When Ill Will Is in Fashion

There are two sides to mettā practice, and it’s good to develop both.

One is mettā in the context of your relations with other people: how you speak to them, how you act with them, and particularly the thoughts that you have toward them. The Buddha lists goodwill as one of the ten types of skillful action—one of the three skillful mental actions: You’re devoid of inordinate greed, you bear no ill will, and your views are straightened out. In other words, you believe in the principle of kamma, the principle of rebirth. These are precepts for the mind as you engage with other people. And remember, with the precepts, the important thing is your intentions. If you break a precept unintentionally, it doesn’t count as broken. It’s usually through greed or ill will or delusion that we break the precepts.

So mettā, in this sense, is a part of the practice of virtue. It’s one of the virtues of the mind. As the Buddha said, if you realize that you’ve harmed other people, you recognize that it was harmful, that what you did was a mistake, you resolve not to repeat it, and then you develop thoughts of goodwill for all beings in all directions.

The purpose being that you want to make sure that you don’t harm others, and you don’t harm yourself with a lot of useless recrimination, you don’t beat yourself up over the past mistakes you’ve made. You recognize them but you don’t wound yourself with them. If you think wounding thoughts about your past mistakes, you tend to block out your memory of past mistakes, and then forget them and repeat them.

So this is your way of keeping that memory alive in a way that’s not painful. And of course, it motivates you to act in ways that are skillful when you’re dealing with other people.

The other side of mettā practice is that it’s a brahmavihāra—a meditation dwelling, a place where the mind dwells in concentration.

You develop thoughts of goodwill for beings in all directions. As the Buddha said, you develop this attitude with directed thought and evaluation, with no directed thought and a modicum of evaluation, with no directed thought and no evaluation, with rapture, without rapture, with enjoyment, with equanimity. In other words, you’re able to get the mind into the different states of jhāna through the practice of goodwill.

The directed thought and evaluation in this case have to do with thinking about events from the day or your relationships with other people in general. Is there anyone out there who you would find it difficult to have thoughts of goodwill for? You can probably think of quite a few people: Some of them would be groups of people; some of them might be people you’ve read about in the news. Others would be people you’ve actually had dealings with in the course of the day. That makes it real. You’ve got to have goodwill in all these cases. This ties these two practices together.

You also think about what it would mean to have goodwill for someone. It doesn’t mean, “May you be happy doing whatever you’re doing.”

Think about it in terms of kamma. If people are going to be happy, they have to create the causes of happiness through their thoughts, their words, and their deeds. So when you’re wishing for them to be happy, you’re basically wishing, “May they be skillful in their thoughts and their words and their deeds.” On the face of it, that should be a thought you can feel toward anyone without hypocrisy.

But then, of course, there may be people you would like to see suffer a little bit first. They’ve done a lot of evil. They’ve generated a lot of ill will. We see this especially now, when ill will seems to be in fashion. The Buddha’s definition for ill will is, “May these beings be killed, may they be destroyed, may they be crushed, may they not exist at all.”

That attitude seems to be in the ascendant. So we have to counteract it with our own thoughts of goodwill so that we don’t pick up those attitudes and we don’t develop those attitudes even toward the people who have them.

In this way, the directed thought and evaluation in the concentration help you to think through areas where you might be tempted to have ill will for somebody. That has a good effect on your actions.

But the performance of goodwill is not just performance with other people. It’s also a performance within your own mind. As you’ve thought through all the difficulties you might have about thinking of this person, that person, and finally come to the conclusion, “Yeah, you don’t want to have ill will for them,” then the mind can settle down with a modicum of evaluation or with no evaluation at all, and no directed thought. Just be there with a feeling of rapture.

Goodwill is a very pleasant feeling to have—the sense that you have no animosity with anybody in the world. There’s no desire to see anybody suffer. That lifts the quality of your heart, makes it more expansive. And this expansive heart is what you’re after. It’s a good place to be, a comfortable place to be.

Again, you want to be here without a sense of hypocrisy. You want to honestly be here with goodwill, which why the practice of goodwill as a brahmavihāra does depend on the practice of goodwill as an aspect of virtue. When you actually live your life in a way where you’re not harming anybody, it’s a lot easier to have thoughts of goodwill in all directions, spread them out with no obstacles at all, with nobody getting in the way—in other words, with none of your defilements getting in the way.

At the same time, when you’re able to dwell in this state, as you get past the directed thought and evaluation, you’re thinking less and less about people, more about just beings in all directions. And then all directions, all directions, all directions, without any reference to people or beings at all. That’s when it does become a brahmavihāra.

This is something you have to develop. Some people say that goodwill is natural to us. All we have to do is forget about our poor social conditioning, get beyond that, and our natural goodwill will arise. Well, we do have goodwill naturally, but we also have ill will naturally. If ill will were not natural, we wouldn’t pick it up from other people, and we wouldn’t be seeing as it’s so rampant around us.

This is why the Buddha calls it a brahmavihāra and not a manussavihāra. Manussavihāra means a human dwelling. As a human dwelling, goodwill would be partial. As a brahmavihāra, it’s universal, immeasurable.

When you have a taste of that, it’s useful in two ways. One, it goes back to the virtue of goodwill. When you’ve had a good session of wishing goodwill to all beings sincerely, then when you come out of it, you find it really difficult to have ill will for specific people. That strengthens your virtue.

But it’s also useful in that the stability of that concentrated state makes it equivalent to the different jhānas.

There’s a passage where a monk comes to see the Buddha and asks him for some meditation advice. The Buddha basically says there are eight topics you can focus on. You’ve got the four establishings of mindfulness: the body in and of itself, feelings, mind states, mental qualities in and of themselves—ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.

Here’s where he says, “you develop this concentration.” Mindfulness here is a concentration practice. This is one of the passages in the Canon that makes that point really explicit. You develop it with directed thought and evaluation, with no directed thought and a modicum of evaluation, with no directed thought and no evaluation, with rapture, without rapture, with enjoyment, with equanimity.

Then you do the same with the brahmavihāras:** You start with goodwill, then on to compassion, empathetic joy, and then equanimity with directed thought and evaluation, with no directed thought and a modicum of evaluation, with no directed thought and no evaluation, with rapture, without rapture, with enjoyment, with equanimity.

These are states that you can use as a basis for insight. Once the mind is clear like this, once it’s settled down like this with a sense of well-being, then it’s a lot easier to see your defilements, not only in your dealings with other people, but also in more subtle areas within the mind.

So these are the two sides of goodwill: goodwill as a virtue, a part of mundane right view in the virtues of the mind; and goodwill as a practice of concentration, as a dwelling for the mind.

They help each other along. They’re both performance arts. As a virtue, you perform well in the world. You don’t create any bad kamma. As a dwelling, it becomes a good place to develop insight. If you don’t develop the insight, it can take you to good rebirths.

You learn how to maintain these attitudes as you approach death. There is that passage, though, where Ven. Sāriputta visits a brahman who’s been a student of his, but who’s been misbehaving. He gets the student to change his attitudes. Then, as the student is dying, Sāriputta takes him up to the Brahma worlds, through the practice of the brahmavihāras. That’s where the student is reborn.

Sāriputta comes back to see the Buddha, and the Buddha chastises him. He says, “There’s more work to be done. You could have taken him further.” But the Brahma worlds are not bad. After all, non-returners are born in the Brahma worlds. That’s what that last passage in the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta is all about: using the brahmavihāras as a basis for overcoming sensuality and to become a non-returner.

So it’s a good practice to develop, a good practice to make part of your performance repertoire. Don’t rest satisfied with it, but don’t look down on it. It’s your nourishment on the path. It’s good inside and good outside.

And as I said, in this world where ill will seems to be in fashion right now, the more people who can develop goodwill and maintain it as their value, the better off we’ll all be.