Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground Up by B. Alan Wallace

Author:B. Alan Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisdom Publications
Published: 2016-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

10

Loving Kindness

The cultivation of loving kindness is ideally suited for the bustling world we live in. It generates a quality of mind that wishes for the well-being of others, and at the same time it profoundly enhances our ability to attain well-being in our own lives. Instead of focusing on a poised state of mental peace, it is a discursive meditation that penetrates deeper into the root causes of our dissatisfactions and transforms them. It offers us a way to understand the distortions of the mind, and a way to defuse these distortions by means of an attitude of loving kindness that springs from the essential purity of our minds.

Loving kindness can be seen as a very potent remedy for the most malignant of the mental distortions: hatred. Having dissolved that, loving kindness is also capable of countering the other distortions as well. Many people believe in the value of anger, arguing that without its forcefulness we are less than fully human. Putting that question aside for the time being, I think we can all agree that hatred is quite another matter. Hatred is simply an expression of malice. Hatred breeds contempt, hostility, resentment, and aggression. And experience has proven that those who become absorbed in hatred eventually inflict tremendous pain and destruction on themselves, as well as on the sentient beings around them.

LOVING KINDNESS TOWARD ONESELF

Loving kindness practice traditionally starts with oneself, and then proceeds, step-by-step, to an attitude of loving kindness toward all sentient beings in the universe.

To develop an attitude of loving kindness, first we must develop a truly loving attitude toward ourselves, compassionately understanding our own desire to be happy and to avoid suffering. As part of that, we must understand the nature of our own ignorance that thwarts this desire for happiness and instead brings suffering. This done, we will have taken an essential first step toward developing loving kindness toward all beings.

To bring this closer to our own lives, let us consider self-contempt. While few of us may actually experience overt self-hatred, it is fairly common for people in our society to struggle with self-contempt, a feeling of impatience and intolerance toward ourselves. For many, this culminates in the feeling that we are not worthy of love from someone else or even from ourselves. Seen in this light, self-contempt is obviously a poor basis for the cultivation of loving kindness.

Let us turn to a fifth-century text, Buddhaghosa's The Path of Purification, that offers us a set of wishes that will help us develop loving kindness toward ourselves:

May I be free of enmity,

May I be free of afflictions.

May I be free of anxiety,

And may I live happily.18

The first, “May I be free of enmity,” is a wish that we may develop friendliness devoid of animosity. In the second wish, “May I be free of afflictions,” we can understand afflictions as referring to both physical pain and mental distress, sadness, grief, and discontent. We may also look more deeply to the very source of all distress,

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