Lovingkindness Paramita
Photo by Kameron Kincade
Lovingkindness, one of the Four Imeasurables, is also the ninth of the ten paramis or paramitas (perfections). In this talk Zuisei speaks of the hunger we all have for love and warmth, for the touch, the regard, of another human being. We are hungry to belong and to know ourselves as part of a whole. Lovingkindness for ourselves can teach us that we have never been apart, never been broken. That is why we’re able to offer immeasurable love to ourselves and others.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
Lovingkindness Paramita
Let me begin by restating the fundamental condition for the development of the Paramitas, which I mentioned earlier in one of the Paramita talks. Maybe it was even in the first one. And this fundamental condition is great aspiration.
Crossed, I would cross.
Freed, I would free.
Tamed, I would tame.
Calmed, I would calm.
Comforted, I would comfort.
Attained to nirvana, I would lead to nirvana.
Purified, I would purify.
Enlightened, I would enlighten.
I would enlighten.
This is the condition for all the Paramitas without exception. So, in other words, it is impossible to practice the Paramitas, the virtues of an enlightened being, for one's own benefit only. Given that they rest on the realization, on the clear seeing, clear understanding of no difference between me and you, no separation, the moment we are freed, we would have to, we would have to free others. Because we know that without freeing others, I cannot be free myself. It's impossible.
But the thing is, we think we can. I think we sometimes think we can go about the business of enlightenment in isolation. And we hear that in order to practice, we need a space, a place, a room of one's own. We need to retreat, we need to seclude ourselves. We have to be free of family, work, responsibilities. And of course, to some extent, this is true. But in order to fully, to really realize ourselves, we have to, we have to bring others with us. Actually, I mean, we're not even bringing them. They are there. We need to not ignore them. We need to not leave them behind. And certainly not to pit ourselves against them.
So, in a moment of disregard or judgment, of resentment towards another, you know, those moments, they are deceptive because they feel powerful. You know, in the moment of putting you down, elevating myself up, that's what it feels. It feels empowering. It feels like I am higher in that moment. And in my mind, that's what it looks like. Perhaps that is what it feels like. But is that what's really happening?
In the moment of setting myself apart, who am I hurting, really? In the moment of drawing a line between me and you, what is my actual experience? What do I really feel? And the power of practice is that the longer we do it, the harder it is to go on as before. In the beginning, it just feels awkward, what we've always done, maybe a bit disagreeable. But then we continue. We continue to practice, and it just feels uncomfortable, with time increasingly confining. And if we're paying attention, at a certain point, it becomes unbearable.
And I think it is our incredible capacity to tolerate discomfort, to tolerate suffering, that in these moments can become our saving grace or our Achilles heel, because we can, in fact, stay for a long time in unbearable, if we're not close, if we're not close. So if we've learned to dissociate, to distance ourselves, even in small ways, if we've learned to cover things up, then we can tolerate a good amount of pain before we really decide or really feel compelled to change.
But if we have great aspiration, I mean, if we really want to be free, then we can direct our actions, our thoughts, our words. So we're not waiting for this to happen somehow with practice. We can turn, we can direct our thoughts, especially every morning, we can wake up and have our first thought be, "May I awaken to supreme perfect enlightenment, and may I bring well-being and happiness to all beings." And we don't need to be shy about this or cautious. This is one place not to be cautious. Why not hold this great aspiration?
Having been born human, this fulfillment, the fulfillment of this great aspiration is within our reach. Do we know that? Do we believe that? Does it matter from the perspective of perfect complete enlightenment? No. From our perspective, it matters, as long as we have a perspective. So drop the perspective. Keep the aspiration. May I awaken to supreme perfect enlightenment. May I bring well-being and happiness to all beings.
What We Really Need
There are four factors that serve as the basis for awakening, and they're called the grounds of Buddhahood. And they are zeal, skillfulness, stability, and beneficent conduct. And zeal means having energy in our striving, exerting effort, enthusiasm, having enthusiasm for practice. And skillfulness is wisdom, is knowing how to skillfully practice, how to skillfully relate to one another and to ourselves. Stability is having unshakable determination. You vow to not be stopped. And beneficent conduct is developing loving-kindness and compassion. And loving-kindness is the ninth of the Paramitas, just before equanimity.
And loving-kindness is the recognition that you cannot do this alone, nobody can. That without others, we cannot practice the Paramitas, we cannot cultivate wisdom, and we certainly cannot practice compassion. These beings, says the Kariya Pitaka, the commentary on the Paramitas, are for me a supreme field of merit, the incomparable basis for planting wholesome roots, the ultimate object of reverence. These beings, all beings, are the supreme field of merit, the ultimate object of reverence.
Imagine for a moment a presidential debate when this was the abiding principle, now that you would be rated according to your actual ability to run the country, and according to your respect, your reverence for all the other players on the field, because without them, you wouldn't be there. You wouldn't be where you are. And I think of this often, without you, I wouldn't have the life that I have. Without my partner, my teacher, the monastics, without whom this place would not be here for us to practice the way that it is now. I don't take this for granted.
This is what should be done by one who is skilled in goodness and who knows the path of peace. Let them be able and upright, straightforward and gentle in speech, humble and not conceited, contented and easily satisfied, peaceful and calm and wise and skillful, not proud or demanding in nature. This is the beginning of the Karniyameta Sutta, the Sutra on loving-kindness. So this is the Buddha speaking. The Buddha is saying, this is what is needed on this path. This is what is needed for one who is skilled in goodness, who wants to walk the path of peace, and who knows this path intimately. These are all the beings skilled in goodness, acquainted with goodness, desirous of goodness.
And you would think that that would be all of us, and maybe it is. Maybe it is all of us, but we get confused. We become afraid. We think we lack. We think we're not. We think we're missing. And in our longing, we get mixed up. It seems to me that our three basic needs for food and security and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.
We communicate loud and clear how we feel about one another, and whether we like it or not, we are spreading it far and wide.
So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it, and the hunger for it, and then the warmth and the richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied, and it is all one. I tell about myself and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it, that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.
There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer when people ask me, why do you write about hunger and not wars or love? This is M. F. K. Fisher. We long for nourishment and security and love, those basic desires that Gokhan spoke about earlier in the week. And she's saying, in one way, that they are all one, which is true, but they're also not.
And that's how we use food to assuage our loneliness, for example, which doesn't work. And so we eat more and perpetuate the cycle, constantly dissatisfied. And the more mixed these desires are, the faster they recede from us, and the more afraid we become, and the tighter we hold on, and the harder it is for us to see that we already have everything that we need. But if this is true, why is it not our experience most of the time?
Gokhan asked a similar question, and this is a good question, a necessary question. If I'm already perfect and complete, lacking nothing, why do I feel so not right? Not enough, not satisfied. I'm Vanessa Zuisei. Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was a food and travel writer. And she wrote, you know, How to Cook a Wolf, Gastronomical Me, The Art of Eating, a bunch of books, more than twenty books.
And that excerpt is from The Art of Eating. And as she says herself, she's writing about more than one kind of hunger. She says, "So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it, and then the warmth and the richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied. And it is all one." That hunger for love and warmth, for the touch, for the regard of another human being, the hunger to belong, to know oneself as part of a whole, to know oneself alive and growing and basically good, basically decent.
These are the more insistent hungers, the hungers that we cannot ignore. We cannot suppress. We cannot subsume, not with food or sex or money or information. They are the hungers that must be satisfied, which really come down to one hunger, which is the need to know who I really am, how I am, what I am. Because if we know this, everything else falls into place.
When the Basics Matter Most
Then I was writing this, and I remembered, you know, there are certain hungers, simpler hungers, that can be satisfied, just the right thing at the right time. I was in, when I was in college, I went to Haiti. My roommate was from Haiti, so we went there together. And we spent about a month there.
And halfway through the trip, we decided she wanted us to go see her grandparents, grandparents who lived on the mountain, really on the other side of the island. And so we decided that we would take the trip. And so we went to her aunt and uncle's house the night before, and we stayed there with them. They served an incredible meal, if I remember correctly. And for dessert, we had homemade ice cream, which was pure bliss, that I didn't know would turn into pure wretchedness by the next morning.
So I woke up, and I didn't quite feel right, but I'm in Haiti, so I thought this is okay. And we piled into this tiny little car, her uncle and this madman of a driver. I mean, we have a word. In Mexico, drivers are pretty bad. We have a word in Spanish, nefasto. Nefasto, which is execrable, appalling. He was really bad. And he's talking the whole time. He's not even looking at the road. The whole time he's turned, looking at my roommate's uncle, just with a steady stream of Creole. And I could pick a word here and there because there was a word of Spanish, a word of French, but most of it I didn't understand.
And I'm in the back with my roommate, and pretty quickly I realized I have food poisoning. And so I spend the next four hours, probably the worst four hours of my life, until the next four hours, which then became the worst four hours of my life, just focusing every ounce of my energy, and this was before practice, every ounce of my energy, on holding onto my insides. And I was embarrassed. I was too embarrassed to ask them to stop. I mean, you know, I had never seen them before until one guy that morning and her uncle just the night before.
And even if I had wanted to ask them to stop, you know, it's the typical countryside, you know, that I grew up with. There's a mountain on one side and there's a cliff on the other. And there's no shoulder or anything. And, you know, we're passing. It's a two-lane highway, and we're passing trucks and donkeys and jalopies on every curve. And I'm dying. But I held it. I was too proud, so I held it right until the moment we arrived, and then I didn't. And I really didn't. You know, I started throwing up, and of course then I got diarrhea to round things up.
And we're staying in this little bungalow. And, you know, I'm with people I don't really know who speak a language I don't understand, trying to get to a bathroom that I can't see because it's pitch black. Because in Haiti, at the time, I don't know if they still do, they would turn off the electricity at 8 o'clock at night. And so that was hell. That was absolute hell. And it was probably not for hours, it was probably an hour or so. And then a doctor finally shows up and gives me this tiny little white pill, and everything stopped. And, you know, it was probably just, just Emodium. For me, it was like the elixir of life. And I was so happy and I was so relieved and so grateful, I asked the doctor to marry me. Fortunately, he didn't understand.
So the right thing at the right time, at just the right time, might be enough to satisfy you. I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits. And it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness. And these really are the needs that are not so easily satisfied. As I said, you know, they're not satisfied in a hurry, and they don't really admit substitutions.
And the Buddha said, I teach about suffering and the end of suffering. That's it. Thousands probably, upon thousands of sutras and commentaries that all come down to this, the truth of suffering and its cessation. Understanding this, realizing this, we experience the warmth and the richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied. Not otherwise. Not for long, at least. And so, turning our minds towards the path, we resolve to do what is necessary. To do what is necessary to free ourselves and to free others from suffering.
Choosing Kindness Over Anger
We do vow to awaken and to bring well-being to all beings. Well-being and happiness. Because loving-kindness really is the foundation of compassion. And it says that compassion is the first of all the qualities issuing in Buddhahood. It is their footing, foundation, the root, head, and chief. That is why you can't realize yourself and ignore others. You can't keep them at a distance. We can't say yes to wisdom and clarity and samadhi and bliss, but compassion, loving-kindness, not so much.
And the Karniya Metta Sutta says exactly how to practice loving-kindness: wishing in gladness and in safety may all beings be at ease. It's actually so incredibly simple that it seems it can't possibly be this. And in one way it isn't. I mean, it's not enough to just wish beings to be at ease. One of the commentaries says, first you wish them that ease, and then you do something about it. You actually make that be so for them. But the beginning really is that thought, holding in my mind the thought, I want, I wish that all beings be at ease. Weak or strong, short or small, the seen and the unseen. All of them.
So all the beings that we love, all the beings that we can't stand, especially the beings we can't stand. The beings we delight in, and the many, many beings that we never even see. We practice very carefully, very conscientiously, not deceiving one another, not despising one another, and not wishing each other harm. So we don't direct our anger, our ill will, our blame toward another. In walking the path of peace, knowing the path of peace, we are peace ourselves. We do not torment ourselves, and we do not torment others. I really like that. That's in that commentary to this treatise.
You know, a bodhisattva, it says, becomes their own protector, right? So we're not excluded. They become their own protector and the protector of others. They become a sage and a hero. But this is heroism born of a deep humility, really, based on a thorough understanding of just my perfect ordinariness and my perfect identity with all beings, and my complete reliance on them.
And so, you know, these books, these self-help books, we get all these catalogs at DC, and there's a bunch of them now, choosing me before we, madly in love with me. And, you know, I understand. I understand they arise out of a need or a perceived need, because so many of us don't feel worthy of love. So I understand. But, you know, when you get to the heart of it, you know, when you really see how it is, you know, there is no me before we. There is no before or after, worthy or unworthy. But then, of course, the question is, how is it then? And most importantly, how is it for you now?
Loving-kindness is the recognition that you cannot do this alone, nobody can.
So with a boundless heart, should one cherish all living beings, radiating kindness over the entire world, spreading upwards to the skies and downwards to the depths, outwards and unbounded, freed from hatred and ill will. And we're always radiating something. And we communicate loud and clear how we feel about one another, and whether we like it or not, we are spreading it far and wide. And so if what we communicate is fear or anger or mistrust, that is what we are helping to sow. That is what we are giving our power to. That is what we are saying deserves my time and attention in that moment.
I remember distinctly the moment when I began to feel that maybe, maybe I wasn't really entitled to my anger, and that maybe it wasn't just as compelling and as interesting as I found it to be, but it would still come up. And so that would be that moment of anger, and I would be kind of stuck. Part of me wanted to feed it because it felt powerful. And in a real way, it felt good. And I wanted others to know that I was angry. I mean, if I'm displeased, they should know it. And starting to feel for the first time, you know what, it's not worth it. And no longer is it not worth it. I just don't want to put my energy on this anymore. I don't want to keep pretending like I'm the center of the universe. I don't need to.
But the anger was still there. So in the beginning, I just ran more. But after a while, you know, even that energy faded, because I would see the impulse. And then that, because, you know, when you're paying attention, it's actually you really, if there's time, if you can slow it down enough, there is that moment when you see the feeling arise, or you feel it very much in your body. And on occasion, I would have time to say, Oh, no, it's you again. No, it was getting harder and harder to take it seriously. I mean, at a certain point, it was kind of embarrassing. You know, there's all this energy. And I'm just like, this is really embarrassing. I don't want to go here anymore.
And so I wouldn't, gradually, very gradually, sometimes. You know, you become more skilled at asking yourself in a moment of passion, will this lead to suffering or to its cessation? And the answer is usually quite clear. And the Buddha says, Don't do anything that the wise would later reprove. Don't do anything that you would reprove. Don't do anything that you will later regret. Because you can't take it back. Even when we say, I take it back, you can't. It's already out there.
So why not instead, from the beginning, cherish all beings? Why not from the beginning put my attention on that which I really want to put my attention on? And have what I radiate be kindness, compassion, love, respect, reverence, gladness, and ease. Peace. And, you know, this place, for lack of a better word, this state, that is free of hatred and ill will, free of impatience, contempt, disappointment, disapproval, for self or other. The Sutra said it is said to be the sublime abiding. It probably harkens back to the four immeasurables, which are said to be the abode of Brahma. It is a sublime abiding, but it's not some other place in some other country happening to a very different person that is not me or you.
And we forget this, but that is why we practice: to remember, to remember this truth. And when we can't remember, or when we're just too caught up, we turn to one another so that we can be reminded once again. Not the least of all, that we are, in fact, worthy. Thank you.
Let me end with this poem by Galway Kinnell, the former poet laureate of Vermont, St. Francis and the Sow. The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don't flower, for everything flowers from within of self-blessing. Though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch, it is lovely until it flowers again from within of self-blessing.
As St. Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow and told her, in words and in touch, blessings of earth on the sow, the sow began remembering all down her thick length from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail. From the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart, to the blue milk and dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths, sucking and blowing beneath them, the long perfect loveliness of the sow.
Lovingkindness Paramita, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Audio podcast and transcript available.
Explore further
01 : Karaniya Metta Sutta
02 :The Art of Eating by M. F. K. Fisher
03 : St. Francis and the Sow by Galway Kinnell