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Ethics of Metta - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on June 03, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good morning, everyone, and welcome. I ended up on the schedule for today rather late, just yesterday afternoon. I think some of you might be here expecting Tenzin Chogkyi. I made a scheduling mistake, and she'll come on the 16th. If you don't know her, she's a wonderful former Tibetan nun.¹ I've known her for 30 years. Before she was a nun, she was deeply involved with an agency in Santa Cruz working with County Legal Services and neighborhoods with conflict resolution, training people in conflict resolution. She's a master at this wonderful art that's so important for us all.

Then she did lots of serious practice at the Tibetan nunnery; I think she did two of the three-year retreats that they do, kind of solitary retreats. She did a lot of practice and study with compassion. So between conflict resolution and compassion, you're not going to go wrong. I'm a little bit sorry she's not here for you today, but she'll be here in two weeks. I'll be at the IRC this next week, and then the following Sunday is my son's graduation from college, so then I'll be back the following week on the 23rd.

I want to mention that because I'm pretty sure I'm going to have a special meeting after the Dharma talk that day, maybe both on Zoom and here live for people who want to come to it. We were approached a few weeks ago by the leadership at Hidden Villa. For those of you who don't know Hidden Villa, it's a nature preserve and farm in the middle of Silicon Valley, up against the Los Altos Hills there. It's a beautiful place to go visit and hike. Before we had our own retreat center, we did retreats there for 10 years, sometimes as many as five a year. It was just a fantastic place to do retreats; they have a hostel there.

We were approached by the leadership there, interested in having IMC back. Maybe a partnership of sorts, so we could have regular use of the hostel again. It comes at the same time that we've been exploding the retreat center and offering retreats. The retreat center is fully scheduled, but now we've started to offer off-site retreats, renting facilities. We now have 14 people, I think, in our teacher training—it's less than a year left of a four-year program—and we have seven teachers already. So we have 21 teachers able to teach retreats. That's also an explosion.

Suddenly to be offered Hidden Villa as a place where we can do more retreats is a wonderful gift. We haven't worked out all the details, but there's a long history, as I said, with Hidden Villa. In many ways, it's a part of our peninsula family of connections. But the real challenge for us, the biggest challenge to be able to do that, is that we do everything on a volunteer basis. Everything's offered freely by volunteers. With all the things we do already, our volunteer base is fairly thin. So to imagine having more volunteers to put on retreats at Hidden Villa... the imagination has a hard time seeing it. It's very important when we do things that we try to do it without any stress; that's our calling card. Otherwise, with all volunteers, it doesn't really work.

So I thought of having a meeting that day for people who are interested in what we're doing there at Hidden Villa, the option there, and to talk about volunteering. Maybe some of you have been there before and done retreats there, and some of you have volunteered there before we did retreats. Some of them don't necessarily come to IMC anymore; they're in the woodwork, watching on YouTube and things like that. So we thought we'd have a meeting and see who would come to talk about that possibility and how to manage to put it on before we go back to Hidden Villa and continue the discussions with them and just explore what that partnership might be like. I thought maybe at 11:30 on the 23rd, we could do that. We'll announce it again; I'll put it on the calendar and on the website. But it's a phenomenally fortunate thing that's come our way, to partner with Hidden Villa to be able to offer retreats there. Maybe doing other kinds of partnerships with them is a phenomenal thing.

One of the things also over the last couple of years that I've been involved in is training people in doing Buddhist caregiving in relationship to the natural world. We have this Buddhist Eco-chaplaincy program and are involved in training a whole bunch of people to be able to do retreats in the wilderness—camping retreats and backpacking retreats, other things. Hidden Villa is right there in the natural world, so we can probably do some pretty creative things there as well.

Ethics of Metta

As for the talk today, last week I gave a series of talks on the fundamentals or the foundations of Buddhist ethics, an introduction to Buddhist ethics. I talked about how part of the foundation of it is the principle of non-harming at the center of it. The idea of becoming skilled in learning to recognize what is wholesome, what is healthy for us in the heart, and to live from that inner psychological health is a foundation for Buddhist ethics.

Another one is that we're involved in training ourselves. The Buddhist precepts are not admonitions or commandments; they're trainings. It's understood you're not going to be perfect at it, but we're training ourselves and cultivating, developing ourselves to become ethical. And then as we become more ethical or train this way, then ethics becomes second nature. It becomes our nature, it becomes who we are.

The word for ethics in Buddhism that's often translated to English is Sila.² That word has two meanings: it means behavior, and then it came over time to mean nature, like a character of a person, something deeper in a person's nature. Some people then have translated it as virtuous behavior, virtuous conduct. At some point, it becomes a person's natural virtue to be ethical, to not cause any harm. It's not something you have to think about doing; it's just who you are. You're not going to intentionally want to harm anyone; it's just your nature to be that way. That's especially the case for those people who mature in this practice to what is sometimes called enlightenment or realization.

If anybody hears that you've been hanging out with the Buddhists or doing Buddhist practice and they ask you how do you know when someone's enlightened, I'll give you an answer that I think is very profound, and that is: you know when they don't want to harm anybody. Isn't that a great answer? I think it is.

So today I wanted to do another piece of this foundation for Buddhist ethics, and that is Metta.³ Metta is a wonderful word that has been translated many times into English. My most common favorite translation of it is Goodwill. Sometimes I like kindness. It's often known in popular Buddhist English-speaking circles as loving-kindness, and sometimes I really like that word. Some people like the word benevolence. There are all kinds of different ways people use the word, and the variety of translations we have speaks to the idea that Metta, whatever it is, is not one thing.

It belongs to a family of attitudes or emotions which can be called our positive social emotions or attitudes, or maybe more precisely, the emotions of care. "Care" has two meanings: care means you want to support someone, help someone, but to care also means that something is important. To have emotions of care is also to have respect for other people, to appreciate them and value them. Metta is in that family of things. Rather than thinking it's one thing, you can take the whole family of caregiving emotions and imagine making a color wheel from them, a color wheel that has no sharp lines between any of the colors. All the colors gradually fade into each other, move into each other. If you've seen a color wheel, sometimes the primary colors stand out more intensely, but they don't have any sharp lines between the other hues of that color.

So we have this wonderful wheel of potential caregiving emotions that we live in. Sometimes in Buddhism, we talk about loving-kindness (Metta), compassion (Karuṇā)⁴, appreciative joy (Mudita)⁵, and equanimity (Upekkhā)⁶ as a form of love. But there are others; generosity could be one.

In the classic language of Pali, Metta is a cognate or connected to the word mitta, which means friend. Some of the oldest definitions of Metta state that it is known as Metta because it arises in one's relationship to a friend. Some people just like to translate it as friendliness, with the idea that friendliness is a wonderful thing to have—warm, friendly feelings for a friend. The idea is to universalize that feeling so everyone's your friend. Wouldn't that be nice? Maybe that's a little bit of a lower bar than saying loving-kindness because as soon as you have the word "love" in it, it's a high bar.

It's possible to have goodwill or a friendly attitude towards people you don't like. I think it's realistic that we have people who somehow don't quite work for us. There's something about them that's maybe aversive and irritating, maybe they're always a cynic, and you're just like, "Oh, here we go again." You don't quite like them, but you can still have goodwill for them. You can still have an attitude of friendliness that's genuine, that's part of your character, your nature, that your heart is open to them and you care for them in spite of the fact that how they are doesn't quite work for you. I don't know if I said that in any way that would offend anyone or trouble anyone, but I was trying to say that it's nice to lower the bar of what goodwill could be because then it's easier to do it. To think you're supposed to be loving to every single person you see is a little bit of a high bar to attain.

In terms of ethics, I like to think of Buddhist ethics as the ethics of friendship, the way you would be with a very good friend. I don't think it feels good to think about killing your good friend. You're probably actually willing to sacrifice even your life for some good friends; it's the opposite feeling. You're probably not going to steal from your good friend; this would just feel yucky, I hope. And probably you're not going to assert yourself in a violent, dominating sexual way on your friend to hurt them. You probably know it doesn't feel good to lie to them. And the last precept, not getting intoxicated—I've known people who have harmed their friends when they got intoxicated. That just didn't work for friends, family, all kinds of people. There's been tremendous harm created. So the idea is, be careful with what you take in so you don't harm anyone. The ethics of friendship is one quality of Buddhist ethics, and I think that gives a very different flavor for what ethics is if the primary reference point is some kind of Western puritanical ideas of commandments, ones that involve punishment and are completely black and white.

Here's more of this definition: Metta is called Metta because it is friendly. It refers to tender or watery love. Some people translate this as moist love, but with "watery" I think of a wonderful container, like a bladder that holds water, and you shake it and the water moves inside. This wonderful resonance in the heart that we have when something happens, the heart is not frozen. It's watery, so it responds. Some people have translated this as a lubricating friendship, lubricating love, a lubricated heart. That's a little odd because I think of the oil for your car, but it also means there's no resistance. Your heart is lubricated, meaning things just flow right through and right in, available. A really well-lubricated heart is like another metaphor: a heart that's so open that things go into it and pass right through; they don't get stuck. When things get stuck, then we get in trouble.

It says the characteristic of Metta is to promote well-being. It's a quality of friendship where we have goodwill and we want well for others. That's the characteristic of it, as opposed to having love or friendship for someone that is characterized by what they can do for me, where it's about my well-being that counts, what I can get in the relationship. Its function is to prefer well-being over ill-being. Its manifestation is the removal of annoyance. Isn't that nice? Occasionally, one or two of you probably get annoyed, and it's such a nice feeling when that annoyance is gone. Annoyance is an irritant for yourself.

Its proximate cause is seeing the loveliness of others. Isn't that great? What does it take to be able to see the loveliness of other people? I know that sometimes that's not available because we're annoyed, because we're angry, because we're filled with desire, we're filled with delusion, we're filled with confusion, fear—all kinds of things. We're so caught up in our agenda and all we have to do. Being over-busy interferes with friendliness. Being over-busy interferes with our ability to take in another person so that we see their loveliness. Wouldn't that be a nice life if you went around seeing loveliness in everyone? Yes, but you've got to be realistic; we have a lot of things to do. What's more important? What could be more important than seeing the loveliness in beings? Metta succeeds when ill will subsides, and it fails when it produces selfish affection.

How does one abide with one's heart accompanied with Metta, extending outward in one direction? There's the idea that you can take this attitude and have it feel expansive and extensive in all directions, but you can start with one direction. How do I abide with a heart accompanied with Metta extending outward in one direction? Just as one would feel friendliness on seeing a dearly beloved friend, so does one extend loving-kindness, Metta, to all creatures.

I like very much that we have different English translations of Metta so that we don't box her in and think it has to be one thing. Why it's not one thing is that the positive social emotions we have, what they are, depends a lot on other qualities of heart and mind that we have, and those shift and change over time. To come to a conclusion today, "This is what Metta is," might keep you from noticing how it shifts and changes. One of the great joys for me in doing Buddhist practice now for these decades is to see that my understanding of love, my understanding of friendliness, of goodwill, Metta, Karuṇā, all these things—how it lives in me has shifted and changed as other aspects of this practice have changed me in different ways.

For example, sometimes you sit down to meditate and I'm preoccupied, maybe a little tense and spinning out in my thoughts. I sit down, and part of what mindfulness meditation is, is getting out of the way of ourselves so that how we are in any given moment has a chance to be seen, to be known, and to settle. To this day, I've noticed that my mind tricks me. I'm involved in some kind of intense thought and preoccupation, and I think the whole world centers around that preoccupation. I think this is the way it has to be, and I have to fix this and solve this, or this person is so terrible and I have to do something. I'm caught up in this world of something. Sometimes it's not interpersonal; sometimes it's like there's not enough time. I have to clean the house and have the dishes cleaned, but I don't have enough time for it. How am I going to do this? I'm rushing around trying to do three things at once, and the world is in this thought bubble of its own preoccupation.

So then I sit down, and it's still there, but after a while it gets softer, gets quieter. The shoulders go down, the belly relaxes. After a while, even the eyes relax and soften, and I notice that my thinking has slowed down. After a while, those thoughts have stopped occurring, and I'm there just with my breath in a simple way. The pressure and the tension that was compelling that earlier thought is seen and known. It's still there, but now it's just pressure somewhere in my mind, and I just sit breathing with it, getting out of the way of it, knowing it, and it quiets down and settles.

When I finish the meditation, lo and behold, I realize, "Wow, I was caught in a delusion before I meditated." I thought I was living in this thought bubble that made its own little universe of what had to happen and how things were and what things mean and all that. But that was its own little thing that I thought was the truth, and now I see it very differently. So what I've learned is sometimes when I feel like I don't have enough time for things, I'll sit down and meditate for 10 minutes, and after 10 minutes, I have lots of time. It's remarkable. Who had the true view of reality? The Gil who thought they didn't have enough time for things, or the one who sees lots of time after meditation? Is the after-meditation one deluded because I'm just forgetting all the list?

Things start settling and changing, and my relationship to myself begins to change. For example, there can be self-criticism. Sometimes some people have self-hate, which is also one of those thought bubbles, those little thought worlds we can live in that has its own authority, its own inner dynamics and working. They say you can't solve a problem with the problem itself; you have to step out of the problem to solve it. Some things that seem so intense and so important and so true in the mind, you have to find a way to step out of it to see something different. Meditation again can be one of those things. There are other ways of doing this: just spending time at a park, going for a walk under trees, being with a friend, exercise.

At some point, something can shift that self-criticism, and it's not the operating principle anymore. Then there's a different way of experiencing oneself. Maybe at first, it's just the absence of self-criticism, but then with time, the tender heart, the watery heart, starts to be able to show itself. It's been eclipsed. Then there can be a feeling of being content, being at peace, being calm, being settled. "Oh, it's good to be this way." Then it starts becoming easier and easier to view oneself as one's own friend, to have friendship towards oneself, to care for oneself, to have a positive view of oneself.

As that process goes deeper and fuller, finding a peace with oneself, a contentment with oneself, a peace with the present moment, there's room for all kinds of other positive emotions to arise. One of them is a simple delight, a joy in being alive. It's one of the great wonderful aspects of meditation—sooner or later, sometimes it's later—to have the bubbling up of meditative joy that's there for no reason. It isn't like you won the lottery or had a great date or something. It's just because you're alive and so content and happy. Who would have believed that you can be happy without getting something, without getting praise or things or pleasures in the world? It's phenomenal to feel this.

Then when you're with your friend, you're not coming to your friend with a need. You're not coming to your friend wanting something. There's nothing wrong with having a need and wanting something from a friend at times, but imagine coming without a need and without wanting something from them, and feeling friendly for them. A friendship that is without need for me, that's a big gift to give someone. Imagine having love for someone, and you have love without a need for someone else. Imagine having a feeling of friendliness, of kindness, of tenderness that has no object, that is just there, just like a joy that has no reason. There can be love that has no object in particular; it's just a state of kindness, a state of love. And then your friend happens to walk into the middle of that bubble. You're just loving, but it's not like you're focused on them, needing to get something from them. Loving-kindness then creates a very different context for ethics.

For example, with romantic or sexual love, that usually comes with desire. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that desire; it's how we live it. How we live it can be tremendously harmful. I'm sure most people here have been harmed by someone's sexual desire once upon a time, or have harmed. But if Metta is the reference point for romantic love, then there's a reference point that is a kind of love, a friendliness that is free of having to act on a desire. It creates a different reference point than desire. Desires can still be there, but there's a whole other attitude that then informs how we go about a relationship.

That Metta that is free of need, free of desire, free of needing to prove ourselves or get anything is a rare thing to have in this world, but that is a phenomenal basis for how we live a life of non-harming.

Part of what we do in Buddhism is to celebrate our capacity for these wonderful positive social emotions. We emphasize the value of learning to recognize them, appreciate them when they're there. One of the ways that we sometimes emphasize this is to look for the situations in your life where it's easy to have this. Look for situations where it's easy to have a friendly attitude, easy to have goodwill that expects nothing in return. Look for situations where it's easy to be generous to someone, or compassionate. For some people, it's more difficult to share in their joy, the appreciative joy in their success. Look where it's easy, and then from where it's easy, be happy with it, appreciate that you have this capacity, value it.

Then, expand it to more and more people. Spread the circle to include not just the people where it's easy—your family and your friends—but start spreading it out to people who are not your friends, not your family, to neighbors, to people who are acquaintances. What does it take to have this positive goodwill, this Metta, this caregiving concern for the well-being of others? What does it take to go onward and outward, make your circle bigger and bigger? That's the exercise that Buddhism teaches as a way of universalizing our Metta, our love, our care, our compassion. It even goes so far as: how do you cultivate Metta for an enemy? They don't say anything about not having an enemy; I guess they assume there are always going to be people who can be an enemy. But even for an enemy, which seems like a really high bar, you would have some basic goodwill, basic friendliness to them. You might have a lot of caution around them because they're your enemy, so it's not like you have to open the doors of your house and invite them in, but there is a kind of healthy goodwill that you can have.

I remember once when someone was really angry—someone I didn't know very well, hardly at all—was really angry with me for nothing I had done, but somehow wanted to blame me for the event. He came over and was yelling at me angrily, and I stood there listening. It took a while. I thought about what is the kind thing to do here. Do I justify myself? Do I explain myself and explain it away? Or do I say that he's wrong? What do I do here? He gave me a lot of time to think about it, so that was nice. [Laughter]

He finally stopped, and with the most goodwill I could have, I looked at him and calmly said, "You know, when you speak that way to me, I feel afraid." There was no blame. I wasn't attacking him; I was just telling him the effect it had on me. I had some fear; it wasn't like I was fearless in the situation. I thought if I say that, then I may be taking care of myself, but it's also my way of having some goodwill for him, not wanting to criticize him but trying to open the door for some other way. In fact, as soon as he heard that, he relaxed. I don't know if he apologized, but he relaxed and brought the conversation to a close and left. That was my little exercise in trying to find the goodwill and trying to find how to be appropriate to take care of myself in this kind of challenging situation where, at least for that moment, I must have been his enemy, the way he was talking to me.

So, to expand outwards. But how do we do that? Not as an "I should," not in some kind of Pollyannaish way to go around seeing everybody's loveliness as if we were pretending. One of the ways is to become skilled through mindfulness practice to understand how we don't do that. One of the really important principles of Buddhism is that there are Buddhist ideals like loving-kindness or Metta, peace, equanimity, calm—Buddhism has no shortage of ideals to carry as a burden. But the way to experience these ideals is to be mindful, to study what interferes with them, what gets in the way. "I hate people"—that gets in the way of love. So, study the hate, find out what's going on. "I don't have time for people because I need to become wealthy." Okay, so then study that ambition. What's going on for you? Really stay present.

Meditation and mindfulness is one of the laboratories for taking a deep, honest look at ourselves, to stop enough to really see what's going on. Then we begin working through some of the things that interfere. One of the very powerful things to begin realizing is to understand when we're causing harm to ourselves by our attitudes. If we're spending a lot of time being angry at others, they might not even know we're angry at them, but we're certainly harming ourselves. If we're spending a lot of time chasing after some kind of ambition and it's becoming stressful for us and we're closing down to everything else, we're being harmed from it. Mindfulness creates a heightened sensitivity to notice where we harm ourselves by our attitudes, our way of thinking, our beliefs, our actions, the words we have.

As we are seeing that and that settles down—remember I talked about just sitting, being present, getting out of the way, and allowing it to settle and quiet—then the thing that interferes with the ideal is no longer there. And then what happens? Well, you thought you were supposed to be loving, but it turned out that's not what the situation called for. This situation called for compassion, or this situation called for celebration, or the situation called for simple generosity, or the situation called for doing nothing. Sometimes the kindest thing to do is to leave this person completely alone.

So this idea of looking at what interferes, so that we can respond with positive social emotions because they are who we are, not what we're trying to live up to. Friendliness is one of the bases for Buddhist ethics.

Reflections

We have a few minutes left. I would love it if you would take just a couple of minutes to share with another person if anything in this talk sparked something interesting in you. Something that, "Oh, that's an interesting idea around this topic of Metta," and maybe you hadn't heard it before, or maybe you have but it sparked something. If you turn towards one or two people near you—but look around, make sure no one's left alone. We want everyone included. We'll do it for about four minutes or so, and then I'll ring a bell and we'll come back for a minute. If you don't want to do this, of course, you can leave or just sit quietly.

[Music and conversation]

Well, that sounded like friendly conversations. I feel a little apologetic that I gave you so little time for that conversation, but you're welcome to stay now and continue. There's no hurry to leave this morning. I think there's a children's program today at 11:15, so you're welcome to talk for about 15 minutes and then continue the conversations outside.

Thank you. May it be that our reflections and our learnings about Metta, and all the different forms it can take, help the people that we encounter feel appreciated. We have a world where people are underappreciated. So let all people be appreciated as we go through our day. Thank you.