can.
And learn to feel empathetic joy not only for those who are already happy, but also for those whose actions will lead to future happiness.
If you have the opportunity, give them encouragement.
But you also have to realize that no matter how unlimited the scope of these positive emotions, their effect is going to run into limits.
In other words, regardless of how 4 strong your good will or compassion may be, there are bound to be people whose past actions are unskillful and who cannot or will not change their ways in the present.
This is why you need equanimity as your reality check.
When you encounter areas where you can’t be of help, you learn not to get upset about those things.
Think about the universality of the principle of karma:
it applies to everyone regardless of whether you like them or not.
That puts you in a position where you can see more clearly what can be changed, where you can be of help.
In other words, equanimity isn’t a blanket acceptance of things as they are.
It’s a tool for helping you to develop discernment as to which kinds of suffering you have to accept, and which ones you don’t.
For example, someone in your family may be suffering from Alzheimer’s.
If you get upset about the fact of the disease, you’re limiting your ability to be genuinely helpful.
To be more effective, you have to use equanimity as a means of letting go of what you want to change and focusing more on what can be changed in the present.
A third lesson from the principle of karma is that developing the brahmaviharas can also help mitigate the results of your past bad actions.
The Buddha explains this point with an analogy:
If you put a lump of salt into a glass of water, could you drink the water in the glass?
No, because it would be far too salty.
But if you put that lump of salt into a river, could you drink the water in the river?
Yes, because there’s so much more water in the river than salt.
When you develop the four brahmaviharas, your mind is like the river.
The skillful karma of developing these attitudes in the present is so expansive that whatever results of past bad actions may arise, you hardly notice them.
So it’s in your own interest to develop these unlimited attitudes.
A proper understanding of karma also helps to correct the false idea that if people are suffering they deserve to suffer, so you might as well just leave them alone.
Actually, karma doesn’t work that way.
When you catch yourself thinking in terms of someone’s deserving to suffer, you have to keep four principles in mind.
First, remember that when you look at people, you can’t see all the karmic seeds from their past actions.
They may be experiencing the results of past bad actions, but you don’t know when those seeds will stop sprouting, and you have no idea what other seeds, whatever wonderful latent potentials, will sprout in their place.
There’s a saying in some Buddhist circles that if you want to see a person’s past actions, you look at his present condition;
if you want to see his future condition, you look at his present actions.
This principle, however, is based on a basic misperception:
that we each have a single karmic account, and what we see in the present is the current running balance in each person’s account.
Actually, each person’s karmic history doesn’t collect into a single account.
It’s composed of the many different seeds planted in many places through the many different actions we’ve done in the past, each seed maturing at its own rate.
Some of these seeds have already sprouted and disappeared;
some are sprouting now;
some will sprout in the future.
This means that a person’s present 5 condition reflects only a small portion of his or her past actions.
As for the other seeds, you can’t see them at all.
This reflection helps you when developing compassion, for it reminds you that you never know when the possibility to help somebody can have an effect.
The seeds of the other person’s past bad actions may be flowering right now, but they could stop flowering in a moment.
You may happen to be the person who’s there to help when that person is ready to receive help.
The same pattern applies to empathetic joy.
Say that your neighbor is wealthier than you are.
You may resist feeling empathetic joy for him because you think, “He’s already well‐off while I’m still struggling.
Why should I wish him to be even happier than he is?
” If you think in those terms, remind yourself that you don’t know what your karmic seeds are;
you don’t know what his karmic seeds are.
Maybe his good karmic seeds are about to die.
Do you want them to die any faster?
Does his happiness diminish yours?
What kind of attitude is that?
It’s useful to think in these ways.
The second principle to keep in mind is that, in the Buddha’s teaching, there’s no question of a person’s “deserving” happiness or “deserving” pain.
The Buddha never talks in terms of people deserving suffering.
He simply says that there are actions leading to pleasure and actions leading to pain.
Karma is not a respecter of persons;
it’s simply an issue of actions and results.
Some people are really good people but they may have some bad actions squirreled away in their past.
Other people smirk and swagger and do horrible things—you can’t stand even to look at them—but their past may contain some wonderful actions.
You never know.
So there’s no question about a person’s deserving or not deserving pleasure or pain.
There’s simply the principle that actions have results, together with the principle that your present experience of pleasure or pain is the combined result of past and present actions.
You may have some very unskillful actions in your past, but if you learn to think skillfully when those actions bear fruit in the present, you don’t have to suffer.
Remember the story of Angulimala.
He killed 999 people and then became an arahant.
Many people were still upset over the murders and would pelt him with stones when he went out for alms.
But he didn’t suffer from the pain, because his mind no longer reacted under the sway of greed, anger, or delusion.
So remember that “deserving” is a useless thought to bring to issues of pleasure and pain.
A more useful thought centers on how we can be skillful in shaping pleasure from whatever past karmic fruit we’re experiencing right now.
A third principle applies to the question of whether the person who’s suffering “deserves” your good will.
You sometimes hear that everyone deserves your good will because they all have Buddha nature, that they’re all essentially good inside.
But this forgets the primary reason for developing good will as a brahmavihara in the first place:
You need to make your good will universal so that you can trust your intentions.
If you regard your good will as so precious that only Buddhas deserve it, you won’t be able to trust yourself when encountering people whose actions are consistently evil.
Remember 6 that you don’t have to like someone to feel good will for that person.
All you have to do is wish for that person to be happy.
And the more you can develop this attitude toward people you actively dislike, the more you’ll be able to trust yourself.
The Buddha illustrates this point with a graphic analogy:
Even if bandits attack you and saw off your limbs with a two‐handled saw, you have to feel good will starting with them and then spreading to include the entire world.
If you keep this analogy in mind, you help to protect yourself from acting in unskillful ways, no matter how badly provoked.
The fourth principle to remember concerns the karma you’re creating right now in reaction to other peoples’ pleasure and pain.
If you’re resentful of somebody else’s happiness, someday when you get happy there’s going to be somebody resentful of yours.
Do you want that?
Or if you’re hard‐hearted toward somebody who’s suffering right now, someday you may face that same sort of suffering.
Do you want people to be hard‐hearted with you?
Always remember that your reactions are a form of karma, so be mindful to create the kind of karma that gives the results you’d like to see.
When you think in these ways you see that it really is in your interest to develop the brahmaviharas in all situations.
So the question is, how do you do that?
This is where another aspect of the Buddha’s teachings on causality plays a role:
his teaching on fabrication, or the way you shape your experience.
Fabrication is of three kinds:
bodily, verbal, and mental.
Bodily fabrication is the way you breathe.
Verbal fabrications are thoughts and mental comments on things—your internal speech.
In Pali, these thoughts and comments are called vitakka—directed thought, and vicara, evaluation.
Mental fabrications are perceptions and feelings:
the mental labels you apply to things and the feelings of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain you feel about them.
Any desire or emotion is made up of these three types of fabrication.
The way you breathe gets the emotion into the body.
This is why emotions have so much more power than mere passing thoughts.
An emotion is basically a thought that’s gotten into your breath, from your breath into your hormones, and from your hormones into the rest of your body—which is why it seems so real, so insistent, so genuinely “you.
” But as the Buddha points out, you don’t have to identify with it.
Emotions and desires are normally conditioned by ignorance, which is why they make us suffer, but if they’re conditioned by knowledge they can form a path to the end of suffering.
In the classical enumeration of the factors of the path, the ability to generate skillful desires comes under the factor of right effort.
So it’s in your interest to change your desires and emotions by bringing knowledge to each of these three types of fabrication.
And a good place to start is with the breath.
If, for example, you’re feeling anger toward someone, ask yourself, “How am I breathing right now?
How can I change the way I breathe so that my body can feel more comfortable?
” Anger often engenders a great sense of discomfort in the body, and you 7 feel you’ve got to get rid of it.
The usual ways of getting rid of it are two, and they’re both unskillful.
Either you bottle it up—which of course turns it into “The Thing”:
a tentacle runs underground and suddenly shoots up out of nowhere and strangles you— or else you try to get it out of your system by letting it out in your words and deeds.
And that, of course, just creates more bad karma.
So the Buddha provides a third, more skillful alternative for dealing with this bottled up discomfort:
Learn how to breathe through it.
Use your breath in a way that creates feelings of ease in the body.
His beginning instructions on breath meditation focus on creating a sense of ease and rapture simply by the way you breathe, allowing those feelings to saturate the entire body.
This physical ease then helps put the mind at ease as well.
In other words, you’re using bodily fabrication to create a healthy mental fabrication, in the form of feeling, which puts you in a position where you can engage in more skillful ways of verbal fabrication, along with mental fabrication in the form of perception.
Skillful verbal fabrication, in terms of the processes of directed thought and evaluation, can help first by finding the best way to breathe so as to alleviate the inner tension of the anger.
Then, as they work together with skillful perceptions, they can help you find a skillful way to frame the issue with which you’re faced.
You can look at your thoughts of anger with more objectivity, and ask yourself, “What in this particular feeling of anger is really useful?
” Is there something in the situation you’re facing that needs to be changed?
How can you do that skillfully?
What reactions would be best postponed?
Which aspects in the situation can simply be let go?
When you’re operating from a basis of physical ease, it’s a lot easier to examine your emotion and answer these questions in an objective way.
The Buddha’s analogy of the lump of salt plays a direct role in this process.
Instead of letting you perceive yourself as immune to the dangers of letting your mind stay in a limited state, it reminds you that you can’t afford to indulge in hatred and ill will.
You have to evaluate the situation in terms of your need for your own good will to protect yourself from bad karma.
Part of this protection is to look for the good points of the person you’re angry at.
Here the Buddha provides an even more graphic analogy to remind you of why this approach is not mere sentimentality:
If you see someone who’s been really nasty to you in his words and deeds but has moments of honesty and good will, it’s as if you’re walking along in the desert—hot, trembling, thirsty—and you come across a cow footprint with a little bit of water in it.
Now what do you do?
You can’t scoop the water up with your hand because that would muddy it.
Instead you get down on your hands and knees, and very carefully slurp it up.
The other person’s good intentions, even if fleeting, are that valuable.
Notice your position in this image.
You’re going through the desert;
you’re hot and trembling.
You need water.
If all you focus on are the bad points of other people, you’re going to feel even more oppressed with the heat and the thirst.
You’ll get bitter about the 8 human race and see no need to treat it well.
But if you can see the good in other people, you find it easier to treat them skillfully.
This means that the good points of other people are like water for your heart.
Learn how to focus on them because you need them to nourish your own goodness now and on into the future.
If, however, the person you’re angry about has no good qualities at all, then the Buddha recommends another analogy:
Think of that person as a sick man you’ve found on the side of the road, far away from any help.
You have to feel compassion for him and do whatever you can to get him to safety.
In the same way, if a person is acting in totally unskillful ways, you have to feel compassion for the suffering he or she is creating for the future, and focus on what you can do to help that person to change his or her unskillful ways.
When you bring these perceptions to bear on your unskillful emotion, they allow you to frame the issues around it so that you can more easily deconstruct it and construct a skillful emotion in its place.
Because emotions contain these elements of thought, evaluation, and perception— they’re not totally preverbal, as we sometimes assume—we can thus use our knowledge of karma and fabrication to shape these elements in the direction we want.
Our knowledge of the what and why of the brahmaviharas helps us master the how.
This is why head teachings are needed even in matters of the heart.
At the same time, because we’ve sensitized ourselves to the role that the breath plays in shaping emotion, we can make a genuine change in how we actually feel about these matters in the body.
We’re not playing make believe.
Our change of heart becomes genuine.
This helps get away from the feeling of hypocrisy that can sometimes envelop the practice of the brahmaviharas.
Instead of denying our original feelings of anger or distress in any given situation, smothering them with a mass of cotton candy or marshmallow cream, we actually get more closely in touch with them so that we can skillfully reshape them.
All too often we think that getting in touch with our emotions is a means of tapping into who we really are—that we’ve been divorced from our true nature, and that by getting back in touch with our emotions we’ll get back in touch with our true identity.
But your emotions are not your true nature;
they’re just as fabricated as anything else in the world.
Because they’re fabricated, the real issue is to learn how to fabricate them skillfully, so they don’t lead to trouble and can instead lead to a trustworthy happiness.
They’re not ends;
they’re means.
That’s the important point you need to remember about emotions:
They cause you to act.
They’re paths leading to good or bad kamma.
If you follow an unskillful emotion, you’ll create trouble for yourself or others.
For that reason you want to learn how to detect all your unskillful emotions so that you can take them apart in terms of these elements of fabrication—breath, directed thought and evaluation, perception and feelings—and reassemble them into something better.
As you learn to see them as paths, you can make them into a path you can trust.
9 When you can learn how to deconstruct emotions of ill will, hard‐heartedness, resentment, and distress, and reconstruct the brahmaviharas in their place, you don’t simply attain an unlimited heart.
You gain practice in mastering the processes of fabrication.
As the Buddha says, that mastery leads first to strong and blissful states of concentration.
From there it can fabricate all the factors of the path leading to the point of all the Buddha’s teachings, whether for head or for heart:
the total happiness of nirvana, unconditionally true.
Which simply goes to show that if you get your head and your heart to talk to each other, they can take each other far.
Your heart needs the help of your head to generate and act on more skillful emotions.
Your head needs your heart to remind you that what’s really important in life is how to put an end to suffering.
When they learn how to work together, they can make your human mind into an unlimited brahma mind.
And more:
They can master the causes of happiness to the point where they transcend themselves, touching an uncaused dimension that the head can’t encompass, and a happiness so true that the heart has no further need for desire.

95.1.3 - The Limits of the Unlimited Attitudes

The Limits of the Unlimited Attitudes
THE BRAHMAVIHARAS ON THE PATH TO AWAKENING

The first meditation instructions given to a child raised in a Theravada Buddhist family usually focus on the practice of metta, or goodwill.
The parents teach the child to spread thoughts of goodwill—a wish for happiness—to all living beings every night before going to sleep.
As the child grows older, the instructions are expanded to include three other attitudes, which—along with metta—are called the brahmaviharas when these attitudes are developed in an unlimited way.
The term brahmavihara is a combination of two words:
brahma, which is a being on a high level of heaven, plus vihara, which literally means “dwelling,” and figuratively “attitude”—an attitude in which the mind habitually dwells.
The brahmaviharas are the habitual attitudes of beings on a high plane of existence.
Unlimited metta is the first of the four attitudes, the other three being unlimited karuna, or compassion—a wish that suffering and the causes of suffering will end;
unlimited mudita, or empathetic joy—a wish that happiness and the causes of happiness will continue;
and unlimited upekkha, or equanimity—an impartial acceptance of what can’t be changed.
These attitudes are unlimited in the sense that they’re extended to all beings everywhere—including oneself—without bias.
Because human beings aren’t on the level of the brahmas, they don’t automatically dwell in these attitudes in an unlimited way.
They tend to feel them more strongly for some living beings than for others.
However, human beings can make these attitudes unlimited through conscious practice, and in that way lift their minds to a higher level.
If the child doesn’t take any further interest in meditation, he or she will probably equate metta or the brahmaviharas with meditation throughout life.
In fact, in Thailand, where the language has a tendency to string words of similar meaning together, the words metta and bhavana—“meditation”—are a common string.
And the attitudes of the brahmaviharas are highly regarded throughout the culture.
I’ve even known Thai Christians who insist that the brahmaviharas are not a specifically Buddhist teaching.
Respect for the brahmaviharas is part of being Thai.
If the child does take further interest in meditation as he or she gets older, the development of the brahmaviharas provides the framework for whatever other practice he or she may specialize in.
Ajaan Mun, the founder of the Wilderness tradition, specialized in contemplation of the body, but he is said to have spent time developing the brahmaviharas three times a day:
when waking up in the morning, when waking up from his afternoon nap, and just before going to sleep at night.
He taught one of his students, Ajaan Khao, a chant expressing the attitudes of the brahmaviharas directed to all the classifications of beings in all directions throughout the cosmos, a chant that takes a good half-hour to recite.
Ajaan Lee, another of his students—who specialized in breath meditation— 2 popularized another chant focused on the brahmaviharas that takes a similar amount of time to recite.
When you look into the Pali Canon—the source texts for the Theravada tradition—it’s easy to see why the brahmaviharas are given so much importance in the living tradition, for there the brahmaviharas are connected to all three aspects of the path to the end of suffering:
virtue, concentration, and discernment.
For virtue, the brahmaviharas provide the motivation.
You undertake the precepts because both because you have compassion for others (Ud 2:
3) and because you have goodwill for yourself (Ud 5:
1). The Buddha once taught the brahmaviharas to a group of non-Buddhists—who weren’t sure whether actions lead to results beyond this lifetime, or even if there was a life beyond this— telling them that if they practiced in line with these attitudes, they would have nothing to fear if actions did lead to results beyond this lifetime.
If there was no life after death, they could still view themselves as pure in terms of their conduct here and now (AN 3:
65). In another case, the Buddha taught that if you realize that you’ve harmed another person through your misconduct, you should realize that remorse will not undo the harm.
Instead, you should recognize the mistake, resolve not to repeat it, and then develop the brahmaviharas as a way of strengthening your resolve (SN 42:
8). In developing concentration, the connection with the brahmaviharas is even more direct.
The Buddha taught the brahmaviharas as themes on which the mind can focus to develop strong states of mental absorption, called the four jhanas.
One discourse (AN 8:
63) suggest that each of the brahmaviharas can lead all the way to the fourth jhana;
two other discourses read in conjunction (AN 4:
123 and 4:
125) suggest that the first brahmavihara can lead only to the first jhana, the second only to the second, and so on up to the fourth.
But in either case, because these jhanas count as right concentration in the noble eightfold path, any of the four brahmaviharas can play an integral role in the path to the end of suffering.
As for discernment, the Canon contains two types of discussions on how the concentration based on the brahmaviharas can act as a basis for discernment.
The first type focuses on how a meditator should contemplate the concentration that results from any of the brahmaviharas.
In two cases, the Canon recommends reflecting like this (taking goodwill as an example):
“One reflects on this [state of concentration] and discerns, ‘This awareness-release through goodwill is fabricated & intended.
Now whatever is fabricated & intended is inconstant & subject to cessation.
’” (MN 52;
AN 11:
17) In another case, the recommended reflection is this:
“One regards whatever phenomena there that are connected with form, feeling, perception, fabrications, & consciousness, as inconstant, stressful, a disease, a cancer, an arrow, painful, an affliction, alien, a disintegration, an emptiness, not-self.
” (AN 4:
126) In both cases, the realization that these refined states of concentration are inconstant, stressful, and not-self can give rise to a sense of dispassion and disenchantment not only for them, but also for all fabricated things.
The sense of dispassion can then lead to all-around release.
The second type of discussion on the relationship between discernment and the brahmaviharas (SN 46:
54) focuses on the mental qualities that can be combined with the concentration based on the brahmaviharas to lead it beyond the four jhanas.
These qualities are the seven factors for awakening—mindfulness, analysis 3 of qualities, persistence, rapture, serenity, concentration, and equanimity— brought to a heightened pitch so that they are “dependent on seclusion, dependent on dispassion, dependent on cessation, resulting in letting go.
” Ordinarily, the seven factors for awakening are used to give rise to jhana, but the fact that in this case they are dependent on dispassion and cessation means that they have been refined through the contemplations mentioned in the first type of discussion:
in other words, the sort of contemplation that leads through dispassion to release.
For instance, you can develop a state of jhana based on one of the brahmaviharas and then—in light of your realization that it’s fabricated or stressful—analyze its qualities as they’re actually present to develop this knowledge to the level of insight where you’re really willing to let go.
According to SN 46:
54, when the brahmaviharas are combined with the seven factors for awakening to the point of letting go in this way, they can lead at the very least from the four jhanas to even higher stages of concentration.
For example, empathetic joy in this combination can lead beyond the fourth jhana to the a state of concentration called the “dimension of the infinitude of consciousness.
” Equanimity in this combination can lead even further to a state called the “dimension of nothingness.
” But SN 46:
54 adds, without further explanation, that these combinations can lead still higher than that.
Now, because other passages (such as MN 118) say that the seven factors for awakening dependent on seclusion, etc.
, can to lead all the way to full awakening, it’s easy to conclude that when they’re combined with the brahmaviharas they can lead that far as well.
So it’s clear that Theravada, both in its living tradition and in its source texts, has long given a great deal of importance to the brahmaviharas, both as a basic set of attitudes to be practiced by all human beings who hope to raise their minds to a higher-than-human happiness, and as part of the path of practice leading to the highest happiness of all:
nibbana.
But recently a number of Western scholars and mediation teachers have advanced the claim that the tradition has underestimated the importance of the brahmaviharas;
that the brahmaviharas are not just part of the path to nibbana.
They can act as the whole path.
All you need to do is develop the brahmaviharas and they’ll take you all the way to awakening.
This argument takes as its scholarly basis two passages in the Canon.
In the first passage, which is found in DN 13, the Buddha teaches the brahmaviharas to two young brahmans who have asked him how to attain union with Brahma.
The argument based on this passage states that the Buddha is here using the phrase “union with Brahma” as a synonym for nibbana.
This means that the brahmaviharas can lead all the way to nibbana.
People advancing this argument admit that this interpretation requires a fair amount of reading between the lines, for the Buddha nowhere states explicitly that union with Brahma is another term for nibbana.
However, they feel that the argument can be justified by a knowledge of the context in which the Buddha taught—a context of which the living tradition has long been ignorant, but which has now been uncovered by modern scholarship.
Once this reading of the first passage is accepted, the second passage (Sn 1:
8)—which we will examine below—can be interpreted as supporting it.
4 This interpretation has profound implications for anyone wanting to reach the end of suffering.
If it’s true, there would be no need to bother with the contemplations of inconstancy, stress, and not-self;
and no need to bother with the more advanced forms of the factors for awakening.
If it’s not true, though, then anyone who followed it would risk missing out on the opportunity to reach any of the stages of awakening in his lifetime.
So it’s important to examine the basis for this interpretation, as well as its consistency with the rest of the Canon, to see if what’s read between the lines in DN 13 is consistent with what’s stated in the lines of the other canonical discourses treating the brahmaviharas and the results to which they lead.
If it is consistent, then the interpretation is worthy of credence.
If not, it’s not.
DN 13 is a long discourse that begins with an unusual incident.
Two young brahmans, quoting different brahmanical teachers, are unable to agree on the path leading to union with Brahma, their highest religious goal.
So they decide to take the question to the Buddha, for they have heard that the Buddha claims knowledge of this path.
Now, according to brahmanical orthodoxy, this is something no good brahman would ever do, because the Buddha was not a brahman, and brahmans would never go to non-brahmans for spiritual advice.
This point of orthodoxy has led some modern scholars to conclude that the entire discourse is meant to be ironical and tongue-in-cheek.
However, the Pali Canon is full of brahmans coming to the Buddha for advice on spiritual matters of all sorts, and many became Buddhist monks or lay-followers as a result.
So it would seem that brahmanical orthodoxy was not always strictly observed in the Buddha’s time—which we know was a time of great spiritual upheaval—and the incident at the beginning of DN 13 might not have been as outlandish as brahmanical orthodoxy would make it seem.
On hearing the question of the two brahmans, the Buddha agrees to teach them the way to union with Brahma.
He begins undiplomatically with a putdown of the brahmanical priesthood as a whole, saying that their tradition is no better than a string of blind people led by a blind person, or a man building a stairway to a palace whose location he doesn’t know.
In other words, none of the brahman teachers who teach the path leading to union with Brahma have ever experienced union with Brahma, so they don’t know what they’re talking about.
The Buddha then launches into his discussion of that path.
He starts with a detailed description of the precepts of a Buddhist monk—a description that parallels word for word a description that he gives in several other discourses (such as DN 2 through DN 12) on the path leading to awakening.
But then, when coming to the topic of meditation, the description reaches a fork in the road.
The parallel passages at this point include a discussion of the four jhanas, followed by the powers that can be developed based on the jhanas, including the development of insight into the four noble truths, followed by total release in the here-and-now.
In DN 13, however, this account is replaced with an account of the four brahmaviharas, followed by the statement that if they are developed, then after death the meditator can expect to attain union with Brahma.
The traditional interpretation of this discourses takes it at face value:
The Buddha is teachings the two brahmans how to reach the goal of their religion, even though their goal is inferior to nibbana.
Read in conjunction with DN 2 through DN 12, DN 13 is thus an obvious assertion of the Buddha’s superiority to the brahmans.
Not only does he know the path to their goal—a path that they 5 themselves don’t know—but he also knows the path to a superior destination:
the ultimate goal of total release in the here-and-now.
The more recent interpretation of DN 13, however, is that it has to be read in conjunction with the Brhad-aranyaka Upanisad, a brahmanical text of which the Theravada tradition has long been ignorant.
The Brhad-aranyaka Upanisad asserts that the brahma worlds are the ultimate spiritual goal, the only postmortem destination from which the soul does not return.
The Buddha, in using the phrase, “union with Brahma,” is referring to these brahma worlds and is also adopting the idea that they are the ultimate goal, replacing the brahmanical conception of what constitutes that goal with his own.
In other words, he’s being ironic.
When teaching the way to union with Brahma, he’s actually teaching the way to nibbana.
This means that the brahmaviharas, on their own and without any other steps of meditation, lead all the way to nibbana.
If this interpretation holds, then SN 1:
8 could conceivably be read in support of it.
This discourse gives a detailed description of how to develop the first brahmavihara, unlimited goodwill, followed by this passage:
Not taken with views, but virtuous & consummate in vision, having subdued desire for sensual pleasures, one never again will lie in the womb.
The phrase “never again will lie in the womb” is a description of the result of the penultimate level of awakening, called non-return.
A person who reaches this level will never again be reborn in this world, and instead will be reborn in one of the brahma worlds called the Pure Abodes, where only non-returners are born and where they all are destined to reach full awakening.
As for practices listed in this passage—not being taken with views, being virtuous, being consummate in vision, and having subdued desire for sensual pleasures—there is no explanation of how they relate to the practice of unlimited goodwill:
whether they automatically happen as part of that practice, or have to be added on top of it to reach the level of non-return.
The traditional interpretation of the passage adopts the second reading.
Just as the description of the practice of unlimited goodwill in this discourse is prefaced by a number of practices that have to be done separately to provide a foundation for the practice of unlimited goodwill, that description is followed by a series of other practices that have to be done separately in addition to it to reach awakening.
However, if we can accept the new reading of DN 13, then it’s possible that the other interpretation could be right:
Unlimited goodwill automatically encompasses these practices.
The problem, however, is that the new interpretation of DN 13 is drastically inconsistent with many other passages in the Canon that explicitly stress the limitations of the brahmaviharas and the brahma worlds to which they lead and where union with Brahma is attained.
To begin with, AN 4:
125 states that each of the brahmaviharas, when practiced on its own, leads to rebirth in a particular brahma world, with goodwill leading to the lowest of the four—the Abhassara, or Radiant brahmas—and 6 equanimity leading to the highest, the Vehapphala, or Sky-fruit brahmas.
DN 1 indicates that these levels are higher than the heaven of the Great Brahma, and although they are not destroyed with the destruction of the rest of the universe at the end of each cosmic cycle, the beings who live there can still fall from there and be reborn elsewhere, usually on a lower plane in the universe.
In fact, AN 4:
125 states explicitly that a person who practices the brahmaviharas without having become a noble disciple—in other words, without having reached the first level of awakening—can, after having lived out the life span of a brahma in any of these four brahma worlds, be reborn in any of the lowest realms of the cosmos:
in hell, as an animal, or as a hungry ghost.
So from the testimony of these discourses, it’s hard to see how the attainment of a brahma world could be equal to nibbana, which constitutes total release from the cosmos as a whole.
The modern interpretation, however, asserts that these discourses shouldn’t really be taken seriously because they were later additions to the Canon, composed by literal-minded monks who didn’t understand the Buddha’s ironic tone when referring to “union with Brahma” and “brahma worlds” in discourses like DN 13. However, there’s no proof that DN 13 is any earlier or more authentic than DN 1 or AN 4:
125, so the assertion of which discourses came first is nothing more than idle speculation.
But two other discourses show clearly that the difference between nibbana and union with Brahma is anything but an idle issue, for it touches on the longterm consequences of choices made at the moment of death.
Both discourses state clearly that if a dying person has his mind set on any of the brahma worlds, he should be told the drawbacks of those worlds so that he can set his mind on the higher goal of release.
The first discourse, MN 97, makes this point in a fairly poignant manner.
The brahman Dhanañjanin, a former student of Sariputta, is dying and asks for Sariputta to visit him.
Dhanañjanin has been negligent as a meditator, and Sariputta, on arrival, reflects, “These brahmans are set on the brahma world.
What if I were to teach Dhanañjanin the brahman the path to union with the brahmas?
” So he teaches him the way to union with the brahmas, and Dhanañjanin, on dying, is actually reborn in a brahma world.
However, when Sariputta returns to the Buddha, the latter chides him for directing Dhanañjanin to an inferior goal at the moment of death when he could have directed him to a higher one.
This, of course, raises the question as to why the Buddha would have limited his discussion with the two young brahmans to this inferior goal, and yet criticizes Sariputta for doing just the same thing.
This question, though, ignores a crucial difference:
Sariputta’s instructions were Dhanañjanin’s last chance to hear the Dhamma in this lifetime, whereas the Buddha, when teaching the young brahmans, could use his knowledge of the way to the brahma world to induce them to return to him later for more instructions on higher attainments.
The second discourse (SN 55:
54) explains why the brahma worlds are an inferior attainment.
In this discourse, the Buddha’s cousin, Mahanama asks the Buddha for instructions on how to advise a wise person who is about to die.
The Buddha replies that if the dying person is plagued by worries about his family, he should be reminded that his worries at this point cannot help his family, so he should let those worries go.
If he is fixated on human sensual pleasures, he should be told that human sensual pleasures are no match for the pleasures of the sensual heavens, so he should focus his mind on those heavens instead.
If 7 he’s fixated on the pleasures of the sensual heavens, he should be told that even those are inferior to the pleasures of the brahma world, and he should instead focus his thoughts there.
If the dying person is fixated on the brahma world, he should be told that even the brahma world is “inconstant, impermanent, and included in identity.
” In other worlds, the brahma worlds are unstable, and the beings reborn there still have a sense of identification with the five clinging-aggregates:
form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness.
Because this identification is a fetter dropped even on the first stage of awakening, the brahman worlds are inferior to that level of attainment.
For this reason, the dying person should be told to focus on the cessation of identification.
If he can do that as he dies, then even though he may be a layperson, his release is in no way inferior to the release of a monk whose mind is released.
These two discourses show clearly that the Buddha regarded rebirth in a brahma world as a goal inferior to nibbana.
And because the distinction between nibbana and the brahma world is such a serious, life-and-death matter, it’s unlikely that the Buddha would have wanted to speak ironically about it, blurring the distinction when talking to the two brahmans in DN 13. The limitations of the brahma worlds are directly connected to the limitations of the brahmaviharas as a path.
This connection is especially clear when we read SN 55:
54, the discourse just cited, in conjunction with AN 4:
178. This latter discourse points out that it’s possible to develop a state of concentration based on the brahmaviharas and yet still feel no interest in bringing an end to identification.
This shows that the brahmaviharas on their own are not enough to arouse that interest.
Something more is needed—such as the reflection on the inconstancy, stress, and not-selfness of that state of concentration—to arouse the interest needed to bring identification to an end.
Another discourse—MN 106—makes a similar point:
that it’s possible to develop a strong state of equanimity in the higher levels of concentration and yet still cling to that equanimity.
Only when there is the added determination not to fashion a sense of identification around the equanimity (MN 137) can that clinging be abandoned.
So it’s obvious that the unlimited attitudes of the brahmaviharas do have at least one limit.
On their own, they cannot lead to awakening.
As a practice, they can’t by themselves bring about dispassion of identification, and so they can lead only to an inferior goal in which identification is present as well.
This means that the new interpretation of DN 13 is unreliable as a guide to practice.
It also means that the concluding passage of Sn 1:
8 has to be interpreted in the traditional way, as a list of qualities to be developed in addition to the brahmaviharas if the concentration based on the brahmaviharas is to lead to any of the stages of awakening.
In other words, the traditional emphasis on the brahmaviharas as a path to awakening is neither too little nor too much.
The brahmaviharas can function as part of the path to awakening, but only a part.
To attain even the first level of awakening, you have to add other practices to induce the disenchantment and dispassion leading to genuine release.
— Thanissaro Bhikkhu

95.1.4 – Sublime Determinations: a Retreat on the Brahmavihāras (2022)

Sublime

Determinations

a Retreat on the Brahmavihāras

Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu

(Geoffrey DeGraff)

with the Sociedade Vipassana de Meditação

BrasÍlia

Copyright 2022 Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Unported.
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//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Pre-Retreat Reading

The Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta

This is to be done by one skilled in aims

who wants to break through to the state of peace:

Be capable, upright, & straightforward,

easy to instruct, gentle, & not conceited,

content & easy to support,

with few duties, living lightly,

with peaceful faculties, astute,

modest, & no greed for supporters.

Do not do the slightest thing

that the observant would later censure.

Think:
Happy, at rest,

may all beings be happy at heart.

Whatever beings there may be,

weak or strong, without exception,

long, large,

middling, short,

subtle, gross,

seen & unseen,

living near & far away,

born or seeking birth:

May all beings be happy at heart.

Let no one deceive another

or despise anyone anywhere,

or, through anger or resistance-perception,

wish for another to suffer.

As a mother would risk her life

to protect her child, her only child,

even so should one cultivate the heart limitlessly

with regard to all beings.

With goodwill for the entire cosmos,

cultivate the heart limitlessly:

above, below, & all around,

unobstructed, without hostility or hate.

Whether standing, walking,

sitting, or lying down,

as long as one has banished torpor,

one should be resolved on this mindfulness.

This is called a Brahmā abiding

here.

Not taken with views,

but virtuous & consummate in vision,

having subdued greed for sensuality,

one never again

will lie in the womb.
— Sutta Nipāta 1:8

Wednesday — Introduction

Good evening.
Welcome to our retreat on the sublime attitudes.

We hope that the retreat will be useful to you all.

The brahmavihāras, or sublime attitudes, are attitudes of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity that you spread to all beings, without limit.
In other words, there’s no limit to the amount of goodwill, etc., that you spread,
and no limit on the number of beings to whom you spread it.
Each of these attitudes is an antidote for mental states that can get in the way of training the mind.
For this reason, they play an important role in fostering the path to the end of suffering.

• Goodwill, mettā, a wish that beings will be happy, is an antidote for ill will, the desire to see beings suffer.
Notice that we don’t translate mettā as love or loving-kindness, because, as the Buddha pointed out, love is partial, and can easily turn into hatred.
When you’re advised to develop universal mettā, you’re not being asked to love everyone, or even to like everyone.
Instead, you’re simply asked not to want to see anyone suffer, regardless of whether you like that person or not.

• Compassion, karuṇā, a wish that those who are suffering will be freed from their suffering, is an antidote to cruelty, the desire to actually harm others when they’re down.

• Empathetic joy, muditā, a wish that those who are already happy will continue to be happy, is an antidote to resentment and envy.

• Equanimity, upekkhā, the ability to maintain the mind on an even keel when events don’t fall in line with your goodwill, is an antidote to irritation.

These attitudes boil down to two—goodwill and equanimity—in that compassion and empathetic joy are basically extensions of goodwill.
Compassion is what goodwill feels when encountering suffering;
empathetic joy is what goodwill feels when encountering those who are already happy.
The Buddha may have separated them out from goodwill in his list of the brahmavihāras because they’re good checks for the honesty and truthfulness of your goodwill.
If someone whose behavior you don’t like is suffering the consequences of that behavior, is your goodwill sincere enough to want to see their suffering end?
If someone whose behavior you don’t like is enjoying the fruits of past good actions, can you honestly say that you’re happy for that person?

Equanimity is the backup for cases where, for the time being at least, there’s nothing you can do to stop people from suffering or creating the causes of suffering.
This means that you develop each of these qualities where appropriate.
You don’t regard equanimity as the goal of the practice.
It always has to be based on goodwill so that it doesn’t shade into apathy or indifference.

Notice that you practice developing these attitudes toward all beings—including yourself.
To do this, you have to develop them consciously, because in the normal human heart these attitudes tend to be partial.
It’s easy to feel goodwill, for example, for those you like, or equanimity toward those who have no connection to you.
But it requires a conscious effort to be able to maintain these attitudes toward anyone and everyone.
It’s not the case that the brahmavihāras are the heart’s innate nature.
After all, their opposites can come just as naturally to the heart.
It’s just as natural to feel ill will for those who have betrayed you or people you love as it is natural to feel goodwill for those who behave in ways you like.
It’s just as natural to get irritated when things don’t go your way as it is to be equanimous when nothing disturbs you.

So in making your goodwill and equanimity limitless, you’re learning to take these human attitudes that tend to be partial and to intentionally erase any trace of partiality in how you apply them.
In doing so, you lift your human mind to the level of the Brahmās, the highest level of heavenly beings, who have developed the sublime attitudes to the point where they can extend them to everyone, no matter who, no matter where.

Because this takes effort, and because you have to keep these heightened attitudes in mind, the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta tells you to determine on goodwill as a form of mindfulness, i.
e., something you have to keep in mind.
This point applies to all four brahmavihāras.

When it says to determine on these things, it’s good to remember what the Pali Canon has to say about determination.

Determination has four components:
discernment, truth, generosity, and calm

When we look into the way the practice around goodwill is described in the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta, we can find all four.

Discernment:
In the first line of the poem, it refers to what should be done by those who appreciate the state of peace as the most skillful aim.
This is a reference to the third noble truth, the truth of the cessation of suffering.
The Canon notes that you can practice the brahmavihāras in two ways:
to lead to rebirth in the Brahmā worlds, or as part of a larger, nobler practice that develops the skills of the noble eightfold path, leading to the total end of suffering, free from rebirth anywhere at all.
In particular, the brahmavihāras strengthen three of the factors of the path:
right resolve, right mindfulness, and right concentration.
If you’re really discerning, you’ll want to practice the brahmavihāras for the noble goal of the end of suffering.
That’s how we’ll explain them here.

In particular, it’s important to note the relationship between the brahmavihāras and right resolve:
This is where your heart enters into the practice, so that it’s not just an intellectual exercise.
As you foster a mature desire for true happiness, and you see at the same time so much suffering around you, it impresses on the heart the need to find a way of practice that really leads to a way to put suffering to an end.
So just as the noble path takes the brahmavihāras to a higher level, the brahmavihāras help strengthen the path in its work.

Truth is defined as not being deceptive, i.e., not changing into something else.
In English, we say that you’re true to your primary intention.
According to the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta, the brahmavihāras are true in that they’re attitudes to be maintained in all postures:
sitting, standing, walking, and lying down, as long as you’re awake.

To be true to the brahmavihāras, you also have to carry through with precepts.
This relates to the lines, “Don’t do slightest thing that the observant would later censure,” and “Be upright, straightforward.”

In other words, for the brahmavihāras to be genuine, they have to show in your actions.
This means:

You don’t harm anyone.

You don’t harm yourself by breaking precepts or provoking passion, aversion, and delusion in yourself.

You don’t harm others by getting them to break precepts or by provoking passion, aversion, and delusion in them.
Remember:
you appreciate the state of peace, and you want others, for their own well-being, to appreciate it, too.

Generosity:
The extension of goodwill, etc., to all is done for free.
You’re not asking for anything in return from the people you give it to.
You don’t give it only to people you think “deserve” your goodwill.
As with all forms of generosity, the Buddha defines this expansive attitude as a form of wealth:
When you give happily, you gain a generous heart in return.
This is why it’s to be protected as mother would protect only child.
In this case, the brahmavihāras are a form of a wealth you can create from within your own heart without having to take anything away from anyone else.
The more you create and extend to others, the richer you are.

Calm:
In the words of the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta, you’re:

“easy to instruct, gentle, not conceited,

content, easy to support,

with few duties, living lightly,

peaceful faculties, modest”

The phrase “peaceful faculties” refers to the practice of sense restraint.

Not conceited:
When developing compassion, you don’t look down on people who are poor or suffering

Content:
You’re content with material requisites that are enough for the sake of the practice.
However, you’re NOT content to watch unskillful states arise in your mind.
That’s an area where the Buddha said you should practice staying discontent until you’ve freed yourself from suffering.

Not taken with views:
You don’t hold to views that are designed to lead to arguments—such as views addressing the question as to whether the world was or wasn’t created by a god or by how many gods.
These views don’t just stay in cafés.
They can get people to attack one another.

Instead, you’re consummate in vision:
You see clearly what’s skillful, what’s not, and, in particular, what needs to be done to put an end to suffering.
This is a way of seeing things that gets you out of arguments and focused on your own behavior.

In this way, calm leads back to discernment.

So as you can see, developing the brahmavihāras requires more than just sitting here and repeating phrases, “May all beings be happy.”
It requires that you understand what you’re doing:

how to develop and maintain a mind state, and

how beings will actually become happy.

It also requires that you live in a way that is in harmony with a genuine expression of the brahmavihāras.

So, during this retreat, in addition to spending time taking the brahmavihāras as a meditative theme, we’ll also be discussing issues of discernment, truth, generosity, and calm as they relate to keeping yourself determined to be constantly mindful of the brahmavihāras in thought, word, and deed.

This evening, we’ll focus on getting started on how to develop goodwill as a mind state.

You may remember from our previous retreats that there are three types of fabrication:

bodily—the in-and-out breath,

verbal—the way you talk to yourself, and

mental—perceptions and feelings.

To extend a wish that others will be happy, you have to be able to make yourself happy—to provide yourself with a sense of well-being through these three forms of fabrication.

We can do that by first focusing on the breath.
This will be our basic meditation method throughout the retreat—getting centered with a sense of well-being focused on breath, then using verbal and mental fabrication to extend the wish that others will experience well-being as well.
We recommend that you go back and forth between these two themes of meditation—thinking thoughts of the brahmavihāras to clear the mind, then focusing on the breath to give a sense of well-being, and then using that strengthened concentration and mindfulness to give more power to your goodwill, etc., then back to the breath, and so forth.
That way, you strengthen both your practice of breath meditation and your practice of the brahmavihāras.

So let’s finish this evening with a guided meditation.

Thursday — Goodwill

As we noted last night, goodwill as a brahmavihāra is a wish that all beings will be happy.
It’s an antidote for ill will, the desire to see beings suffer.

As we also noted, it’s not an innate quality in the human mind.
Human goodwill tends to be partial to those you like.

For goodwill to become a brahmavihāra, you have to learn how to extend it to everyone, in all situations.
That requires mindfulness and determination.
Mindfulness is the ability to keep this attitude in mind.
Determination involves four qualities:
discernment, truth, generosity, and calm.

Discernment here means looking at the issue of happiness in terms of right view.

First, there’s right view about what might be called the kamma of happiness, the principle that for beings to be happy, their happiness has to be based on their own actions.

This is why, in the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta, the expression of goodwill is not just:

Happy, at rest,

may all beings be happy at heart.

Whatever beings there may be,

weak or strong, without exception,

long, large,

middling, short,

subtle, gross,

seen & unseen,

living near & far away,

born or seeking birth:

May all beings be happy at heart.

It also goes on to say:

Let no one deceive another

or despise anyone anywhere,

or, through anger or resistance-perception,

wish for another to suffer.

In other words, the mature and wise expression of goodwill sees that other beings will be truly happy only if they have goodwill for others, too.

So a skillful expression of goodwill is:
“May all beings understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them.”

This is an attitude you can extend to anyone without hypocrisy, even to people who have been cruel and heartless in their behavior.

Now, there may be people you would like to see suffer or be punished a little bit for their past misdeeds before they become happy, but you have to ask yourself:
Why?
What good would be gained by that?
Would that punishment actually make them see more clearly the error of their ways?
Often suffering makes people even more insistent that they were right to begin with.

Think of yourself:
You know you have some bad kamma in your past.
Would you want to be punished for those actions first before you can be happy?
Of course not.
You’d like to have the chance to come to your senses first, so extend the same forgiveness to others.

As the Buddha said, if we all had to be punished for our past bad actions before gaining awakening, no one would ever gain awakening.

Most of the cruelty in the world comes from people who are suffering and fearful.
It would be better to wish that they willingly see the error of their ways and willingly change how they act.

You can then rejoice in that.
In the Buddha’s image, such a person brightens the world in the same way that the moon brightens the night when it’s released from a cloud.

In addition to providing insight into the kamma of happiness—what it means to wish that beings be happy—discernment also has to apply to what it means to express goodwill in your words and deeds.
It does NOT mean doing what people like, or trying to please them all the time.
The Buddha doesn’t teach you to be a doormat.
You have to think about the other person’s genuine well-being, which the person him- or herself may not even realize.
Remember:
Appreciating the state of peace, and hoping that other people will find that peace, too, you try to get them to observe precepts and to lessen the amount of greed, aversion, and delusion in their minds.

These are some of the ways in which discernment helps to determine on goodwill as a brahmavihāra.

As for truth:
To be truthful in your goodwill, you have to be able to maintain it at all times.
This requires that you learn how to talk to yourself in ways that can maintain goodwill even when others mistreat you.
This is why goodwill is often discussed together with patience.
You may remember the story of Lady Vedehikā from our retreat on the ten perfections:
the woman who hit her slave in the head with a rolling pin.
It was because of her lack of forbearance that her good reputation was ruined.

Given this need for strength in your patience and goodwill, the Buddha uses many images and perceptions—mental fabrications—to remind you to stay strong and unwavering in your goodwill no matter what.

Think of his image of bandits cutting you into pieces with a two-handled saw:
Even then you should have goodwill for them.
That way, if you were to die at that time, at the very least you would die with your mind in a skillful state.
The survival of your goodness is much more important that the survival of the body.
If you die with thoughts of ill will, those would pull you to a rebirth motivated by thoughts of revenge—and that wouldn’t be a happy rebirth.

Then think of the Buddha’s image of the mother protecting her only son.
In those days, a woman’s best guarantee for future safety was to have a son.
Without him, her life was in danger.
If her husband were to die, she’d have no protection at all.
So she would protect her baby son in every way possible.
In the same way, you should protect your goodwill as your guarantee for future safety.
If you allow yourself to abandon your goodwill, you’re putting yourself in danger.

Think also of the Buddha’s image of goodwill as large as the Earth, greater and vaster than the actions of other beings.
It’s a strength, not a gentle attitude for weak people to develop.
Think of the story of Ajaan Lee fighting off an elephant with his goodwill, or fighting off hordes of mosquitoes with goodwill, “with no holds barred.”

Think also of the Buddha’s image of goodwill as being like space.
People can try to write things in space, but there’s no surface on which their writings could stick.
In the same way, don’t let people’s bad words or actions stick in your mind.
Don’t carry them around and ruminate on them.
Just let them vanish.

When someone close to you does something displeasing, think of the good things that person has done:
This makes it easier to feel goodwill for that person.
Like a monk looking for pieces of cloth to make a robe, and who finds a piece of cloth that’s partly dirty:
He tears off the good, clean part and leaves the dirty part aside.
In other words, the monk benefits by knowing what to take and what not to take.

If you can’t think of anything good the person has done, think of him or her as being like a sick person on the side of the road in a desolate place:
You have to have compassion for such a person.

The purpose of all these images and perceptions—which, as I noted, are mental fabrications—is to help you maintain your goodwill independently of other people’s actions.
Remember:
If your goodness depends on other people being good, then it’s not secure, and you yourself can’t trust it.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you go out of your way to help other people when they abuse your help.
Remember, one of the best ways to help others is to get them to act wisely.
If you can’t do that, maybe it’s time to go your separate ways, wishing the other person well, but staying out of each other’s lives.

Ajaan Fuang, my teacher, once discovered that a snake had moved into his room.
Every time he entered the room, he saw it slip into a narrow space behind a storage cabinet.
Even though he tried leaving the door to the room open during the daytime, the snake wasn’t willing to leave.
So for three days they lived together.
He was very careful not to startle the snake or make it feel threatened by his presence.
But finally on the evening of the third day, as he was sitting in meditation, he addressed the snake quietly in his mind.
He said, “Look, it’s not that I don’t like you, but our minds work in different ways.
It’d be very easy for there to be a misunderstanding between us.
Now, there are plenty of places out in the woods where you can live without the uneasiness of living with me.”
And as he sat there spreading thoughts of goodwill to the snake, the snake left.

If Ajaan Fuang had tried to show lovingkindness to the snake by petting it, the snake would have probably felt fearful and would have bitten him.
So the lesson here is that when you meet with human snakes—and we’ve all met many of them in our lives—often the kindest thing to do is to wish the other person well and to go your separate ways.
Or, if you have to live together, you have to establish clear boundaries.

That’s how truth helps to determine on goodwill as a brahmavihāra.

As for generosity:
Goodwill, to be a brahmavihāra, has to be freely given as a gift.
It’s not just for people who “deserve” to be happy.
“Deserving” and “not-deserving” don’t come into the issue at all.
Think of Buddha’s goodwill:
He didn’t teach the end of suffering only to people who didn’t deserve to suffer.
If he had, he wouldn’t have found anyone to teach.

So you give goodwill freely to all.
As the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta says, you extend it to:

Whatever beings there may be,

weak or strong, without exception,

long, large,

middling, short,

subtle, gross,

seen & unseen,

living near & far away,

born or seeking birth:

In the Buddhist understanding of action, giving a gift is seen as a trade:
You give the gift and get something good in return.
What you get depends not only on the gift, but also on your motivation and attitude while giving.

We can apply Buddha’s teachings on the levels of motivation for giving in general to the gift of goodwill.
The higher the motivation, the greater the happiness that results.

The lowest motivation is, “I’ll get good kamma coming back to me in future.”

In this connection, AN 11:
16 lists karmic rewards of goodwill when it’s thoroughly cultivated:

“One sleeps easily, wakes easily, dreams no evil dreams.
One is dear to human beings, dear to non-human beings.
The devas protect one.
Neither fire, poison, nor weapons can touch one.
One’s mind gains concentration quickly.
One’s complexion is bright.
One dies unconfused and—if penetrating no higher—is headed for a Brahmā world.”

In terms of protection:
There are many stories in the Canon of the Buddha being protected by his goodwill:
as when the elephant Nalagiri was let loose to attack him, or when a bandit was hired to assassinate him.
In both cases, when they came into the range of his goodwill, they stood still in their tracks.
Your goodwill may not be as strong as the Buddha’s, but if you consciously develop it, you’ll find that there are times when it can unexpectedly get you out of danger.

Some if the higher attitudes are these:

“Goodwill is good.”

“I’m happy, it’s not right that I don’t wish the same happiness to others.”

“Goodwill makes the mind serene.
Gratification and joy arise.”

“Goodwill is an ornament for the mind”:
In other words, it’s a natural expression of a mind that has developed concentration and discernment.

As for your attitude, you give goodwill with respect for other beings’ desire for happiness.

As with giving in general, you have to use your discernment to figure out, in individual cases, what is the best way to express your goodwill to others.
In some cases, it’s expressed by loving-kindness.
In others, as with Ajaan Fuang and the snake, it’s best expressed by leaving the other person alone and wishing him/her well.

One expression of goodwill that’s always an appropriate gift is the gift of forgiveness.
In one of the standard phrases for goodwill—“May all beings be free from animosity”—
the Pali word for animosity, vera, is the opposite of forgiveness.
It’s the vengeful animosity that wants to get back at someone for perceived wrongs.
So when we wish that others be free from vera, we’re saying two things:
“May all beings receive forgiveness for their wrong actions,” and “May all beings forgive others who have wronged them.”

When you forgive others, you’re not saying that you’re going to love them—
or that you’re even going to forget the wrong that they did.
You’re simply saying that you won’t try to get back at them.

When you forgive someone who’s wronged you, it doesn’t erase that person’s kamma in having done wrong.
This is why some people think that forgiveness has no place in the karmic universe of the Buddha’s teachings.
But that’s not so.
Forgiveness may not be able to undo old bad kamma, but by erasing any thoughts of vera,
it can prevent new bad kamma from being done.

The Dhammapada, a popular collection of early Buddhist poems, speaks of vera in two contexts.
The first is when someone has injured you, and you’d like to inflict some injury back.
The second is when you’ve lost a contest—in the Buddha’s time, this referred primarily to military battles, but now it could be extended to any competition where loss entails harm, whether real or only perceived—and you want to get even.
As when Brazil loses to Argentina in soccer.

In both contexts—injury and competition—forgiveness is what puts an end to vera.
You resolve not to settle the score, even if society grants you the right to do so, because you realize that, from the point of view of kamma, the only real score in contests like this consists of more bad kamma points for both sides.
So, in forgiving the other side, you’re basically promising yourself to forego any opportunity to add to the score.
You have no idea how many lifetimes this particular karmic mud fight has been going back and forth, but you do know that the only way to end it is to stop the vera, and if the end doesn’t first start with you, it may never arrive.

Forgiveness is a stance you may have to make unilaterally, within yourself, but there is the possibility that the other side will be inspired by your example to stop slinging mud as well.
That way, both sides will benefit.
Yet even if the other side doesn’t immediately join in the ceasefire, there will come a time when they lose interest, and that particular back-and-forth will die.

As for the case when you’ve lost out in a competition, the Buddha says that you can find peace and end vera only by putting winning and losing aside.
To do this, you start by taking a good look at where you try to find happiness.
If you look for it in terms of power or material possessions, there will always be winning and losing.
If you gain power or status, for instance, others will have to lose.
If others win, you lose.

But if you define happiness in terms of the practice of merit—giving, virtue, and meditation—there’s no need to create losers.
Everyone wins.
When you give, other people naturally gain what you’ve shared with them;
you gain a spacious sense of wealth within and the love and respect of others without.
When you’re virtuous, abstaining from harming anyone, you gain freedom from remorse over your actions, while others gain safety.
When you meditate, you give less rein to your greed, aversion, and delusion, so that you suffer less from their depredations, and other people are less victimized by their prowling around as well.

Then you further reflect:

Greater in battle

than the man who would conquer

a thousand-thousand men,

is he who would conquer

just one—

himself.

Better to conquer yourself

than others.

When you’ve trained yourself,

living in constant self-control,

neither a deva nor gandhabba,

nor a Mara banded with Brahmas,

could turn that triumph

back into defeat.
— Dhp 103–105

Other victories can be undone—“settled” scores, in the light of kamma and rebirth, are never really settled—but victory over your own greed, aversion, and delusion is something that lasts.
It’s the only victory that creates no vera, so it’s the only victory that’s really safe and secure.

But this isn’t a victory you can hope to attain if you’re still harboring thoughts of vera.
So in a world where we’ve all been harmed in one way or another, and where we could always find old scores to avenge if we wanted to, the only way to find a truly safe victory in life is to start with thoughts of forgiveness:
that you want to pose no danger to anyone at all, regardless of the wrong they’ve done.
This is why forgiveness is not only compatible with the practice of the Buddha’s teachings.
It’s a necessary first step.

That’s one important way in which generosity helps in determining on goodwill.

In connection with calm, three passages stand out from the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta:

1. Santindriyo:
Have peaceful faculties.
You have to look carefully at how you engage with the world through your senses.
Do you look at it with the eyes of greed, aversion, and delusion?
Listen with the ears of greed, aversion, and delusion?
If so, you’re going to find things that aggravate those attitudes, and it’ll be hard to live in peace with others.
You have to look at:

a) your motivation for looking, etc.

b) the results of how you look, etc., at other people and things.

In other words, see your engagement with the senses as a cause-and-effect process.
Then you change the causes—your motivation and what you’re looking for—so that their effects don’t aggravate the mind.

For example, when you look at a beautiful person:
If the way you look at the person aggravates lust or envy, you have to look at the person in another way.
What features of that person’s body or personality are NOT attractive?
Focus on those.

Similarly, when looking at a desirable material object, ask yourself:
What would the drawbacks of owning that object be?

2. Santussako ca subharo ca:
Content and living lightly.
You have to look carefully at how you impose on the world with your material needs.
Be content with just enough to get by and to practice the Dhamma.
If you’re greedy for things, it’s bound to get you in conflict with others who want the same things—this is why there are conflicts in families and wars between nations.
Think about what I just said about winning and losing:
It’s best to look for happiness in a way where everyone wins, and that’s easiest when you can keep your greed, aversion, and delusion under control.

3. Diṭṭhiñ-ca anupagamma… dassanena sampanno:
Not taken with views, but consummate in vision.
What “not taken with views” means is that you don’t grab on to views that would get you into conflict with others.
Some views actually seem to be designed to create conflict and arguments, such as how the world began.
If people believe there’s a single god who ordains what has to be done in world, they go around trying to force their views on others.

“Consummate in vision” means that you see clearly what’s skillful and what’s not:
This is designed for you to take as a guide for your own behavior.
You don’t have to impose it on anyone, and you actually create more peace in world.

In this way, calm comes back to discernment.

It’s in these ways that your determination on being mindful of goodwill all the time actually becomes a guide to your activities throughout life, leading to a genuine and lasting happiness, both for yourself and for others.

Friday — Compassion & Empathetic Joy

As I mentioned Wednesday night, the second and third brahmavihāras—compassion and empathetic joy—are expressions of goodwill.
Compassion is what goodwill feels when encountering suffering;
empathetic joy is what goodwill feels when encountering those who are happy.

We tend to think of these attitudes as being very easy:
Of course we feel sorry for people or animals who are suffering.
Of course we feel happy when we see other people being happy.
But these attitudes are easy only some of the time.
In fact, like goodwill, our human level of compassion and empathetic joy tends to be partial.
It’s easy to feel these attitudes around innocent people who we feel are suffering unjustly or around people we think deserve to be happy.

But for compassion and empathetic joy to become true brahmavihāras, you have to be able to feel them in all situations.
When someone who has harmed you or your loved ones, and is now being punished for his or her wrongdoing, you still have to feel compassion for that person, even if you feel the punishment is precisely what that person deserves.
When people who are enjoying good fortune abuse that good fortune—say, using their power to create war and mayhem in the world—you can’t wish for them to lose their good fortune.
A more skillful attitude would be to wish that they would see the error of their ways and then use their good fortune for greater good.

It’s cases like these that test the discernment and truth of your determination on goodwill:
You say you want all beings to be happy, but are you willing to extend the same wish to people like these?
Can you see why it’s the wise thing to do?
And that it’s good for you?
When Argentina beats Brazil in soccer, can you be happy for them?
When Argentina loses to Guyana, can you feel compassion for them?

The best way to strengthen your discernment and truth in developing these two brahmavihāras is to think about the Buddha’s teachings on kamma and rebirth.
These teachings provide a context that makes it easier to feel compassion and empathetic joy in difficult situations.
They do this by helping you to see why these attitudes are appropriate and actually good for you.
In this way, these two brahmavihāras not only test your discernment, truth, generosity, and calm, but they also make these qualities stronger.

First, kamma:
When someone is suffering, you have to reflect on the reasons why people suffer.

Here we have to correct a common misunderstanding about kamma.
The Buddha didn’t say that our present suffering comes entirely from our past actions.
In fact, he actually said that to believe that what you experience now depends solely on past actions is an extreme form of wrong view.
He took this point so seriously that—even though he wasn’t the sort of person to look for fights—when he heard that other people were teaching this view, he sought them out to argue with them.
If you teach that everything depends on past kamma, he said, it leaves your students unprotected and bewildered, for it leaves them with no way of escaping from suffering in the present.

One case involved some Jain ascetics:
They claimed that by engaging in extreme asceticism, they were burning off the pains caused by their past bad kamma.
So he asked them:
“Have you noticed that when you don’t engage in asceticism, you don’t feel those intense pains?”

They answered, “Yes.”

“So how can you say that the pain comes from past action?
It comes from what you’re doing right now.”

The Buddha’s actual teaching on kamma is that the pleasures and pains you experience come from a combination of two things:
your past actions and your present actions.
In fact, your present actions are the more important of the two.
Past actions provide the raw material from which your present actions shape what you actually experience right now as pleasure or pain.

So when people are suffering in the present moment, the causes come down to two:
unskillful actions in the past, or unskillful actions in the present.
They either did something harmful in the past, or they’re doing something harmful now—either to others, in mistreating them, or to themselves, in how they engage in the three types of fabrication in the present:
bodily, verbal, and mental.

If a person is suffering from the results of past bad actions, and you would like to help the person in an external way, what you’re hoping is that your help represents the point at which the person’s past good actions are beginning to bear fruit, and the past bad actions are beginning to end their influence.
This is perfectly praiseworthy, and if you can succeed in helping to improve the external situation, it’s all to the good.
But there are times when the person’s past bad kamma is still strong.
That’s when you have to focus on the person’s present kamma, and in particular, on the way the person fabricates his or her own experience.

As you may remember, the three fabrications are these:
Bodily fabrication is the in-and-out breath.
Verbal fabrication is how you talk to yourself.
In technical terms, this is called directed thought and evaluation:
You direct your thoughts to a topic and then you make comments and ask questions about it.
Mental fabrication is perception and feeling:
the mental labels you apply to things, and the feeling tones you focus on.

These forms of fabrication take the raw material provided by your past kamma and shape it into what you actually experience in the present moment.
It’s as if you’re a cook.
Your past kamma is the raw food and other ingredients in your kitchen.
Your present kamma consists of your skills as a cook.
If you’re a bad cook, you can spoil even good ingredients.
If you’re a good cook, you can take even garbage and turn it into good food.

So when someone is suffering, the four noble truths teach us that it’s not so much from external circumstances.
It’s because of that person’s lack of skill.
This is what the Buddha meant when he said that the causes of suffering can be traced to avijjā, or ignorance.
The ignorance here is not just a matter of not being informed of certain facts about reality.
It’s ignorance of how to skillfully act in thought, word, and deed.

When we say that people suffer because of their actions, past and present, it means that there’s no one in the human world who’s really innocent.
Even if someone has behaved perfectly in this lifetime, there may be some bad seeds in his or her kamma field from past lifetimes that are now sprouting.
Now, this doesn’t mean that that person deserves to suffer.
And it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t feel compassion for that person.
If your compassion is so picky that it can go only to innocent people, you won’t find anyone to give it to.
Accept the fact that the human realm is one where we all have a mixture of past bad kamma and past good kamma.
We’re all in this together, so we should all have compassion for one another.

And remember that the Buddha never talked about people deserving to suffer.
He offered his teachings on how to stop suffering to all beings, no matter what their past kamma was.

He also pointed out that by changing the way you fabricate the present moment, making your attitudes more skillful, you can greatly weaken the results of past bad kamma.
When your mind is well trained, it’s as if it’s rich and expansive.
An untrained mind is narrow and poor.
An analogy he gave was this:
The results of past bad kamma are like the fine for stealing a goat.
If a rich man steals a goat but then gets fined, he can easily pay the fine without feeling any hardship.
If a poor man steals a goat, and he has nothing with which he can pay the fine, he gets thrown in jail.

The ways to make the mind rich are these:
You train it in virtue, discernment, and the brahmavihāras.
You also train the mind so that it’s not easily overcome by pleasure or pain.
This last ability comes from practice in concentration.
You train yourself to master the skills of breathing so that when there are pains in the body, you can use the breath either to dissolve the pains or to give you a place to stay in the body that’s not overcome by pain.
When pleasure arises in the meditation, you allow it to spread through the body, but you don’t let your focus leave the breath to go wallowing in the pleasure, for that would destroy your concentration.
When you can master these skills, you can deal with the results of past bad kamma without suffering from them.

So when you see someone who’s suffering, you don’t just tell yourself that they deserve to keep on suffering.
Even if you can’t change their external circumstances, you should try to think of what ways they can make their thinking more skillful.
In other words, your thought should be:
“May this person learn to act in ways that don’t cause more suffering.”
That’s the wise expression of compassion.

Otherwise, if you just leave people to their suffering, they’re not just sitting there, on the receiving end of suffering.
They’re engaged in intentions and the processes of fabrication all the time.
If they get overwhelmed by their suffering, they can easily start thinking and acting in ways that will cause more suffering.
Either they thrash around and make their own suffering worse, or else they get irritable and strike out at the very people who are trying to help them.
That’s the kind of thing you want to see stop.

So look to see how you might actually help that person learn to fabricate his or her experience in a skillful way.
This is why the gift of Dhamma—explaining how to stop suffering—is the highest of gifts.
It’s also why this gift is the best way to show compassion.
You’re not trying to make people depend on you for their happiness.
You’re training them in how to be independent in creating their own well-being.
Remember the phrase in the brahmavihāra chant:
“May they look after themselves with ease.”
You’re teaching them the cooking skills they’ll need for the rest of their lives.

If people who are suffering can listen and comprehend what you’re saying, try to find the best advice for their particular suffering.
If you can get them to meditate, so much the better.
If not, try to get them to accept the fact that suffering is part of life—think of all the other people who are also suffering right now, and feel goodwill and compassion for them.
This helps the person to realize that he or she is not being singled out by the universe to suffer, and that suffering is a universal part of the human condition.
This helps the person to expand his or her thoughts, and this can lift the state of that person’s mind.

If the person is in really bad shape and can’t be taught, then try to create a peaceful atmosphere around the person as best you can, and speak in ways that are soothing and help to allay any anxiety the person might have.

As for empathetic joy, the teaching on kamma also applies.
People are happy because of their actions, past and present.
Either they did skillful things in the past, or they’re fabricating their experience in a skillful way right now, or both.

Now, there are a lot of people who managed to do something good in the past, and are now reaping the rewards of those good actions, but they get complacent, conceited, and careless, thinking that they’re better than other people or that the rules of good behavior don’t apply to them.
Maybe they’ve seen that they can break the precepts, for instance, without suffering any immediate consequence.
If they’re very good-looking, maybe they’ve learned that they can get away with things that ordinary-looking people can’t.
From our point of view, that’s because their past good actions are still bearing fruit.
But when they’re ignorant of right view, they don’t see that.
The Pali Canon is full of examples like this, not only on the human realm, but also in the realms of the devas.
And I’m sure that you can think of lots of examples from your own life.

So, just as compassion focuses on the wish that people who are suffering will learn how to behave in skillful ways, when you practice empathetic joy, you spread a similar wish to people who are enjoying good fortune:
“May these people learn to act in ways that will create even more happiness.”
In other words, may they learn to find joy in skillful actions, such as practicing generosity, being virtuous, and developing thoughts of goodwill for all.

So, both in the case of compassion and in the case of empathetic joy, the emphasis is on hoping that the people to whom you extend these attitudes will create good kamma in the present—kamma that reduces suffering and extends happiness.

It’s in this way that we can see how important it is to remember that pleasure and pain in the present moment are not just the products of past kamma.
The actual fact of the matter is that present kamma is more important than past kamma in determining whether a person will experience pleasure or pain in any given situation.

A proper understanding of kamma is necessary because it helps to correct some erroneous ideas that people often have around compassion and empathetic joy.
One is the erroneous idea that if people are suffering they deserve to suffer, so you might as well be equanimous and leave them alone.
If you ever catch yourself thinking in those terms, remind yourself:
When you look at people, you can’t see all the karmic seeds from their past actions.
They may be experiencing the results of past bad actions, but you don’t know when those seeds will stop sprouting.
Also, you have no idea what other seeds, what wonderful latent potentials, will sprout in their place.

There’s a saying in some Buddhist circles that if you want to see a person’s past actions, you look at his present condition;
if you want to see his future condition, you look at his present actions.
This principle, however, is based on a basic misperception:
that we each have a single karmic account, and what we see in the present moment is the current running balance in each person’s account.
Actually, no one’s karmic history is a single account.
It’s composed of the many different seeds planted in many places through the many different actions we’ve done in the past, with each seed maturing at its own rate.
Some of these seeds have already sprouted and disappeared;
some are sprouting now;
some will sprout in the future.
This means that a person’s present condition reflects only a small portion of his or her past actions.
As for the other seeds, you can’t see them at all.

This reflection helps you when developing compassion, because it reminds you that you never know when the possibility to help somebody can have an effect.
The seeds of the other person’s past bad actions may be flowering right now but they could die at any moment.
You may happen to be the person who’s there to help when that person is ready to receive help.

The same pattern applies to empathetic joy.
Suppose that your neighbor is wealthier than you are.
You may resist feeling empathetic joy for him because you think, “He’s already well-off, while I’m still struggling.
Why should I wish him to be even happier than he is?”
If you find yourself thinking in those terms, remind yourself that you don’t know what your karmic seeds are;
you don’t know what his karmic seeds are.
Maybe his good karmic seeds are about to die.
Do you want them to die any faster?
Does his happiness diminish yours?
What kind of attitude is that?

When you really understand kamma, you realize that your own thoughts in the present moment are also a kind of kamma, so you want your attitudes in the present to be as skillful as possible.
This includes the kamma you’re creating right now in reaction to other people’s pleasure and pain.
If you’re hard-hearted toward somebody’s suffering, someday you may face the same sort of suffering.
Would you want people to be hard-hearted toward you?
Or if you’re resentful of somebody else’s happiness, someday when you become happy there’s going to be somebody resentful of yours.
Is that what you want?

So be mindful to create the kind of kamma that gives the results you’d like to see.
As I said, in the case of compassion, this means thinking, “May these people”—and this includes you—“learn to act in ways that don’t cause more suffering.”
In the case of empathetic joy, the proper attitude is, “May these people”—and this includes you as well—“learn to act in ways that will create more happiness.”

Now, there are lots of rich, powerful, or beautiful people for whom that wish seems unrealistic, but you never know:
Someday they may see the emptiness of simply enjoying their pleasures.
Maybe they’ll see the dangers that come with wealth, power, and beauty.
Wealthy and powerful people can never really trust people who try to befriend them.
Beautiful people attract the attentions of people they wouldn’t want to attract.

So maybe people who are currently heedless about their good fortune will come to their senses and start looking for something with more meaning for their lives.
Of course, this also means that we should come to our senses about good fortune and happiness, too.

With this thought, we come to look a little more deeply at the lessons to be learned from compassion and empathetic joy:
further lessons related to kamma and rebirth.
This is where we go beyond the brahmavihāras and begin to develop genuine wisdom and discernment related to the path to the end of suffering.
As the Buddha said, the brahmavihāras on their own don’t lead to dispassion, so they’re not a complete practice.
The discernment they require is simply the discernment on the level of mundane right view:
the level of right view that leads to good rebirths.
At best, they can take you to the Brahmā worlds, but no further.

But when you start reflecting on the nature of mundane happiness, and begin to see how empty and dangerous it is, your brahmavihāra practice provides a foundation for developing transcendent right view:
the level of right view that leads to the safety of total freedom from suffering.

There’s a pair of suttas where the Buddha has you reflect that when you see someone who is suffering greatly, you should remind yourself that, over the long course of saṁsāra, you’ve been in that position, too.
Conversely, when you see someone who is rich and powerful, you should remind yourself that you’ve been there as well.

These suttas teach many lessons.
One is that if you see someone who’s suffering, you shouldn’t feel proud that you’re better off than they are.
You’ve been in that position, too.
When you can think in this way, you can keep your compassion from becoming condescending.

Similarly, when you see someone who’s rich, beautiful, and powerful, you shouldn’t resent, envy, or begrudge that person’s good fortune.
You’ve been there, too.
This way, you can learn to feel genuine empathy even for people whose station in life is much higher than yours.
They’re human beings, too, just like you, and you shouldn’t let their good fortune blind you to the dangerous position they’re in.
Just as you lost your power and wealth in the past, they’re going to lose theirs.
Like you, they need to keep on developing the causes for further happiness

But these suttas also warn you against the dangers of staying on in saṁsāra.
Even though, through the practice of generosity, virtue, and goodwill, you can return in a future lifetime to a position of power and influence, look at what happens to most people who have that good fortune:
They abuse it.
This is the nature of happiness in the world.
It tends to contain the seeds of its own destruction.
Even devas can be reborn in poor families who live on the side of the road.
When you see people who are wealthy and complacent, you have to remind yourself:
You’re not immune to that.
If you became wealthy again, you could easily become complacent again, and create a lot of bad kamma through your complacency.

It’s as if saṁsāra were a sick joke:
You work hard at the causes of goodness, but then when you get the results of goodness, they destroy your goodness.

When you think in these ways, it makes you more inclined to want to gain release from saṁsāra entirely.

And that’s precisely the lesson you should draw when you’re really discerning in your practice of compassion and empathetic joy.

So far, we’ve been talking about empathetic joy for people who are enjoying worldly happiness.
But it’s also important to develop empathetic joy for people who are experiencing happiness in the Dhamma.

Think of the story of Aṅgulimāla.
He was a bandit chief who had killed many, many people.
But the Buddha saw that he had some good potential buried deep inside him.
So he used his psychic powers to impress Aṅgulimāla.
Aṅgulimāla threw down his weapons and ordained as a monk.
The king decided not to punish Aṅgulimāla, and to let him stay on as a monk.
Later, Aṅgulimāla became an arahant.

When we hear this story, it encourages us:
If a criminal could become awakened, then maybe we can, too.
But there were many people at the time who were not encouraged, and instead were upset:
They may have been relatives of the people who Aṅgulimāla had killed.
It didn’t seem right to them that he was getting away with murder.
So when he went on his alms round, they would throw stones and other things at him:
breaking open his head, breaking his alms bowl, tearing his robe.
The Buddha reminded Aṅgulimāla to bear with the pain.
It was a lot less than the pain he would have suffered in hell if he hadn’t become awakened.

This story teaches us several things.
One is:
Never be envious of people whose meditation is going better than yours.
When, during the Q & A, someone talks about getting the mind into deep states of rapture and stillness, don’t resent them.
Be happy for them.
After all, when you finally get to experience rapture and stillness in your meditation, don’t you want other people to be happy for you?

A second point:
Don’t let your ideas of justice and rightness get in the way of your compassion and empathetic joy.
Don’t be like the people who threw things at Aṅgulimāla after he became an arahant and so heaped up bad kamma for themselves.

Our Western ideas of justice depend on the idea that we can know the beginning point of any story, and from there we can determine—if wrong has been done—who was the first to do it, or whose response was excessive.
But given the long, long nature of saṁsāra, we can never know the beginning point of any story.
And remember, the Buddha’s teachings are not intended to see that justice is done.
They’re intended to put an end to suffering.
So when you see people who are suffering, extend compassion to them, without thinking about whether they deserve to suffer or not.
When you see people who are experiencing good fortune, extend empathetic joy to them, without thinking about whether they deserve to be happy or not.

Then reflect on your own suffering and happiness:
Don’t think about whether you deserve to be happy.
The way to put an end to suffering is open to all.
Do what you can to create the causes, not only for happiness in this life, but also for a happiness that’s solid and sure:
the happiness of awakening.
That’s when you have real compassion and empathetic joy for yourself.
And that’s not a selfish thing.

Saturday — Equanimity

As I mentioned Wednesday night, the four brahmavihāras all come down to two:
goodwill and equanimity.
Goodwill—together with its extensions, compassion and empathetic joy—is a wish for happiness.
Equanimity is the ability to maintain the mind on an even keel when events don’t fall in line with your goodwill.
The suttas say it’s an antidote to irritation.

The difference between the first three brahmavihāras on the one hand, and equanimity on the other, can be easily seen in the phrases we repeat to express these attitudes.
The first three are expressed as intentions:
“May all beings be happy.
May they be freed from stress and pain.
May they not be deprived of the good fortune they have attained.”
It’s all “may, may, may.”
But with equanimity, it’s a statement of fact:
“All beings are the owners of their actions, heirs to their actions, born of their actions, related through their actions, and live in dependence on their actions.
Whatever they do, for good or for evil, to that will they fall heir.”
It’s the reality check for the other three attitudes:
Because of the principle of people’s free choice in deciding how to act, you have to accept the fact that not all beings will be happy anytime soon.

As I also noted on Wednesday, goodwill as a brahmavihāra is said to be a form of mindfulness, something you have to keep in mind.
And you have to be determined to keep it in mind.
That’s why you need all four factors of determination to develop and maintain it:
discernment, truth, generosity, and calm.

There’s no place in the Canon that says explicitly that equanimity is a form of mindfulness or that it’s related to determination.
But when you try to practice it, you realize that it, too, is a form of mindfulness that you have to be determined to develop if it’s going to become a brahmavihāra.
As with ordinary, human goodwill, ordinary, human equanimity is partial.
It’s easy to be equanimous about some things but not about others.
If a stranger in foreign land gets sick, you may feel a little compassion, but it’s easy for the mind to switch to equanimity:
This is the way of the world.
It happens every day.
But if someone you deeply love gets sick, it’s hard to stay equanimous.
Yet at times like that, if you really want to be of help to that person, you have to develop some equanimity, to get the mind to calm down so that you can think clearly about what’s the most helpful thing to do.

In this way, equanimity is clearly related to the fourth determination, calm, but it’s also related to the other three.

First, the fact that you’re willing to accept the principle of kamma is related to discernment.
So is the fact that you can see that equanimity itself is something you have to develop as a brahmavihāra to be able to apply it whenever is necessary, regardless of what the situation may be.

To begin with, note that there are skillful forms of equanimity and unskillful forms.
The type of equanimity that simply doesn’t care, that’s indifferent to the sufferings of others, is unskillful.
So is the lazy equanimity that doesn’t care if unskillful qualities are taking over your mind, the equanimity that simply accepts their presence without thinking of doing anything about them.
The Buddha didn’t teach indifferent or lazy equanimity.

Ajaan Chah calls lazy equanimity the equanimity of a water buffalo.
You may know the story.
A storm went through his monastery one time, and the next day he was walking around the monastery to survey the damage.
He came upon a hut with half of its roof blown off.
The monk who lived in the hut was sitting inside, meditating.
Ajaan Chah called out to him, “Why aren’t you fixing the roof?”
The monk replied, “I’m practicing equanimity.”
Ajaan Chah scolded him, “That’s the equanimity of a water buffalo.
You’re a human being.
Fix the roof.”

If you look in the Canon, you’ll notice that the Buddha never teaches equanimity alone.
It’s always taught in combination with other qualities, and it takes on aspects of the qualities that accompany it.
In the context of the brahmavihāras, the Buddha is teaching the equanimity of a good doctor.
A doctor has to start with goodwill and compassion for the patient.
But he also needs equanimity.
If he tries one approach to treat the patient but it doesn’t work, he doesn’t get upset.
He has to develop some equanimity to think clearly, to try to figure out what other approaches might work.
If he sees that there are some symptoms that he cannot alleviate at all, again, he can’t get upset.
He has to be equanimous about those symptoms so that he can focus on the symptoms he can alleviate.

When you discern the type of equanimity the Buddha is talking about here, you’ll also discern why equanimity is a necessary complement to the other three brahmavihāras.
There are three main reasons in all.

The first reason relates to the intention in each of the other brahmavihāras:
You focus on the wish that other beings will behave in a skillful way, for the sake of their own happiness.
Remember the statement for goodwill:
“May all beings understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them.”

Compassion:
“May this person learn to act in ways that don’t cause more suffering.”

Empathetic joy:
“May these people learn to act in ways that will create more happiness.”
You’re placing your hopes on the choices that other people will make—and you know how little control you have over their choices.

So these attitudes are bound to be disappointed if they’re not backed up by equanimity.
As Ajaan Fuang once said, goodwill—if it isn’t supported by the equanimity of concentration—is a source of suffering.
So to prevent yourself from suffering, you have to accept the fact that not all beings will follow in line with your good wishes for them.

But some people will.
This is the second reason for why equanimity is a necessary complement to the other three brahmavihāras.
It allows you to focus your energies on areas where you actually can be of help, to yourself and to others, without wasting energy trying to help those who resist or simply can’t benefit from your help.
You accept the fact that there may be some past kamma—either your past kamma or the other person’s past kamma—getting in the way, and you can’t go back and undo what was done in the past.
So you focus your energies in areas where you can be of help.

In this way, equanimity is related to a basic principle of generosity:
As the Buddha once said, you should give where you feel inspired or you feel that your gift would be well used.
You may feel inspired to help everyone, but because your energies and resources are limited, it’s best to focus on areas where your help would be well used.

Ultimately, though, we have to be like the doctor who knows that even though he can cure some of his patient’s illnesses, someday the patient will have to die.
So the doctor has to be equanimous about that fact.
In the same way, we have to realize that all living beings are subject to aging, illness, and death.
We ourselves are subject to aging, illness, and death.
This is the third reason for developing equanimity.
We have to realize that if we don’t put an end to our craving, we’ll have to keep coming back to worlds where we and all the beings around us are subject to more aging, illness, and death.
Do you want that?
If not, you have to focus your energies on the practices that will free your from the processes of saṁsāra.
This requires that you’re equanimous about areas that, if you gave your attention to them, would pull you away from the practice.

In this way, you’re practicing equanimity in line with the first line in the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta:
“This is to be done by one who appreciates the state of peace.”
You’re taking your brahmavihāra practice and using it to help in your practice of the duties of the four noble truths, leading to the peace of the third noble truth.
You may remember from Wednesday that you can practice the brahmavihāras either for the sake of becoming a Brahmā or for the sake of gaining awakening.
When you develop your discernment, you realize that awakening is a much better goal for this practice.

As for the truth of your equanimity, it’s similar to the truth of your goodwill:
You have to learn how to breathe, think, and use perceptions and feelings to help keep your equanimity solid in the face of events that would otherwise shake it up.

The Buddha talks about many levels in developing equanimity.
He notes that our ordinary, everyday type of equanimity—where we happen to keep the mind on an even keel in the face of good and bad input coming through our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind—is not very reliable.
It can easily be shaken as new input comes in, especially if you’re not mindful.
So, in different suttas, he explains how to develop your everyday equanimity to make it stronger.
In some cases, such as MN 137, he emphasizes developing equanimity by using insight before concentration;
in others, such as SN 36:11, he advises developing concentration before insight.
In both cases, he’s again taking you beyond ordinary brahmavihāra practice and using it to serve the purposes of the four noble truths.

It’s important to note, however, that in either case, he doesn’t have you go straight from everyday equanimity to heightened equanimity.
Instead, he has you develop joy and refreshment—either through insight or concentration—as an intermediate step.
And it’s easy to see why.
If you went from ordinary “blah” straight to stronger “blah” with no sense of joy, the practice would get dry or depressing pretty fast.
As Ajaan Fuang once said, if the practice doesn’t have a sense of rapture and joy to keep it alive, it’s like an engine without any oil to lubricate it.
It’s going to seize up and stop running.

So let’s look at how the Buddha would have you develop joy as a way to strengthen your equanimity, to see which method would work for you.

In the case where he would have you start with insight, he recommends that when you feel distress over the inconstancy of the things you love, you shouldn’t go running to sensual pleasures to escape that distress.
Instead, you remind yourself that there are people who have gained liberation from all distress, and you give rise to a desire to follow their example.
This thought in itself may be distressing—you think about how far you are from the goal—but at least it offers hope:
There is a way out.
I read recently someone saying that Buddhism doesn’t have a word for hope, but it actually has two:
the noun, āsā, and the verb, paṭikankhati.
And the Dhamma is as hopeful a teaching as you can imagine:
It teaches that there is a sure way out of all the disappointments of life.

When you set your sights on gaining some release from your sufferings, then you contemplate on how all objects of the senses—past, present, and future—are inconstant and subject to change.
When you adopt this attitude and can willingly accept it, it can lift your mind to a level where you feel above all that change.
For some people, this realization is accompanied by joy.
They feel liberated from their day-to-day concerns.
Then as that joy calms down, you move on to equanimity as you maintain that same perspective of insight.

From there, the Buddha would have you develop that equanimity into the higher levels of concentration.
And then, once that concentration is established, he would have you reflect on how it, too, is inconstant, stressful, and not-self.
That realization can lead to unbinding, which—like your original insight—is accompanied first by joy.
In fact, it’s the highest happiness of all.
Then when you reflect back on the changing phenomena of the world, you can view them with an unshakeable equanimity, because your happiness lies beyond their reach.
That’s one approach.

Now, some people find the insight into inconstancy, if it’s not backed up and preceded by concentration, can be disorienting rather than joyful.
They feel as if the ground has been pulled from under their feet.
If that’s the case with you, you should develop concentration first.

Here the first step, the Buddha notes, is to strengthen your everyday equanimity through a series of perceptions:
Try to make your mind like earth.
People throw disgusting things on the Earth, but the Earth isn’t upset by them.
Make your mind like fire:
Fire burns garbage, but isn’t upset by the garbage.
Make your mind like water:
Water washes away dirt, but isn’t upset by the dirt.
Make your mind like wind:
Wind blows garbage around, but isn’t upset by the garbage.
Make your mind like space:
People can try to draw pictures and write words in space, but there’s no place for pictures or words to stick.

When you can adopt these attitudes, then it’s easier to deal with the difficulties of getting the mind in concentration.
You can observe clearly what’s working and what’s not working as you try to get the mind to settle down, without getting overly excited or upset.
That makes it possible to develop concentration as a skill.

In other words, when your mind is like earth, it’s not just a clod of dirt.
It’s simply solid and not easily shaken.
That’s the kind of mind you need to observe and understand what’s going on in your mind so that you can get it to settle down with a sense of ease.

Then, to get the mind to a deeper equanimity—the equanimity of the fourth jhāna—you first have to develop the first three jhānas, which are characterized by pleasure and rapture or refreshment.
When the mind has been nourished by the pleasure and refreshment, then it’s ready to settle into a secure state of equanimity with a strong sense of well-being.

From there, you can develop the insight that will take you to awakening, which as we’ve already noted, is the highest happiness, and is accompanied by equanimity when you reflect on the world on which you no longer need to feed.

When you give your equanimity a strong, solid foundation like this, you’re making it unshakeable and true.
Your truth is also taking you beyond ordinary brahmavihāra practice and using it for the sake of awakening.

As for generosity:
When you solidify your equanimity with a sense of well-being, you’re giving yourself a safer food inside for the mind to feed on.
Or even better, if you follow these steps all the way to awakening, the mind has found a happiness that no longer needs to feed at all.
This means that you don’t have to feed off the other brahmavihāras, and that helps to purify your practice of them.
Your gift of the other brahmavihāras becomes more pure.

Let me explain.
There are times when people feed off of their own goodwill and compassion, expressing these attitudes in their actions in ways that may not necessarily be conducive to the good of others.
They’re actually more concerned with how good their compassion feels to them, and don’t notice that they’re actually not being helpful to the other person at all.

I heard a Dhamma teacher once say that he didn’t want to be reborn in a world where no one was suffering, because he wouldn’t have the opportunity to express his compassion.
On the surface, this sounds noble—he always wants to be helpful—but when you think about it, it’s actually quite selfish:
This teacher needed to have somebody else suffer so that he could feel good about his compassion.

A nobler attitude is one that doesn’t have to feed off of compassion.
And that’s what developing a well-grounded sense of equanimity encourages, even if it’s just the equanimity based on concentration.
It provides you with your own inner food of well-being that allows you to see more clearly, when the time comes to help other people, exactly what kind of help would actually benefit them the most.

And as for calm:
We’ve already noted that equanimity is a calm mind state in and of itself.
But there are gradations of equanimity.
The levels of equanimity that come from developing strong concentration—or even better, that come from awakening to the highest happiness—are the calmest of all, in that they’re based on a strong inner sense of well-being.

We might call this the equanimity of a winner.
This is different from the way equanimity is sometimes taught with a defeatist attitude.
A defeatist attitude says, basically, that there’s no lasting happiness to be found in the world, so you might as well give up trying to find it.
Just learn to accept things as they are and don’t hope for them to be better than what they are.
When you give up on your search for happiness, you can be equanimous and content with what you’ve got.

That, as I said, is a defeatist attitude.
It’s equanimity tinged with regret, disappointment, and a sense of powerlessness.
It’s heavy and narrow, a contentment found by lowering your standards for satisfaction.

We bow down to the Buddha, though, because he actually has us raise our standards for satisfaction, to accept nothing less than the ultimate happiness.
There’s nothing defeatist in his attitude at all.
In fact, he called the noble eightfold path the path to victory:
You can find a happiness that’s not subject to aging, illness, and death, that’s totally free of sorrow.
You win out over all your defilements and all the changing and unreliable things in the world.

This is what Ajaan Fuang called the brightness of life:
Even though there’s suffering, there’s also a path to the total end of suffering, and it’s open to everyone.
When your equanimity is based on well-being, it’s expansive and light.
Because it comes from well-being, there’s no regret or disappointment or powerlessness at all.
It’s a state of calm that’s really satisfying—and when a state of calm is satisfying, that’s the highest calm of all.

So when you understand the Buddha’s teachings on equanimity, you can see that it’s a necessary complement to the other brahmavihāras.
It keeps them from leading to suffering.
It keeps them focused.
It keeps them pure.
And when you develop it properly, it helps all four brahmavihāras lead to something even higher:
a state of mind that can experience a happiness beyond the world, one that frees you from having to come back and feed off the world ever again.
This is the ultimate way in which you show goodwill for yourself and other beings:
You provide for your own true happiness—as the phrase says, you look after yourself with ease—and your happiness doesn’t require you to take anything from anyone ever again.

Sunday Morning — Closing

At the end of every retreat, the question always is:
How can I take the lessons I learned on the retreat and carry them into my life?

As the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta says, it requires a combination of mindfulness and determination.

Otherwise, it’s all too easy, after you’ve been sitting for several days, thinking thoughts, “May all beings be happy.
May all beings be happy,” but then you get in your car to go home, someone cuts in front of you, and you think, “And may this being go to hell!”

So to prevent that, stop to remind yourself of some of the lessons you’ve learned over the past few days.

One is that the brahmavihāras don’t come naturally.
Our human goodwill and equanimity are natural, but they tend to be partial.
And that partiality means we can’t depend on ourselves to act skillfully in all situations, which means that it’s easy to fall off the path to the end of suffering.

To raise the level of your heart and mind, you have to fabricate new mental states, through using the three fabrications:
the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, and the perceptions and feelings you focus on.

For example, both for goodwill and for equanimity, breathe in a way that gives rise to a sense of well-being inside.
When you’re coming from a sense of well-being, it’s easier to wish for the well-being of others.
As Ajaan Lee says, it’s like opening a faucet to a tank full of water:
Cool water will come out.
If you don’t have a sense of well-being inside, and you try to spread thoughts of goodwill, it’s like opening the faucet to an empty tank.
Nothing comes out but air.

That’s bodily fabrication.

With verbal fabrication, talk yourself in ways that encourage you in the practice of goodwill, reminding yourself of how it will give strength to your practice all around.

And as for mental fabrication, think of the images the Buddha and the ajaans give for goodwill:
that your goodwill is strong and vast like the Earth, as cool as the River Ganges, as free and wide-open as space.
It’s a form of wealth.

Think also of his image of the bandits cutting you up, and of the mother protecting her only child:
You have to protect your goodwill with your life.

And remember, goodwill for others doesn’t mean that you simply do what they want.
It means that you think about what would be conducive to their true well-being—and especially, what influence you can have on them to get them to behave in skillful ways.

All of that is discernment.

When you keep these lessons in mind, it’s easier to be true to your original determination to practice the brahmavihāras, and you can become more generous with them as well.
Remember that goodwill is a form of wealth that you can create from within, and that there’s no reason to put any limit on the amount of wealth you create.

As for calm, remember also to develop equanimity as a back-up for your goodwill, so that you can keep it focused and pure, and you can keep yourself from suffering from your goodwill.

When you determine to keep these lessons in mind, then your practice will grow stronger all around.
You stay focused on the desire to find a happiness that causes no harm to anyone—not to yourself, not to other people.
You’ll reap the benefits from following through with this desire, now and into the future, and so will all the people around you.

🤝🤗 mettā-sahagatena cetasā	🤝🤗with a mind of friendly-kindness,
ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā	pervade [that mind state] in the direction [of the first quarter, without limit].
viharati,	Live in this way.
tathā dutiyaṃ,	likewise (the) second [quarter],
tathā tatiyaṃ,	likewise (the) third [quarter],
tathā catutthaṃ;	likewise (the) fourth [quarter],
iti uddham-adho	Thus above,-below,
tiriyaṃ sabbadhi	across, everywhere,
Sabbat-tatāya	All-places,
sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ	(to the) entire world
🤝🤗 mettā-sahagatena cetasā	🤝🤗with a mind of friendly-kindness,
vipulena maha-g-gatena	vast, exalted,
appamāṇena a-verena	unlimited, without-vengeful-animosity,
A-byāpajjena pharitvā	without ill will, pervade [that mind state everywhere].
viharati,	Live in this way.

👐😊 Karuṇā-sahagatena cetasā	👐😊with a mind of compassion,
ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā	pervade [that mind state] in the direction [of the first quarter, without limit].
viharati,	Live in this way.
tathā dutiyaṃ,	likewise (the) second [quarter],
tathā tatiyaṃ,	likewise (the) third [quarter],
tathā catutthaṃ;	likewise (the) fourth [quarter],
iti uddham-adho	Thus above,-below,
tiriyaṃ sabbadhi	across, everywhere,
Sabbat-tatāya	All-places,
sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ	(to the) entire world
👐😊 Karuṇā-sahagatena cetasā	👐😊with a mind of compassion,
vipulena maha-g-gatena	vast, exalted,
appamāṇena a-verena	unlimited, without-vengeful-animosity,
A-byāpajjena pharitvā	without ill will, pervade [that mind state everywhere].
viharati,	Live in this way.

😊 muditā-sahagatena cetasā	😊 with a mind that rejoices in skillful Dharmas,
ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā	pervade [that mind state] in the direction [of the first quarter, without limit].
viharati,	Live in this way.
tathā dutiyaṃ,	likewise (the) second [quarter],
tathā tatiyaṃ,	likewise (the) third [quarter],
tathā catutthaṃ;	likewise (the) fourth [quarter],
iti uddham-adho	Thus above,-below,
tiriyaṃ sabbadhi	across, everywhere,
Sabbat-tatāya	All-places,
sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ	(to the) entire world
😊 muditā-sahagatena cetasā	😊 with a mind that rejoices in skillful Dharmas,
vipulena maha-g-gatena	vast, exalted,
appamāṇena a-verena	unlimited, without-vengeful-animosity,
A-byāpajjena pharitvā	without ill will, pervade [that mind state everywhere].
viharati,	Live in this way.

🛆👁 upekkhā-sahagatena cetasā	🛆👁 with a mind of equanimous-observation,
ekaṃ disaṃ pharitvā	pervade [that mind state] in the direction [of the first quarter, without limit].
viharati,	Live in this way.
tathā dutiyaṃ,	likewise (the) second [quarter],
tathā tatiyaṃ,	likewise (the) third [quarter],
tathā catutthaṃ;	likewise (the) fourth [quarter],
iti uddham-adho	Thus above,-below,
tiriyaṃ sabbadhi	across, everywhere,
Sabbat-tatāya	All-places,
sabbāvantaṃ lokaṃ	(to the) entire world
🛆👁 upekkhā-sahagatena cetasā	🛆👁 with a mind of equanimous-observation,
vipulena maha-g-gatena	vast, exalted,
appamāṇena a-verena	unlimited, without-vengeful-animosity,
A-byāpajjena pharitvā	without ill will, pervade [that mind state everywhere].
viharati,	Live in this way.


“Everywhere, all places, the entire world” means: Exclusively, completely, without remainder, entirely;	“Sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokan”ti sabbena sabbaṃ sabbathā sabbaṃ asesaṃ nissesaṃ.
this is an all-embracing expression “Everywhere, all places, the entire world”.	Pariyādāyavacanametaṃ—“sabbadhi sabbattatāya sabbāvantaṃ lokan”ti.


so cattāro brahmavihāre bhāvetvā kāyassa bhedā paraṃ maraṇā brahmalokūpago ahosi.	He develops the four bv, with the break up of the body, after death, is reborn in the brahma world.



‘ariyavihāro’ itipi, ‘brahmavihāro’ itipi, ‘tathāgatavihāro’ itipi. ānāpānassatisamādhiṃ sammā vadamāno vadeyya	anapana sati samadhi is a noble dwelling, brahma dwelling, tathagata’s dwelling, this I say.


“abyāpannacitto hoti appaduṭṭhamanasaṅkappo —	“He is of good will and his intentions are free of hate thus:
‘ime sattā averā hontu abyāpajjā,	‘May these beings live happily,
anīghā sukhī attānaṃ pariharantū’ti.	free from enmity, affliction, and anxiety!’

4👑☸ Cattāri Ariya-saccaṃ 四聖諦

4bv☮️

4 Brahma vihāra

0 - (STED 4bv) Brahma vihāra

(STED 4bv☮️ → 1. Mettā🤝🤗)

(STED 4bv☮️ → 2. Karuṇā👐😊)

(STED 4bv☮️ → 3. Muditā😊)

(STED 4bv☮️ → 4. Upekkhā🛆👁)

0.1 – 4bv gloss of key words in formula

0.1.1 – a-byāpajjena, non-ill-will

0.1.2 – mahag-gatena, exalted

0.1.3 – appamāṇena, immmeasurable

0.1.4 – Sabbat-tatāya = all-places, not “to all [beings] as oneself”

Ven. Sujato

Ven. Brahmali

Ven. Anālayo

Bhikkhu Bodhi

Ab Vb 13 glosses

0.1.6 – a-verena = without-vengeful-animosity

0.20 – Nomenclature, why 4bv instead of ceto vimutti or appamāna

ceto vimutti, mind lberation

appamāṇena, immmeasurable

4bv, 4 brahma vihāra

conclusion, 4bv wins over 4acv

1 – 🔬Mettā🤝🤗: Friendly-kindness

Mettā (1.🤝🤗 ): friendliness, good will, benevolence

2 – 🔬Karuṇā👐😊: Compassion.

Karuṇā (2.👐😊️ ): compassion

3 – 🔬Muditā😊: Rejoicing in Skillful Dharmas.

mudita : rejoicing in skillful Dharmas

4 – 🔬Upekkhā🛆👁️: Equanimous-observation.

Upekkhā (4.🛆👁️ ): Equanimous-observation

25 – Sutta references

25.1 – results for (STED 4bv) Brahma vihāra formula

AN 3.63 Buddha does 4bv in all 4 postures

SN 3.65 famous Kālāma (kesamutti) sutta, won 4 assurances

AN 3.66 Sāḷha sutta, similar to kalama, using 4bv to attain arahantship

AN 4.125 leading to rebirth in brahma realms

AN 4.126 combining 11 contemplations with nonreturn brahma realm

AN 4.190 doing 4bv is attaining the state of a brahma, state of deva = 4 jhānas

AN 5.192 teaches brahman 5 ancient lost distinctions

AN 9.18 eight uposatha sila + metta (but not other 3)

AN 10.219 kamma, rebirth, mind, The Deed-Born Body

AN 11.16 same as MN 52, 11 doors to deathless

DN 13 Tevijja: teaches brahmins how to meet the god Brahma

DN 17 Mahāsudassana: King does 4j then 4bv

DN 19 Buddha talks about past life as steward

DN 25 ascetics practicing austerities

DN 26 gradual training with 4bv following 4j

DN 33 abhidhamma style definitions, 4 appamañña

KN

MN 7 cloth simile, gradual training 4bv follows samadhi

MN 21 famous saw simile – even if bandits cut off your limbs

MN 40 naked ascetic, gradual training, 4bv follows samadhi

MN 43 4bv defined as appamāṇā cetovimutti

MN 50 Māra harrassses a previous Buddha

MN 52 4bv are part of 11 doors to deathless

MN 55 eating meat and 4bv

MN 83 King Makhādeva

MN 97 Sariputta teaches dying man way to Brahma world

MN 99 way to brahma world

MN 127 Anuruddha explains difference between immeasurable and exalted

SN 41.7 4bv is one of several types of ceto vimutti

SN 42.8 after 5niv abandoned, 4bv 4cv with conch blowing simile

SN 42.13 4bv and dhamma-samādhi, citta-samādhiṃ

SN 46.54 4bv associated with formless attainments

25.2 – ime sattā averā hontu: may these beings live free from vengeful animosity

AN 10.176, AN 10.211, AN 10.217, MN 41, MN 42, MN 114

95.1 – Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu‍ Articles on 4bv

95.1.1 - The Sublime Attitudes (2003)

95.1.2 - Head & Heart Together

95.1.3 - The Limits of the Unlimited Attitudes

95.1.4 – Sublime Determinations: a Retreat on the Brahmavihāras (2022)

100 – commentary

100.2 – frankk Articles and commentary on 4bv

200 – misc.

200.1 - AV: Audio, Video Multimedia

999 – Bookmarks of interest

999.9 – TOC permalinks

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