The Four Brahma Viharas are:
1. Metta: loving kindness
2. Karuna: compassion
3. Mudita: sympathetic joy
4. Upekkha: equanimity
I'm going to devote four posts in the next two weeks to an examination of each of these as part of my homework for a Thai yoga massage training I'm about to take.
Metta is a word that I've known for most of my life, at least in terms of the sounds of its letters. My mother had a college friend named Metta. People talk about it a lot in yoga and in peace and justice circles in which I participate. When I started studying Judaism, I learned it again as chesed, which also translates to loving kindness. (It's interesting that the term in English is mostly used as a translation for other terms. I'd bet there's a word for it in Irish.)
Buddhanet (linked above) says that "the direct enemy of Metta is anger." In the wake of my mother's death (and the deaths of two close friends preceding hers and additional family illness shortly after her death), I've spent at least part of most days angry in some form. Now feels like a perfect time for me to take stock of the relative frequency of anger and metta in my life, and work on decreasing the former by increasing the latter. I can't reject my anger entirely, because that wouldn't be true to how I feel, but I'm happy to try to make it smaller. I first learned that love vanquishes anger from my mother, and then from The Beatles. The concept seems much more simplistic in English than in Sanskrit, but not necessarily any easier to deploy. Without having looked at the other three principles, I wonder if there is any sort of enemy of sadness. It can't be happiness. I feel both simultaneously on a regular basis.
What's especially interesting to me in the texts is the link between Metta and concentration. Any time I'm angry, I definitely feel that my anger makes it hard for me to focus on anything but my anger, and it makes it hard to show loving kindness to anyone, least of all the object of my anger. Sometimes movement is the only way to shake me out of it. That's deliberate. Ive also had what i think of as surprise infusions of loving kindness toward a person I'm angered by. Sometimes it starts with pity or regret, but it ends in a rush of love. Even if it's fleeting, the fact that it sometimes appears makes me wonder if my yoga is having more of an impact on my spirit than I sometimes think.
Buddhanet also says: "The cultivation of this state of mind [of Metta] is called Bhavana or normally translated as meditation. When we cultivate it, it becomes strong, powerful and useful. It brings us abundant, deep and intense peace and happiness. The cultivation of it involves the following:
1 The concentration of metta. Concentrated, it becomes strong and powerful.
2 Metta is also trained so that it can be given to anybody. That is, it is flexible, versatile, universal and boundless.
3 When this potent force has become powerful we can make use of it to produce many marvels to make everyone's life better.
To do this effectively one needs the method. Acquiring the skill requires patience. With experience one improves."
That's a lot to unpack, but I quote it all in case it's helpful for someone, and to remind myself to return to it when I need a metta boost.
Bringing things back around to the beginning, a simplistic look at the sounds of the word compares it to the English adjective meta, one of my favorite words. Intellectually, I know they don't have any connection through their shared sounds, but more imaginatively, the concept of metts seems pretty darn meta to me. It should be, at the very least - couldn't we all use more loving kindness that, in referring back to itself, never ends?
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