Metta

About Metta Meditation

Mettā bhāvanā is the systematic cultivation of goodwill, and it is the most structured practice in Buddhist meditation — far more so than its reputation suggests. The Buddha gives the aspiration in ten verses; Buddhaghosa's fifth-century Visuddhimagga supplies the method, and it is unexpectedly technical. There is a prescribed order of recipients, and explicit warnings about getting it wrong: do not begin with someone you find attractive, because desire will impersonate goodwill; do not begin with someone who has died, because the practice will simply stall; do not begin with an enemy, because anger arrives faster than benevolence. The sequence runs from oneself to a respected person, a neutral person, and finally a difficult one, ending in what the text calls breaking down the barriers — the point at which the practitioner can no longer find a difference between the four. Mettā is the first of four brahmavihāras, and the tradition names a specific counterfeit for each. The near enemy of loving-kindness is attachment, which feels identical from the inside and fails in exactly the same places.