Okay, so tonight we chanted the Karaniyamita Sutta.
It's the discourse on what should be done for love.
What should be done by one who wishes to attain
freedom through loving kindness.
When we went to the Dharma Center, they chanted it.
Oh no, they had me read it.
I read it.
They have someone read it every week or maybe every time they meet.
And they read it in English.
because the idea is to understand what you're saying.
The Karaniyameta Sutta, it's actually more of a reminder.
It's not actually a meditation practice, you see.
There's the one part
where it starts to talk about and so on.
So it's explaining how to practice metta.
It's explaining what should be done if your practice is metta.
Meta means love.
So it starts off by telling you what the preliminaries are.
If you want to be a person who is proficient or a loving, if you want to be a loving person, you need certain prerequisites.
You have to be
The first part is about how you should train yourself if you would like to become a loving person.
As with all of the good things in the world, mindfulness, wisdom, compassion, they're not things you can just set out and cultivate.
You can't just say, I'm going to be in love with everyone, I'm going to have love for the whole world.
Just as you can't say, I'm going to be wise.
No.
You can't will it to happen.
This is something that takes work.
Love is a quality of mind that takes work.
And this is important because otherwise we quite often have a wrong idea of what is meant by love.
We have an idea of love that is actually perhaps even unwholesome.
It's the kind of love that we have for our families or that we have for our, what we say, loved ones.
Now when you have love for loved ones, most of what you call love is actually some sort of attachment.
And that's why it's ones.
No, that's why it's particular.
If you ask anyone, do you love your family more than you love perfect strangers on the street?
And of course everyone would say, yes, I do.
But the question is, well, why is that?
There's various reasons.
We're closer to them.
We know them more.
We understand them better.
But the biggest one is that we're
attached to them.
We're more attached to our families than we are to our friends, and we're more attached to our friends than we are to perfect strangers.
So we have this idea of love that is actually based on our desires.
So when you say you love your friend,
But the reason you say that, what you mean is that this person makes you happy.
Why do you say, oh, I love so-and-so?
Why do you say that?
You say that as an expression of pleasure, because that person brings you pleasure.
You don't say it, we often don't say it because it means I want to help that person.
See, there's the aspect that is love.
But there's the aspect that this person makes me happy.
Oh, I love oranges, for example.
Oh, I love cheesecake.
We use this word love.
But this isn't... See, it's not a pure love.
And there is love, especially for our families, for example.
There is the desire to help them.
But it's so caught up in the desire that they should...
be and act in a certain way, which is attachment.
And this is, the word we use is caring.
We say, I care for the people I love.
And so I had a question recently, someone asked me, if you give up attachment, how can you care for the ones that you love?
Does a person who lets go not care anymore?
And I've actually gotten this sort of question before, and it's actually true that love doesn't care.
Love isn't caring.
Love and caring are two very different things.
It's a difficult teaching, but I'm quite sure it's true.
Love is ready to help, but it doesn't care in the sense that it doesn't become upset when things don't go as planned, you see.
Think of the word care.
It doesn't mean that you don't care for people the way a nurse cares for people.
You care for people as appropriate to your situation out of love.
In the sense of actively working for them or doing something for their benefit.
But if you help them or if you do your part and they don't...
They don't get better or they don't appreciate it.
You don't care, you see.
So you don't have this caring in terms of being upset or having your happiness dependent on something.
You see, a person who is truly free from attachment won't care what happens in the sense that they won't be moved by what happens.
They will care in the sense that they will differentiate between actions.
So they will act in such a way as to bring benefit.
So they will care in the sense that they won't say, if I hurt you or if I help you, it's all the same.
They care.
They do the things that bring care to people or bring care or bring benefit, you see.
But when we talk about caring, caring what happens to people, you see, we're dealing with two very different mind states.
The one that looks and thinks this is something that is helpful for that person and decides to do it, doesn't just sit back and watch them suffer, or doesn't just sit back and watch them suffer.
be in need.
When they need something, love and this kind of caring is the giving as is appropriate to give, helping as is appropriate to help.
But there will be no, there's no anxiety
If it's not appropriate to help or if there's no way you can help when you see someone suffering greatly, you don't care in the sense that you don't get upset when they're suffering.
You do what you can to help and you're mindful and you're clear in mind about it.
And so the easiest way to understand the difference here is that true love is universal.
How we can tell the difference between love and attachment is that attachment is partial to certain things and certain people.
The love that we have for our parents, the love that we have for our children, the part of it that is love is the same sort of thing that can be developed for all beings.
But the attachment can only be developed for
one segment of reality or one portion of reality, one segment of the population.
So we have attachment for certain people.
But love is something that can exist to the same extent between all beings.
We can have love for a perfect stranger, something we don't normally think of.
We normally think that
love is something that you reserve for your loved ones, right?
But that is actually more, that's a kind of love in the sense of being based on attachment.
So when we develop love, this is, this is
First of all, understanding that it's something that takes work.
It's not this easy kind of love that you have for apples and oranges and sweets and so on.
It's not even the love that you have for a romantic involvement, or even the love that you have for your children or your parents, per se.
I mean, a large part of it, part of that is just attachment.
The way you can tell is because love doesn't care.
If a person dies, love doesn't get upset.
Love doesn't cause you to be sad when a person dies.
That's attachment.
Love doesn't cause you to get upset when a person leaves you or when a person changes, when your friends betray you.
This is attachment.
The love that we have for our parents and for our children is the dedication to them and the going out of our way to help them.
But the worrying and the caring part.
is based on attachment.
Which is, of course, much easier.
It's much easier to love cheesecake than it is to love your enemies, for example.
So this is a good way to test your love, and to understand love, is to cultivate it not only on those you love, but cultivate it on those who you don't know, and on those who you actually are upset at.
Because then you can see where... Actually, the best people are those you don't like.
Because then you know the only thing that you're going to have is love.
You'll have no attachment for someone you don't like.
If you have someone who you're angry at, when you try to cultivate love for that person, you'll find out what true love is.
Because you won't be able to get attached to them.
You won't give rise to the same attachment as you will for someone you love.
Quote-unquote love.
So first important point, love is something that's difficult and takes training to undertake, to cultivate.
And so there's things that you have to do.
You have to be upright.
You have to be set in morality.
You have to be a charitable person.
You can't be stingy.
You have to be, you have to practice meditation.
The best way to cultivate loving kindness is to clear your mind and your mind is pure.
An enlightened being is naturally able to cultivate loving-kindness and wish for good things for all beings.
So content, easy to support, with few duties, living lightly, controlled in senses.
Your mind has to be focused.
Your mind has to be free from these kind of attachments, sensual attachments.
It has to be free from worry.
It has to be free from anxiety, fear.
It has to be free from shame and guilt for having done bad things.
So you have to be moral and virtuous in order to cultivate it.
and not attached to families.
These are actually words for monks.
A lot of the Buddha's teaching, some people ask, well, then is this sort of teaching really applicable to lay people?
We're talking about things like being easy to support in terms of going on alms round or so on.
But the Buddha would always frame it in terms of the training for the monks because they were the ones he gave the majority of his talks to.
So this talk was actually given to a group of monks and there's a very famous story about the Karaniya Meta Sutta.
They went into this forest to practice meditation and the angels tried to kick them out and so they came back with the Meta Sutta.
And when the angels heard the Karaniya Meta Sutta they took care of the monks and they let them stay.
So the Buddha taught this to these monks saying go back and chant the Metta Sutta.
So we always go and chant it when we go to a new place, when we go to the forest.
We always try to remember to chant this Sutta and think of all the good things in it to cultivate loving kindness for all the beings in the forest.
But what I mean is
the Buddha would give a teaching that was detailed, directed towards the monks, but the same principles, the meaning was that the same principles should be practiced by the lay people, only to a lesser degree.
So when you have
The whole of the Buddhist monastic code, all these 227 precepts and all the minor precepts, that's the detailed analysis of morality.
But the basic morality is keeping five precepts.
So if you keep five precepts, that's enough to become free from suffering.
Of course, eight precepts, five or eight precepts you can keep.
It's really the basis of the rest of the precepts.
So in the same, you shouldn't just discard the things that the Buddha says in this example, a teaching that he gives to the monks.
We should take this as the highest form of practice.
So being unattached to family, so that means because monks shouldn't get caught up in their interactions with lay people or being partial to going into the village and hanging out with lay people.
But then you think, well, why is that?
And what is the quality that we're trying to avoid?
Of course, it's busyness and socializing, which are very important qualities to avoid for lay people as well.
So the point being, when we read many of the Buddha's teachings, we see that they're directed towards monks, but we should take the principle behind each one of them.
Sometimes it's difficult to understand if you haven't lived as a monk.
Sometimes you can have the monks explain why is it that we shouldn't go to families or how is it that a monk gets attached to families.
These are the ways.
These teachings are important for anyone.
It says, someone who is skilled in good.
Anyone who is skilled in good and wishes to attain that state of peace.
That state of peace refers to the jhana or the calm and the state of tranquility and absorption that comes from cultivating loving kindness.
And then it goes into a...
If you read through it, you can see how the Buddha...
gives an example of how to practice loving-kindness, but it's sort of an overview.
The actual practice can take two forms.
This form is the one that I favor as sort of a supplement to vipassana meditation, the insight meditation.
It's that you start with
You start with yourself, for example, and then you move outward physically.
So here he's giving the example of sending to all beings at once.
But the method of practice would be to cultivate it for yourself first.
Say, may I be happy, may I be free from suffering.
And then go to the people in the room and think about them.
May they be happy and may they be free from suffering.
And then go to the people in the building.
And you can think of the beings.
If you think of angels being in the building or ghosts or whatever, send to them as well.
All of the animals and if there are animals in the area.
Of course in the forest this is more important.
We send to all the mosquitoes and all the leeches.
Send to all the little beings and big beings and the monkeys and so on.
And then you send to all the people in the city or the town or the area, the district.
And then you send to all the people in the province or the state.
And then you send to all the beings in the country.
You send in degrees of size or physical space.
And this helps you to sort of work up to this taking in the global or the universal population.
Taking in all beings.
May all beings be happy and free from suffering.
the and then you can go in you can of course you can go in in in types as well so you as i say you you start with the humans and then go on to the animals and the angels and the ghosts and you can do that at every level until you get to um may all animals in the world may all angels may all brahmas and so on uh and you then you can you can even start
playing with it.
So all beings in the north may they all be happy, all beings in the south may they all be happy, west, east.
The Buddha gave many different
examples of how you can practice mitta.
The reason for quote-unquote playing is that it cultivates your mind.
It's a mental training.
It's like running drills for tennis or whatever sport that you play.
You run drills and you get in different scenarios to help to train your body, and in this case to train your mind.
to the point where you can send loving-kindness easier.
You're training yourself in being a loving person, in wishing people well.
That's basically what loving is.
The other way to cultivate loving-kindness, that is, I think, more favored for people who are cultivating it for the jhanas, because in the Visuddhimagga, I think this is how it...
advises you to cultivate it is starting with yourself, but it's just as an example.
The Visuddhimanga says you can't enter into jhana by wishing love for yourself because it's not really loving.
Talking about loving yourself is not really loving.
The Visuddhimanga says it won't lead to concentration.
Start with the people you love.
Start with your family.
Start with your parents, your children.
Start with the ones that you love.
And pick someone of the same gender.
Pick someone you're not going to be attracted to.
Because otherwise it gets confused with lust.
It gets confused with attachment.
And try to send loving kindness to them and cultivate it to the point where you're able to love these people.
You're able to love the people who you already love.
This is an easy thing to do.
It's an easy exercise.
Then when you can do that, try to think of someone that you don't know very well, you don't have an opinion about.
Maybe you know them, but let's say someone you work with or someone you don't have an opinion with.
You say hello to them and they're not your friend, but they're not your enemy.
Find someone who is in the middle and send loving kindness to them.
This is more difficult.
As I said, this takes training.
You try it for a while, and if it doesn't work, then you come back and think of the person who you love.
Do that for a while and then try again.
You see, it's a means of training the mind in degrees.
And then when you can finally send love to this person, cultivate that and go back and forth between these two, sending love to the person you love, love to the person who you normally wouldn't even think about or you don't really care about.
And then, when you can do that equally, then start sending love to someone you don't like.
And this is where loving kindness can actually be a useful tool, where you use it for the people you don't like.
But you can't start there because if you're not trained in loving kindness, you'll just get angry when you think of them.
When you think of a person you don't like,
You can't help but get angry.
And if that happens, then it's difficult.
Then it will be difficult to cultivate, to try and get the opposite to come in.
So you have to be careful.
When the anger comes up, go back to the person who you don't normally think about.
And if that doesn't work, go back to the person you love.
So then now you have three hops.
Start with the person you love, go to the person you don't care about, and then go to the person who you don't like.
until finally you can actually love the person who you normally wouldn't like, the person who is your enemy, and send love to them, and then send love to all three of them, and then you begin to cultivate universal love, and you start to cultivate love for all beings, and you enter into a state of love, and enter into the jhanas via loving-kindness.
So these are the two basic ways.
One is in degrees in terms of the love that you have for them, and the other is in terms of degrees of physical proximity.
And so then you can do them together.
You can start with the degrees of love and then move on to, say, okay, once you're skilled in love, then go on to the...
go on to the degrees of proximity.
And he explains it, he gives a good simile, as a mother would risk her own life to protect her only child, even so towards all living beings one should cultivate a boundless heart.
So we cultivate loving-kindness just as a mother
has love for their child.
And this is the point I was trying to make about how the love that a mother has for their child is the love part of it.
Or the part of it that is love is the part that we can send to all beings.
If you can't have the same feeling as you have for your children,
Same feeling you have for your children.
If you can't have that same feeling for all beings, then you know that that part is not love, that part is an attachment.
So we have to cultivate this great love that we have for our children.
We have to transfer it to all beings.
And the benefit of it is it takes us out of our idea of love, and it helps us see what is the love and what is the attachment, so that we can become impartial and become a mother to all beings as the Buddha was.
The Buddha had the love of a mother for all beings, or he had even greater love than a mother for all beings.
Now that's the love part.
The interesting part about this, he reminds us at the end, he says one should develop, if you want to cultivate the practice of metta, you should cultivate this whenever you're doing.
And in another place, the Buddha has recommended this as one of the protective meditations.
So even if you're not practicing loving kindness for the purpose of gaining the jhanas,
It protects your mind as you're cultivating insight meditation, for example.
It protects your mind from anger, because anger can stop you from progressing on the path.
Our practice is like a small tree that has to grow.
And if it's not protected, it will fall over in the wind or it will get blown over, it will get trampled on by animals.
So we have to protect it.
We have to guard it.
And love is one way of guarding your meditation.
Guarding you from getting angry and getting frustrated and getting turned off from the meditation.
When we send love, we'll feel happy, we'll feel peaceful, and we'll therefore be able to practice meditation quite easily.
And this is what the Buddha gets to at the end when he says, if you practice this,
And, the last part is the plus part, because it has nothing to do directly with loving-kindness.
But if as well, you don't get caught up in views, you see.
You use loving-kindness to purify your mind and then you cultivate vipassana, insight meditation.
You have sila, you have morality, and you have vision, which means wisdom.
Dasana means vidarshana, vipassana.
and removing desire for sensual pleasures.
This is what leads you to not be reborn again.
So he actually changes the subject in a way, or it seems like.
He's now not talking about metta, but what he's saying is using metta to begin
to overcome views because metta is something that calms the mind and takes you into a state of peace so once you develop loving kindness remember to use it he gives this as the last teaching to these monks when he sends them off so cultivate loving kindness
for the purpose of helping you to overcome wrong views of attachment.
Some views are actually based on anger, is a very good example.
We have these ideas that we don't deserve to be treated the way we're treated by other people, or we should, this person deserves to be punished or so on.
So when we have these wrong views are directly cut off to the practice of loving kindness.
But because of the calm and the peace that comes from it, all views can be overcome with it as a base.
Once you then turn your concentration, turn your focus towards reality.
you're able to see things as they are and give up your erroneous views.
And if you have morality and vision, then you're able to overcome sensual desire.
And that's another important one because the close enemy for love is...
is lust.
It's the near enemy, it's called in the Visuddhimagga, because it's very easy to slip into the wrong one.
So this is an important point to remember, that if you're cultivating love, be careful not to fall into desire for sensual pleasure.
If you can overcome all of these, you'll never come to birth in the womb again.
That's the Karaniyameta Sutta.
Now, I thought I'd talk about this, because we chanted it, but I thought it would be a good thing to talk about so that we could incorporate it into our practice.
And the way I would suggest it is at the end,
When the bell goes, then take a moment before you open your eyes.
We'll give a few moments to actually practice loving-kindness.
Why we do that is because through the practice of insight meditation, your ability to send love becomes stronger.
And that loving-kindness then in turn protects the benefits that you've gained from the practice.
It solidifies your concentration.
The two work well together.
So we'll do that at the end of our practice.
We'll just take a few minutes to send loving kindness.
As you like, maybe if you've learned how to send it or if you want to try one of the ways that I mentioned.
It's...
We're not going to get technical or too structured about it.
We'll just do an experiment.
An experiment to try to develop loving kindness.
So we'll do that.
We'll start meditating and then at the end we'll do that.