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Brickwall Unlimited

May All Beings Be Happy

Snp 1.8, the Metta Sutta — set 2, The Basic Diagnosis and the Path

Reading time: about 2 min · 267 words

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Before you read

This is one of the most often recited texts in the Buddhist world, usually called the Karaṇīya Metta Sutta after its opening words. It is about friendliness: wishing all beings well, without limit.

It starts with character, not with the wish. Someone who wants to practice this should be capable, honest, easy to speak to, content, and not greedy. Only then come the lines most people know: may all beings be happy at heart, whatever and wherever they are.

The central image is a mother protecting her only child with her life. The text asks you to turn that same care toward all beings, in every direction, whether you are standing, walking, sitting, or lying down.

The numbers beside the verses count the verses within this discourse.

Translation

Verses

1This is what should be done by someone skilled in the good, who has understood the state of peace: let them be able, upright, truly upright, easy to speak to, gentle, and not proud,

2content and easy to support, with few duties and a light way of living, calm in their senses and alert, not brash, and not greedy among families.

3Let them not do even the slightest thing that the wise would criticize them for. May all be happy and secure; may all beings be happy at heart.

4Whatever living beings there are, whether frail or firm, without exception, long or large, middling, short, fine, or coarse,

5seen or unseen, living far away or near, those who have come to be and those still to come: may all beings be happy at heart.

6Let no one deceive another or look down on anyone anywhere. Let no one, out of anger or resentment, wish pain on another.

7As a mother would protect with her life her child, her only child, so toward all beings develop a boundless heart.

8Develop a boundless heart of friendliness toward the whole world, above, below, and all around, unobstructed, without hatred, without enmity.

9Standing or walking, sitting or lying down, as long as you are awake, resolve on this remembering. This, they say, is the divine way of living here.

10Not taking up views, virtuous and accomplished in vision, with greed for sensuality removed, they do not come again to lie in a womb.

The eighth discourse, on friendliness, is finished.

Words used in this translation (5)
friendliness
This project's rendering of "mettā" (often translated "loving-kindness") -- an intentionally cultivated goodwill extended outward, including to people you don't know.
greed
One of the three "roots" behind unwholesome action, alongside aversion and delusion -- the acquisitive pull toward what looks satisfying.
heart
This project's rendering of "citta": the feeling side of mind. It takes on moods, wants, leans, and reacts. Practice can gladden, steady, train, and release it. Some call it the "heart-mind" or "feeling mind". Here "heart" does not mean only emotion, or the physical organ.
remembering
This project's rendering of "sati". It means actively keeping what matters in mind and coming back to it when you lose it. It is not bare attention to whatever happens to be present.
world
A word whose scope shifts with the teaching. It can mean the lived world we build through the senses and the mind, or the wider physical cosmos. The surrounding passage shows which sense it has.
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