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Karaniya Metta Sutta: The Buddha's Words on Loving-Kindness

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Re: Karaniya Metta Sutta: The Buddha's Words on Loving-Kindness

#51

Post by jbgt »

Glench wrote: post #20

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 wishe…

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.

Re: Karaniya Metta Sutta: The Buddha's Words on Loving-Kindness

#53

Post by FrustratedMonky »

thoughtFrame wrote: post #38
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #36

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.

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".

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.

Re: Karaniya Metta Sutta: The Buddha's Words on Loving-Kindness

#54

Post by suggestion »

robobro wrote: post #14
nickpsecurity wrote: post #12

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 an…

> We are undeserving, evil people who deserve justice for our sins. I'm not an evil person.

Do you think most people you would consider evil considered themselves evil?

Re: Karaniya Metta Sutta: The Buddha's Words on Loving-Kindness

#55

Post by thoughtFrame »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #53
thoughtFrame wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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.

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

Re: Karaniya Metta Sutta: The Buddha's Words on Loving-Kindness

#56

Post by nico »

kajumix wrote: post #48
krzat wrote: post #6

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 k…

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 back…

Checkout the movie The Creator for a dystopian (or at least disturbing) use of that technology

Re: Karaniya Metta Sutta: The Buddha's Words on Loving-Kindness

#57

Post by nico »

passion__desire wrote: post #39
grahamplace wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any recommendations for where to start learning?

HN crowd would love Daniel Ingram and his teachings. https://www.integrateddaniel.info/ https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/p/daniel-ingram-on-emerg...

His book is essentially meditation/realization for overachievers. It is almost the opposite of Zen

If you take everything as a task to be done and life as goals to achieve, then that might be a good book

Otherwise Reddit’s /r/meditation, /r/streamentry or just the Calm app might be better starting points

Re: Karaniya Metta Sutta: The Buddha's Words on Loving-Kindness

#58

Post by nataliste »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #36

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.

There's always the Simile of the Mountain:

https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/SN/SN3_25.html

Re: Karaniya Metta Sutta: The Buddha's Words on Loving-Kindness

#59

Post by metta2uall »

I love how this sutta makes it clear what its definition of pure love is (wishing that everyone is well, unconditionally), and that this should be cultivated towards all beings, including animals.

Sadly though most Buddhist laypeople are not vegan, though some popular teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh did promote minimising the suffering of animals via such practical means as making vegan choices..

Regarding meditation, Ajahn Brahm from the Thai Forest Tradition has taught extensively not just focused Metta Meditation, but how Metta (i.e. love/acceptance) towards the present moment is a key part of other techniques like meditation of breathing. One of his books, "Kindfulness", really gets into this.

Re: Karaniya Metta Sutta: The Buddha's Words on Loving-Kindness

#60

Post by MilStdJunkie »

denton-scratch wrote: post #41
MilStdJunkie wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 phi…

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…

For traditional Buddhists, the experience of "self" or atta is considered an illusion, like a mirage, or perhaps a rainbow. The argument is that the phenomenological world is impermanent and formless, so the things that we experience via the senses are not representative of the "real stuff" out there. The self is built on these, so itself is also impermanent, and not an eternal quality. It's not bad exactly - later traditions posit that these aggregates or skandas of the self are the root of personality - but clinging to the impermanent self or samsaric phenomenon is, well, the root of suffering. And Buddha's all about suffering; if hypocrisy was Christ's kryptonite, then suffering is definitely the Shakya Buddha's. There's also another word for "self" that identifies with a sort of universal self, which is actually eternal, but it's also completely incomprehensible, by definition of its being infinite. And there's a whole bunch of later traditions. It's a lot to unpack.

I'd recommend picking up a good survey, some I remember as an undergrad were :

The First Cities, D. Hamblin

The Wonder that was India, A. Bassam

Indian Atheism, D. Chattopadhyaya, who also did a survey on Lokayata, an early Materialist movement in the subcontinent.

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