[HN Gopher] Karaniya Metta Sutta: The Buddha's Words on Loving-K...
___________________________________________________________________
Karaniya Metta Sutta: The Buddha's Words on Loving-Kindness
Author : rajlego
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-10-10 09:13 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.accesstoinsight.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.accesstoinsight.org)
| gourabmi wrote:
| Most wholesome thread on HN in recent memory.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| Although the prose is beautiful, the word lovingkindness has a
| different meaning. It was an English word invented to translate
| hesed in Hebrew into English. The Word of God, esp in King James
| Bible, uses this word to explain how God loves His chosen people.
|
| https://www.compellingtruth.org/lovingkindness.html
|
| We are undeserving, evil people who deserve justice for our sins.
| Instead, God offers us a chance to repent and follow Him out of
| pure grace. He makes a covenant backed by His own name. Within
| that covenant, He preserves us in eternal life forever while
| using us to His glory in this life. If we fall, He'll discipline
| us but never let us go. That's out of _His_ love and character.
|
| This undeserved grace for those following Jesus Christ is what
| the Bible calls hesed, or lovingkindness.
| madphilosopher wrote:
| Conditional grace is not grace. The human experience of grace
| is so much larger than what you describe.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| Grace is anything that's not deserved that is given. You
| could tell your kid they get a new car so long as they do
| their homework every night. They could do this and still not
| deserve a car. You don't have to give it. So, that would
| still be an act of grace even in conditional.
|
| Whereas, while we were still sinners (enemies of God), Christ
| died for us. He laid His life down for us. He left everything
| He had in heaven to save those He loved. At every point, we
| were undeserving enemies. If we repent and trust Him, we
| still keep turning on Him and failing. Yet, nobody can snatch
| us out of His hand.
|
| That's grace upon grace that God lavishes upon those who
| believe in Jesus Christ.
| robobro wrote:
| > We are undeserving, evil people who deserve justice for our
| sins.
|
| I'm not an evil person.
| suggestion wrote:
| Do you think most people you would consider evil considered
| themselves evil?
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| We all tell ourselves that. God is holy, loving, and just.
| He's that all of the time. Heaven will be life without a
| single act of evil. God's definition of good is that you obey
| Him and love others without failure.
|
| In your case, you can test yourself using Romans 1:
|
| https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+1%3A18-3.
| ..
|
| Have you ever lied, stolen, cheated, shown apathy, lusted, or
| wished evil on someone? Have you rejected the true God or
| tried to live your own way instead of His? These are evil per
| the God that defines what morality is.
|
| "The wages of sin is death but the free gift of God us
| eternal life in Jesus Christ."
|
| Fortunately for you and I, the only good person to ever
| live... tempted in all ways we are but having committed no
| sin... earned God's favor for you, died for your sins, was
| raised again, and offered you eternal life in His name. You
| just have to repent and put your trust in what He did. He'll
| also transform you from the inside out when the Spirit of God
| dwells in you.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Nor am I. And I don't appreciate the implied equating of
| "justice" with punishment.
|
| More broadly, I don't think "evil" is a useful word; it
| refers to (a) the embodiment of everything that is
| irremediably bad, and (b) to people or actions that are
| irremediably bad. I don't think such people and actions
| exist, and I don't think pure badness is embodied anywhere.
|
| So I think the word has no referent.
| krzat wrote:
| Interesting to see this here, without any context attached. I've
| been practicing loving kindness meditation for a few months now
| and the results have been incredible.
|
| I'm atheist, pretty sure reincarnation is bullshit, but the
| method described in this sutta works. In mundane terms, you can
| train your brain to be happier and more joyful by those simple
| visualizations.
|
| I'm not quite sure what is the role of spreading kindness in all
| directions, perhaps it somehow ties our perception of space and
| time, which is always present, with good feelings - what fires
| together, wires together - making them more likely to appear in
| future.
| roenxi wrote:
| > I'm atheist, pretty sure reincarnation is bullshit...
|
| It is fairly easy to conclude that existence is bullshit. The
| evidence is that the whole world is a soup of atoms and any
| particular group of atoms that believes it is distinct from the
| rest is just confused.
|
| If that makes sense to you, then either you don't exist now and
| you won't exist again ... or you do exist now and you will
| exist again. Or, to repeat that with different words, if you
| exist now you will reincarnate later. This perspective meshes
| extremely neatly with Buddhist philosophy. Although the idea
| that people can remember past lives is highly suspect.
| grahamplace wrote:
| Any recommendations for where to start learning?
| krzat wrote:
| Here is a good starting point:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/streamentry/wiki/twim-crash-course
| thenobsta wrote:
| Big fan of TWIM. I've tried several methods and TWIM seems
| to work super well with my brain.
| uberstuber wrote:
| There's a wonderful group that meets every Saturday to
| practice and discuss: https://tasshin.com/metta-squad/
| jbgt wrote:
| Two very nice meditation teachers, very skilled. They
| practice and teach for many years, long time based in
| Thailand. I like their approach of Compassionate
| Understanding, compared with some of the more achievement
| minded approaches we find often in Buddhism in the West.
|
| rosemary-steve.org
| passion__desire wrote:
| HN crowd would love Daniel Ingram and his teachings.
|
| https://www.integrateddaniel.info/
|
| https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/p/daniel-ingram-on-
| emerg...
| m_a_g wrote:
| If you're new to meditation, then I can highly recommend
| "Waking Up".
| kajumix wrote:
| I have fantasized about a secular technological possibility for
| reincarnation (or afterlife). It's not outrageous nowadays to
| consider a future tech that allows taking a backup of your
| brain and restoring it later in a compute substrate other than
| your brain. The effect would be you waking up with your
| memories and personality in some other place out in the far
| future. Now, perhaps, our brain is being constantly backed up
| in the nature. Perhaps, if physics gets to the bottom of
| everything, we can travel far enough out into outer space in an
| instant, and look back at the brains of people on earth as they
| were an arbitrarily long time ago when light bounced off of
| them to reach that far out, and that with insane optical zoom
| and perfect neural resolution, so they can restore them?
| Whether you wake up in a hell or a heaven, is another question.
| 5cott0 wrote:
| The Mahayana (Tiantai school) version:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34460022
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Is there a Sutta for being behind on a project, and crushing
| stress at meeting deadlines, being critical path and a few dozen
| people waiting on you.
|
| Seriously. There are a lot of Sutta's. Wondering if one deals
| with regular deadlines/stress.
| [deleted]
| thoughtFrame wrote:
| The Bhagavad Gita is for you. Reducing stress is related to
| cultivating detachment(vairagya) while still doing your duty in
| the project.
|
| I've seen this objection so many times that I'll say it first:
| detachment is _not_ apathy, it 's not "not caring about the
| project anymore".
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I'm not objecting.
|
| Just in the heat of the moment, hard to stay detached.
|
| Sometimes the Suttas, can be a bit 'distant' to everyday
| life. Hard to relate them back to the hear and now.
| thoughtFrame wrote:
| Yeah, practical hermeneutics involve a healthy sprinkle of
| our reality into those texts.
|
| And it makes sense that modern problems aren't well treated
| by sutras or vedic texts. Deadlines are ever shortening,
| everything is vying for our attention. A project that we're
| very attached to because the failure of delivering means
| you could get sacked (usually, our minds jump straight to
| the worst case: we _WILL_ get sacked) is probably something
| unheard of in the times of the Buddha. But it 's just hard-
| mode life compared to what they wrote. The patterns are the
| same, but you have less HP, and you're full of debuffs.
| Under that lens, those texts are mostly timeless and
| independent of which era you read it on. If you understand
| that you're working on a team, that your agency is only one
| part of the success. There's all sort of factors that go
| into the success or failure of the project, and all you can
| do is the work you've been assigned to. That's where you
| can care and do the best work that you can while still
| being dispassionate about the project's success or failure,
| and thus less affected by the pressures of the deadlines,
| less stressed by the pressures from the higher ups, the
| estimates you know are completely wrong, etc.
|
| Of course, all of this is assuming you're working on the
| kind of project I'm imagining, but it should apply to other
| things too
| robobro wrote:
| People here interested in Buddhist theory / psychology may be
| interested in this book: https://americanmonk.org/abhidhamma-
| lessons/
|
| Abhidhamma Lessons: A Top-Down Approach Using Computer Science
|
| Author is a former programmer who uses computer science methods
| to discuss Buddhism's approach to understanding the mind and
| reality. I found it interesting!
| korginator wrote:
| As with many Pali words (e.g., dhamma, samkhara, etc.), it's hard
| to provide a simplistic one-dimensional translation of the phrase
| "metta", often crudely translated as loving-kindness. When you
| read through the Sutta Nipata and the early texts, it comes
| across more as unconditional or unconstrained friendliness which
| is far easier to practice in real life, even when you can't make
| yourself feel loving-kindness.
|
| There are several other passages from the oldest strata of Pali
| texts, e.g., the SNP (Sutta Nipata) and some of the connected
| discourses (Samyutta Nikaya) that talk more about metta, a rich
| and complex tapestry that paints a picture of the actual and
| original intent behind the word or phrase.
|
| This talk by Prof. John Peacock has some good insights into the
| phrase metta, and provides a good overall context.
|
| https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/2600
|
| Metta is part of the four brahmaviharas or practises to cultivate
| wholesome states of mind, the others being karuna (compassion &
| kindness for oneself and for others), mudita (simplistically
| translated as "empathetic joy") and upekkha (equanimity).
| an_mp_speaks wrote:
| Always a pleasure to see ATI links on here, especially when it's
| something like this, which has to be one of the most beautiful
| and practical suttas in the Pali canon.
|
| Transcribing buddha-dharma has long been praised as a meritorious
| act. In the modern era, it'd be hard to beat John Bullitt in his
| practice of it.
| [deleted]
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| It's a useful tool on the path to the realisation that such tools
| are unnecessary.
| Glench wrote:
| My meditation teacher described two types of meditation practices
| designed to train your mind to be more loving and compassionate
| and therefore happier. I'd like to share a little about them in
| the off-chance they're beneficial.
|
| One type is to envision the pain and suffering of people and
| respond compassionately in a way that eliminates their pain and
| suffering. When I was suffering terribly myself I constantly
| wished for others who were in similar difficulties to be freed
| immediately. This actually made me feel a lot better. The problem
| is that for some people dwelling on suffering is a real bummer.
|
| The second type is similar to the text linked above: cherishing
| all beings as they are, as if they were your very children that
| you love so so much. Lately, my meditations have started to
| transition toward this type and I've felt spontaneous feelings of
| bliss and love toward others that grows the more I do it. And
| this kindness is naturally starting to come out in my behavior
| and interactions with others.
|
| In both cases, the meditations develop "bodhicitta", which is a
| word that describes the attitude of wishing others well. It's
| said that this attitude, when trained, nourished, and grown is
| the very cause of all happiness and when perfected causes
| happiness to bloom uninterruptedly. Therefore, it is an extremely
| beneficial and powerful practice.
|
| It's fantastic to see this text linked on Hacker News even
| without much context. Wishing you all well!
| jbgt wrote:
| Nice to see you name them as a pair. Very often, people seem to
| focus on Metta only, maybe due to the focus on this Sutta.
|
| To my understanding, Compassion / Lovingkindness are linked and
| often arise together, and it's a bit odd to wish to separate
| them too strongly: When contemplating other's and out own
| Dukkha, Compassion may arise, wishing for it to cease.
| Lovingkindness may then arise, wishing for there to be
| happiness and peace instead. They both work together.
|
| By contemplating Dukkha we better understand this
| Characteristic of existence, and develop
| Compassion/Lovingkindess. To avoid getting too "down" by too
| much Dukkha meditation, Sympathetic Joy with one's and other's
| good qualities or good actions we can brighten the mind. and
| Equanimity helps us from falling into grief/anger on one side,
| and euphoria and avoiding the truth of existence on the other.
|
| So the Brahma Viharas work together and aren't too artificially
| / forcefully separated.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Like nearly all Buddhist teachings, there are practices you can
| do to develop these faculties. For example, you can reflect that
| all beings have at one time or another been your mother, or your
| child; realizing this, how can you feel hatred towards any other
| being?
|
| It doesn't work for me, of course; I don't believe in rebirth.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > For example, you can reflect that all beings have at one time
| or another been your mother, or your child; realizing this, how
| can you feel hatred towards any other being?
|
| What's the exact cosmology again?
|
| 1. Every being is likely to be your mother
|
| 2. Every being _has_ been your mother with certainty
| (beginningless time)
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Buddhist cosmology holds that the cycle of rebirth is
| endless, so all beings have been your mother and your child
| at some time in the past, and will be again in the future.
|
| So it's 2.
|
| And for clarity, the view is that time is both beginningless
| _and endless_.
| Glench wrote:
| > It doesn't work for me, of course; I don't believe in
| rebirth.
|
| Are you still able to generate loving-kindness in yourself? If
| so, then those teachings that don't work for you don't matter.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Well, honestly I don't know. If I had _feelings_ of loving
| kindness, I 'd know that; but that would be just feelings. I
| don't have a loving-kindness detector, and I wouldn't know
| how to calibrate it if I did.
|
| I suppose one could work from hatred; people generally know
| if they hate something. So if one has reduced the incidence
| of hatred, then perhaps you could say the technique worked. I
| used the technique (along with others) over a period of a
| couple of decades, during which I "suspended belief"
| concerning rebirth. But over a couple of decades, it's quite
| possible that my personality changed for other reasons - such
| as other techniques, or watching my children grow up, or
| simply maturing.
| Glench wrote:
| If I may tease you lovingly for a moment, when you smile at
| your child do you go "I am unable to detect what is
| happening!" :P
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Both of my "children" are adults in their 30s; either of
| them could kill me with their bare hands if they chose
| to.
|
| I don't think loving kindness manifests when I smile at
| someone; I think it manifests when I forgive them for
| some outrage that has left me seething. That is, I don't
| associate loving-kindness particularly with good
| feelings.
| thenobsta wrote:
| Small animals also help. :)
|
| I can't help but feel happiness and goodwill for a cute
| cat or bunny. Once I have that feeling, I can pay
| attention to it, keep it going, sit with it, or wish that
| feeling for myself or to others. If I lose it, I just
| bring up an endearing image or thought of the
| cat/bunny/my kiddo and pay attention to that feeling
| again.
| krzat wrote:
| There is really nothing magical about metta. It's all in
| consistent practice.
|
| 1. You visualize a cute bunny (for example).
|
| 2. You recognize that visualizing a cute bunny makes you a
| bit happier.
|
| 3. You realize that you can influence your mood by
| visualizing cute things.
|
| 4. You train it to make it stronger and more reliable.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Sorry, but I don't think metta amounts to feeling "a bit
| happier" or "being in a good mood".
|
| Metta is one of the four Brahma Viharas (foundations of
| Brahma). Another is karuna, or compassion; wishing others
| not to suffer. The standard practice in Tibet for
| generating compassion is called tong len ("sending and
| receiving", sorry, I don't know any Sanskrit word for
| it). You imagine someone else's suffering as a black
| cloud, breathe it in, and breathe out all your goodness
| and happiness as a white cloud, which you imagine going
| into them. It's a simple bolt-on for ordinary meditation
| on the breath. [Edit] If you have a real, suffering
| person to practise on, I was told that helps a lot.
|
| Practising tong len is liable to cause depression in the
| practitioner, or so I was told. It's not tantric, you
| don't need permission to do it; but it's probably not a
| good idea to try it unless you have an experienced
| meditation instructor.
|
| "Feeling good" is not a sign of progress in meditation.
| krzat wrote:
| I'm sure there are well established practices in Tibet
| but IMO there is nothing special about them, which is why
| there are multiple schools of Buddhism instead of just
| one.
|
| I had a real suffering person to practice on (me) which
| is why I'm quite certain about what I wrote. If you have
| capability to improve your mood on demand, your entire
| approach to life changes. You can be selfless, take risk,
| work long hours, even if entire world collapses, you will
| always have metta to support you. This is how I
| understand equanimity at the moment.
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| Yeah, I don't buy the "remembering past lives" business, but
| "life after death" seems like a physical certainty if you're
| not necessarily attached to the "self"[1]. I suppose it's sort
| of how life works, on our planet anyway, for the last two
| billion years when we invented sex to outpace the viruses. Some
| sort of sentient planetary slime mold might have different
| ideas.
|
| One thing that's interesting is that Indian philosophy of the
| 800-400 BCE era had a concept congruous to the Greek _atomos_ ,
| the _kanu_. One of the neat things about _kanu_ is that it
| knows where it 's been, in a moral sense. This was posited as
| one explanation for reincarnation, all your bits fly around
| according to these moral laws, creating new points of
| awareness. Bad people burn all their energy whoring around,
| drinking, eating, so the kanu don't have a place to go (pigs,
| lower castes, etc), but good people spread their lives around,
| and kanu get higher life forms to coalesce into (brahmins, nice
| people, gods, etc). Obviously there's no morals at the Planck
| length, but it's an interesting notion.
|
| Auschwitz ashes in our lungs, tears of Christ in our blood. One
| of Buddha's "memories" of past lives was as a man who
| sacrificed himself to feed a starving tiger and cubs. I've
| always thought that locking corpses in eternal tupperware was a
| little creepy.
|
| Always keep in mind, though, at the heart of a lot of Indian
| philosophy is a certain brutality. I mean, the word for heaven
| is "non-existence"; as an old professor of mine[2] once
| quipped, "that's a perfectly reasonable posture if you've ever
| been to Bangalore". The entire notion of "higher" and "lower"
| life forms - including different kinds of PEOPLE - sort of
| gives away the game. Important to remember that AAALLL of these
| old systems were built to justify the civilization they emerged
| from, and it wasn't always purty.
|
| [1] Whatever that is. Some sort of recursive system that
| simulates outcomes for a given range of choices? That seems way
| too pat.
|
| [2] Who was also a minister, so there's that. He already
| believed in a Big Rock Candy Mountain with fluffy beards and
| chubby wingbabies.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Regarding "the self": Buddhism is seriously conflicted about
| that idea. The self is said to be illusory, but we constantly
| apply all of our energies to defending it. Why do they go on
| so much about it, if it isn't real?
|
| It's been described to me as a pathetic, insignificant thing,
| absolutely in need of a defender. Western (or I should say,
| english-speaking) Buddhist teachers call it "ego", but I'm
| pretty sure that's wrong, in that Freud and Jung coined the
| term "ego" (they had different definitions, but it's not the
| self from Buddhism that either of them defined).
| cracoucax wrote:
| Imo the belief in rebirth is not needed to practice metta, you
| just need to realize that every being wants to be happy, just
| like you.
|
| Yet all of them are mired in delusion and most of the time do
| things which go the opposite way of generating real happiness,
| we all do.
|
| Everyone is mired in delusion and most of the time react to
| feelings of anger and craving (vedana), which are generated
| based on their history, social norms and whatnot. They are just
| being manipulated by those all the time, unless they're very
| mindful of what's happening in their mind temporarily.
| Realizing this you can't really hate anybody, and in fact you
| realize they are 100% like you.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > the belief in rebirth is not needed to practice metta
|
| That's not what I was saying; I was commenting on that
| suggested technique for developing metta, in particular,
| which _is_ dependent on belief in rebirth.
| cracoucax wrote:
| Ah yes I understand
| compumike wrote:
| Rob Burbea Metta Retreat: https://dharmaseed.org/retreats/1084/
| audio recordings with instructions and guided meditations
| avtar wrote:
| Another one of his metta (and emptiness) retreats with great
| talks: https://dharmaseed.org/retreats/1277/
| compumike wrote:
| Thank you!
| paolomaffei wrote:
| This very translation has been put to music by an artist called
| Indiajiva [1], I find it very peaceful
|
| [1]
| https://open.spotify.com/track/1bBMoUSm7Oc07l3JdQoP4g?si=671...
| Glench wrote:
| Wow thanks for sharing this!
| adyashakti wrote:
| metta is a powerful practice. if you want to feel happy, do a bit
| of metta. if you want mind-melting ecstasy, do a lot.
| wirrbel wrote:
| https://suttacentral.net/snp1.8/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=pla...
| Sutta central offers various translations (multiple translators,
| multiple languages).
|
| Thich nhat hanh had a good introductory article I believe it's
| this one https://tricycle.org/magazine/cultivating-compassion/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-10-10 23:02 UTC)