2021-06-09 Mettā Sutta (3 of 5) With No Anger
IInsight Meditation CenterJun 10, 2021 at 1:44 am13min
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00:02Gil Fronsdal
We continue with a series of talks on the mettā sutta, the discourse on loving kindness. I am doing it this week by dividing the text into four parts. This next part is the shortest part of the text.
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00:32Gil Fronsdal
The classic instructions for loving kindness practice are found in a fifth century meditation manual by a teacher named Buddhaghosa. It is a big book called The Path Of Purification. The modern practice of loving kindness, the most common way to practice, comes from this particular book. It is a manual on meditation.
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01:03Gil Fronsdal
The ninth chapter of the book is about the brahmavihārā meditations – the meditations of loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. The longest discussion is about the first one, loving kindness. In the section about loving kindness, most of the section, many pages, has to do with overcoming resentment and anger. One of the biggest obstacles for loving kindness is to have resentment or anger towards someone – then it is hard to have kindness or goodwill towards them. So the section is a treatise or instructions on overcoming anger more than it is teachings on loving kindness.
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01:59Gil Fronsdal
In the mettā sutta, this next part is about that, but it is only four lines. This time, I think I have succeeded in posting this part of the mettā sutta in the YouTube page where it gives a description of what we are doing, underneath the video. If you click on Show More, I think it will show it to you. At the bottom of that is: "Let no one deceive another, or despise anyone, anywhere. Let no one through anger or aversion, wish for others to suffer."
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02:48Gil Fronsdal
Here we have a call to put aside anything that gets in the way of goodwill. This text is not only about loving kindness. It is about the path to liberation, through loving kindness. The path of liberation cannot be found in being angry, despising or having aversion towards anyone – especially if there is a wish for them to suffer – a certain kind of hostility.
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03:18Gil Fronsdal
That feeling, that attitude goes against the grain of liberation. It involves getting unliberated. It involves getting entangled, in bondage, caught, and not free, if we are caught in resentment or anger. It is not necessarily all anger. Rather any anger that involves hostility or ill will towards someone, wishing others to suffer.
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