Cultivating the Brahmaviharas

'from a talk given by Ajahn Sucitto at CittaViveka, 3I/07/03.

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The standard Dhamma practice for the human realm - the realm of being affected by people, events, things, ourselves, our own moods, our own limitations and disappointments is the brahmavihara - the cultivation of empathy. These 'measureless states' are metta, karuna, mudita, and upekkha; which we translate as loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. The Buddha presents these as all based on the same mental mood or tone: lofty, uncramped, measureless, free from hatred and ill-will, 'to others as to myself,'

The way the Buddha defines these states is by what they are not: uncramped, free from hatred and ill-will, being beyond measure. This is typical of the way the Buddha speaks; it's by the removal of certain blocks, that healthy states happen. It's not 'pump out the metta now,' 'you should have more compassion - otherwise you're not good enough' - but just for your own welfare. If you understand these blocks, and then realise that you can be free of their cramped boundaries, there's the possibility of experiencing great heart.

These brahmavihara are very profound, because if one contemplates the human realm, then what people are often doing, is running from shelter to shelter, creating little patches of territory, defending it, and curling up inside their own little burrows. From the political level right down to the everyday family life, it's not an uncramped, measureless abiding. We can all find ourselves caught up, not through conscious design, but helplessly thrown into these contracted, reduced ways of being, because the context within which we live, and how we can best operate in it has not been fully comprehended. This ignorance contracts us into a cocooned world of thoughts, memories, hopes and ambitions, secret cravings, illicit passions, and so on. We can always find a toy to play with in our own little rooms.

This is because we haven't fully comprehended found a way to be comfortable out here. Of course all of us need conventional boundaries, doors that close, but all of us need doors that open as well, otherwise our life is not free. We can't move, and can't feel our own fullness if we're closed in on ourselves. So these brahmaviharas represent aspects of a fruition that we all fundamentally need.

Metta is the quality of well-being, of being given or providing nourishment. The image that is used in the Buddhist commentaries is one of a mother, nursing, suckling a baby. It's that kind of feeling - you're just held and nourishment's being given. This is metta. Giving to others, whatever they are_: good, bad, high, low, small, big, important, unimportant — being able to do that. And to oneself, whether one is feeling stupid, inadequate, joyful, enlightened, exalted, whatever it is — to have this cultivation.

Karuna - compassion or protection. In this case, the image that is used is that of a mother watching over a child in its cot while it sleeps — making sure no harm comes to him or her. So in this case, the awareness is a little bit more spacious, but very much conscious, present; a sense of providing shelter — 'let no harm come to this one."

Mudita is joy that is associated with sharing. The analogy is of a parent seeing that the child is growing up, getting stronger, and being able to do things. 'Very good. You can manage...' So it's a joy. 'I know what it's like to feel strong and confident and upright and independent,' rather than envy. Mudita is sharing joy, rejoicing. Mudita is connected to anumodana, it comes from the same root. So when in the monastery we chant the anumodana for the acts of offering that sustain us, we are rejoicing, saying 'You've done some good kamma; wonderful; it is good. Don't overlook this. Please reflect on your goodness so that you also feel good'

Upekkha - this is equanimity. The commentary describes this as when the parent sees that the child is now fully grown and can move around on its own. Then the parent senses: 'Well, he or she will find out what they need to find out. I still care for them, but now they have to see for themselves.' This is upekkha: it's accompanied by understanding that we all have to work with our own kamma. Equanimity holds a caring space that allows us to grow: 'This is just stuff, isn't it? You'll be all right, you can go through it.' It has a trusting quality; it is love manifesting as trust. We've all got to be with our fears and joys, our success and failure, our good and bad, and equanimity allows us to be present with these kammic residues so that we can acknowledge, investigate and see the way that clears them. It's not indifference. Like all the brahmavihara, upekkha maintains the sense of empathic connection - to others as to oneself, of course. So when one is going through a rough
time: 'Do I have the breadth of heart to hold that?' Rather than to panic, react, start beating myself up, or run away. Equanimity is not about cheering up, and being happy, but about having confidence in being present. We trust the heart presence to have its effects! With some stuff, you just don't know what to do; but you can know that all you can do is be present with it, hold it in an empathetic way, and just not keep adding more stuff to it. This is upekkha, to others as to oneself.

In becoming more conscious to human life, you recognise the validity of the brahmavihara. Human life can be so fraught, even when people are keeping precepts, and have good intentions, adequate food and shelter. In living together in a monastery, one can get anxious and tense in case one is infringing on some minor rule or matter of procedure: 'Maybe someone will jump on me...!' We carry a sense of fear of what we don't know and intimidation in the face of authority. Or, if you are 'in charge', you may get the sense that you've got to carry all this until you drop dead. And then they'll say you didn't try hard enough, or weren't good enough, or mindful enough, or relaxed and friendly enough... That burdened sense can come up in the mind — the pressure that it's up to you to create something that makes everything feel okay: take everything into account, sieve it through a mind like a computer, garnish it with politically correct statements, and dish it up at a moment's notice. And look relaxed at the same time. You fret and worry in order to set up an idyllic situation where everything's settled...but that requires a lot of control and organisation. And control is about being apart from something in order to manage it. So if you're controlling, you're always apart and that feels alienating.

And even if you manage to get things under control, there's always the unpredictable. People suddenly turn up at monasteries, often just to make offerings- so they need to talk. But if someone is hanging onto being quiet, they get upset! And then if you're 'in charge' of making it so no-one gets upset, then you failed again. But the irony is that the Holy Life is based on the unpredictable, on not being in control of the context. The context is benevolent, it is one of generosity and harmlessness and faith; so it's up to us to train in empathy so that we're not upset by benevolence — let alone malevolence. But if we cultivate the brahmavihara, contact with others is through empathy rather than control - and then it doesn't have to be upsetting.

Meditation can offer us access to a core quality, which feels like an 'inner' state, where things are not happening, and the flow of events has receded. The world disappears, thought ceases, and we feel firmly grounded. When we come out of that and think about it, we remember that place where we felt comfortable and calm and think: 'If I get a few hours in that everyday, I'm okay. If I get a retreat, I'll get in there a long time. Then I'll feel pretty good and strong before I go "out there" and get battered again. But maybe I won't get enough this time, because last time I was in the middle of my retreat and then someone went and died on me. I had to go to the funeral, and that made me lose my samadhi.'

Things can get like this. I think that whatever it is that makes people commit to meditation, and to monastic life, carries the sense of finding a place away from the abrasive world, a Refuge where we can dip into safe territory. But where is the Refuge? Situations can certainly be remedial, but we have to develop beyond them into something more universal. Where are you going to be when there aren't any of these pesky humans around? And we need each other: Who's going to look after you when you get old? What happens if you have a car crash and your legs get chopped off? What happens if you lose your marbles? When you get too sick to keep going, who's going to look after you? Why should they bother? It's because metta, karuna, mudita, and upekkha are natural responses to the sentient experience when we relate to it empathetically. Empathy is innate, but gets buried under the psychological strategies we develop to manage our lives. But management is alienating … and it breaks down. So why wait for the car crash? Why don't we cultivate empathy now? Is empathy so difficult for us? Is it something that means that I won't be able to stay in my quiet place? Does kindness and compassion entail social engagements and getting emotionally involved and tangled up and getting overwhelmed again when I want to be quiet? Is it possible to cultivate empathy in a quiet way, and work with that boundary between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’.

It is just this boundary that is so marked with mistrust, fear of being hurt, fear of causing offence. It's an awkward edge — but it'll remain marked by ignorance if we don't cultivate full awareness right there. But if we do, our boundaries could be maintained from a mutual understanding and appreciation of shared needs. So it's not that we shouldn't withdraw, have privacy and solitude, but not to have to retract in that 'bolting rabbit' fashion. 'Out here' doesn't have to be Desolation Row.

The brahmavihara help us to deal with the apparent realm of the world 'out there', the manifestation of psychological residues that are challenging for 'me in here.' The more you sieve through some of the topics that spark off the sense of fear or mistrust or aloneness or irritation - you realise they're not all that bad on the sentient level. Why does one get so angry about having to wait fifteen minutes for some food? Why did I get so resentful about your talking to this person and not talking to me? Maybe it's because we are carrying a lot of latent ill-will and desolation already, in a heart that's so cramped that it has to project it as 'out there.' So when we're in a pretty safe place — a pretty virtuous, comfortable, benevolent place — and yet experiencing hell, the thing to check is: how much of that is coming from our own minds? Maybe there are levels of affliction and confusion that we haven't really acknowledged. We're looking at people and events through the lens of residues of being abused, or neglected by other humans who weren't cultivating brahmavihara. But right now we can develop the empathy and compassion towards ourselves and others in order to clean out these residues. Maybe that will be a Refuge.

Through past afflictions, we learn to defend and we learn to assert control. Control and defence become basic patterns that we resort to in the uncertainty and wobbliness of life. You can see this in meditation retreats. People get violently upset about someone breaking the silence or dogmatic about details of etiquette and ritual or even domestic duties: 'someone didn't clean the tea-towels properly. I've said this three times. I'm a patient person, but the tea-towels are supposed to be cleaned property!’ Why do these things get so intense for us? I've heard things like this in my own mind: it's awful to have so much rage over little things, so much anxiety over seemingly little things - but they trigger patterns of losing control, and suddenly things flare up.

This is the story of religious life, isn't it? People who certainly started out with an inclination towards brightness, love, God, the divine, the abundant, whatever it is. You end up snarling at some other monk over the fact that he got a banana and you didn't! It's always been that way: there were ferocious schisms in the Buddha's own day. These brahmavihara are obviously not very easy things to cultivate! Maybe we don't think it's that important, or we think it's secondary - or even maybe a bit of a distraction - the main point being is get out of this to Nibbana! But just consider how many hindrances to the practice occur through feelings of resentment, lack of worth, anxiety, defensiveness and tension. You have to clear these. I don't know whether that's Nibbana or not, but it's certainly suffering and a cessation of it, and I'm interested in that.

So when you start to come out of the silent centre of meditation, and open your eyes and ears, there's the sense of what happens around your centre. When you're moving around in walking meditation, there's the sense of being in something else. You're with something other. It's not actually a physical sense: it's the consciousness that is carrying potentials and possibles. How are you with that? This is part of our make-up, it affects us, so we have to come to terms with it and purify it. If we close off from it, all we really see it as is the colour of our door. Although we can see shapes and hear sounds, on the heart level we discern them through a tint of uncertainty, need, mistrust etc. And it's to clear this tint that we practise the brahmavihara.

This practice is not about losing ourselves in the external realm, or getting sentimentally attached to it, but about coming to the place where we sense the meaning of it, sense the feeling of it. Whether you do this consciously or don't do it consciously, it still happens. It will touch you. The world and the mind are spring-loaded for it. The moment will come when somebody drops a pot next to you, or when someone turns up late, or looks at you in a strange way, or says nothing... and you get the ripple from that. So can we clearly acknowledge these anxieties — maybe I'll be left out, maybe I'll be disregarded. The topics are endless, aren't they? Endless and personal, so we get caught in them. But whatever the topics are, underneath them are the universal senses of irritation, of fear of being blamed, the sense of rejection and grief…Why does it have to be so hard to be here?

Fear and rage are very basic because they're embodied senses. We all have them just from having been born in a physical body. The body reacts to protect us; it goes into fear, it retracts; it does that automatically. It has to jump when it's startled, otherwise it doesn't survive. Fear is not some kind of personality disorder. Then sometimes there's that twitch of rage, which is the defence reflex that causes the whole body to flood with as much power as it can. Bodies have to do that. However for human beings it gets much more complex, because the same mechanism gets triggered by all kinds of things. It's no longer triggered by tigers jumping at us, but it's triggered by people looking at us in a disapproving way. Or by a raised tone of voice; or even by how we imagine other people sense us. We have a thinking mind and a heart that stores perceptions of friendship and threat and so forth; so that you can be living in a state of mild panic all the time. And the whole thing can get triggered into red-alert over your role or responsibilities or gender. You'll feel slightly intimidated or guilty and find yourself doing or saying the things, or presenting yourself in a way that will ward off the punishment that you sense is waiting for you. Isn't this pitiful? Isn't this something that gives rise to compassion and a sense of urgency?

Kindness and compassion — there are two scenarios in which to practise these. One is when the events occur (but actually it's probably a bit late by then); the other is when you investigate and practise with what you sense with being here and occupying a shared space. So just go to the sense of being here, being an object to others — even before anything happens. Open your eyes and be present with no particular aim. Feel how that is in the body. The mind might not be thinking very much, but if you have developed bodily awareness, you can sense effects that the mind might be screening; a slight tightening in the shoulders, a slight frozen, locked-up feeling in the chest or the abdomen. So do you feel really well now? Do you feel really happy being in a space with other people around? Or do you feel it would be nice just to get out and be on your own, or doing something? Feel how the body senses that dis-ease: a non-specific sense of irritation, restlessness or a nervousness. Or the sadness or resignation that evolves from having to contain and cope with a long-term low-potency fear and rage.

Sadness is human. Reptiles seem to act in fear and rage; they don't seem to get a lot of grief going. Humans have a sense of that, because grief is the sense of alienation. 'I'm not in a place that's warm, friendly. But nobody cares. Oh, well, I'll just put up with it. Life's like that.' This is resignation. So we accept in a resigned way, and feel that this is equanimity— but it's actually numb grief. And when we go forth for the ending of sorrow and grief, it doesn't mean burying them in resignation and indifference towards ourselves and others. It means exposing and clearing them.

Now we don't really want to feel all this stuff because it's chronic, it's normal and there seems to be nothing we can do about it. It might seem irrelevant - so just get a cat instead! We can stroke the cat, and that's fine: something's warm and friendly and fluffy and doesn't mind being touched. Or we can go out for a walk, and get some free space. All these things can be useful as a substitute - but what are we substituting for? What is the cause of the 'manageable' tension and numbness that I'm relaxing from? What is the difficulty I'm relaxing from? Wouldn't it be good to not have that difficulty?

Now these difficulties affect the sense of 'my self’ and the 'other, out there.' So the theme of the brahmavihara is to be able to gradually move through the whole field of perceptions, starting perhaps with just this very sense of what's closest, what's touching us right now. 'May I be well.' 'May I not have to be perfect, but be free from beating myself up.' 'May I not be carrying blame and criticism towards myself.' 'May I acknowledge my goodness and rejoice in it: my virtues, the precepts I keep, the renunciation I've done, the commitments I've made. May I acknowledge those and rejoice.' 'May I be able to bear with kamma as kamma, rather than as my self.' These are daily reflections. And then coming into the bodily sense, where is the tension in the body?

When I begin a meditation sitting, I often imagine or visualise sitting within a pool of light, something that is gently pleasant and holding. Or I might imagine sitting in sunshine, because I enjoy doing that. So I bring that image, that mood into the mind and spread it into the body. In walking meditation, I might walk along as if I were wading a step at a time through that warm light so that the body feels relaxed. Or I might imagine sitting with the Buddha as a father, mother, or friend - to be right there in the presence of someone who's saying 'You're all right with me. Whatever you are, I accept it.' Of course all this might sound a bit crass when I put it in words, but I'm suggesting ways of evoking a mood, because it's important to find your own space where you don't have to be that good, or happy or vigorous or punctual or neat. You have to place the body in a sense that says, 'you're welcome to be here.'

Now the bodily sense, I think, is very important. When we cultivate mindfulness of the body we sense how the body is affected by psychological/emotional experiences - as in the tension around rage and fear, or the relaxation with friendship. We can, in body meditation, give rise to the easeful affects through our mental cultivation - through imagining, for example, being in that which is pleasant, buoyant, uplifting. And this can help to free up residual tension, or the numb, shut-down bodily sense that many people are left with after years of coping with rage, fear and grief. This affective damage isn't total but we may experience it at particular times - such as with strangers - or in particular parts of the body — such as the area around the eyes or the throat, or the upper chest. It may not seem remarkable. But in meditation on the body, you can sense the dis-ease that the body carries. And then, noticing that your chest feels quite closed, you practise slowly sweeping awareness through the whole body, through these places...with the suggestion: 'what would it be like if it were pleasant, okay, safe right here?' Around your chest or throat or diaphragm, for example, imagine being willing to receive whatever impression is there, and then being willing to respond. This is a way into the brahmavihara. It's not about doing something to make things better. It's not about feeling wonderful. It's the willingness to apply empathy whenever, wherever. Then what's it like to not have to prove something, defend yourself, succeed at something? Aren't you more fluent, capable and present? Isn't that a move in the right direction?

A sense of empathy and compassion is more than something that we should have in order to be proper responsible Buddhists: this brahmavihara sense just feels good and true. Our systems are more capable and enjoyable when this potential is available. But to come out of cramped limits on our empathy, we have to first acknowledge them. And my suggestion is to go to the bodily counterpart of the cramped sense and work from there. The mind tends to add blame and shame, or ignore its own limitations; the process is less reactive, and less deniable, in the body.

‘To others as to myself’: can we invite others into the presence of the brahmavihara? Sometimes it doesn't seem relevant, or useful or necessary...or that they'd notice anyway: such is the lens of separation, personal insignificance and resignation through which we gaze. So it's important to peel off these layers from our hearts: really is there anyone who would not appreciate being regarded with kindness and empathy? How could I imagine that 'there's no point?' And regarding others this way is always going to do me some good! So we work 'internally’— in our own minds — and 'externally' in terms of conscious action and speech that is based on sharing and respect and tolerance and friendliness. Especially in hearing people talk, try to hear beneath the topic, the dismissed remark, the stresses, the places where the pauses occur and there's a reaching out for response — what is needed? And what arises in your own heart when others talk? The character assessments, the inferences about hidden motives, the waning of attention, and finally the 'oh here he goes again' of resigned indifference. Wouldn't it be better to say something rather than perpetuate this hell of disconnection? Just to say what is happening for you; just to ask for an opportunity to question or clarify.... Otherwise our patterns just go on and there's not much use in being with others. And that in the end is what it feels like: 'I'm all right on my own, playing with my toys in my room.'

But we could be a blessing for each other. We could help our blind spots to learn how to see, we could welcome our numb patches back to life. And if I practise this towards myself, I am pragmatically learning empathy rather than ideologically demanding that you or I should be more compassionate and loving, and joyful and serene and so on.... So in our own "inner” world: 'the cramped heart feels like this.' Welcome it, take it into your embodied presence. Then maybe we'll be able to see each other with a little less fear that: 'someone's going to dump their stuff on me.' Or react with irritation or despair if I say I don't understand where they're at right now. And the uncramped heart feels like this: 'it's good to be here.' Not that we can make that into a person, but rather, 'the afflictions are not present right now, may we all enjoy and benefit from this.'

To others as to myself: may we empathise with our wish for well-being, for freedom from hostility, for appreciation and enjoyment, to accept and to be accepted. This is the standard for the human realm.

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