Metta as Restraint

We start the day with thoughts of goodwill, wishing for the happiness of ourselves and all beings. The Buddha calls this an unlimited attitude. But he also calls it a form of restraint. In other words, you keep careful watch over how you’re going to look for your happiness. You want to make sure it doesn’t harm anybody else, and you want to make sure it doesn’t harm you. So restraint, here, goes both ways.

One is restraint as to what goes out of you in terms of your thoughts, words, and deeds—what you say to other people, what you do to them. You want to have some restraint there so that you don’t harm them.

That’s why we have the precepts. They’re an expression of goodwill, not only for other people, but also for ourselves. If we break the precepts, we’re going to create some bad karma for ourselves. So whatever pleasures we might get in breaking them are not going to last. The long-term consequences are going to be bad.

Even more so when we think about the other direction where we have to show restraint: taking things in from outside. When you’re looking at something, listening to something, ask yourself why are you looking, why are you listening? What do you expect to happen? Most of the time our looking and listening and our engagement with all the other senses is pretty random. Whatever mood strikes the mind: You look here; you listen there.

The Buddha says you have to be more consistent, more thoughtful. When you look at certain things in certain ways, does it provoke lust? Does it provoke anger? Does it provoke greed? Jealousy? If so, why are you looking in that way? You’re creating trouble for yourself. You want to make sure that when you look, wisdom is looking and not your greed—wisdom is listening and not your anger.

It’s not the case that things come in and then the mind responds. All too often we’re out there looking for trouble. So you have to remind yourself that if you’re casual and careless in the way you use your senses as you go through the day, it’s going to be difficult to get the mind to settle down when you try to meditate. Whatever development you get in the meditation is going to be squandered.

Be very careful how you look, how you listen—and then how you act. That’s how your goodwill can become unlimited because you’re not harming anybody. When you’re harming people, and then you say you have goodwill for them, it doesn’t sound very honest. And when you’re harming yourself, and you say you have goodwill for yourself, how is anybody going to believe you?

So you’ve got to take your goodwill seriously if you want it to be universal. You have to show some restraint. Which means instead of looking for sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations for your happiness, you work on the well-being that can come through staying with the breath, staying with the body.

The Buddha makes this point. He says that mindfulness immersed in the body is like a post. As the animals of your senses get tied to leashes, and the leashes get tied to the post, they don’t have to go anywhere. There’s a crocodile; there’s a monkey; there’s a bird; there’s a hyena; there’s a snake. What else? A dog. They’re going to want to go in different directions. But if they’re tied to a post, there’s no problem. If they’re not tied to a post, which is where our senses normally are, they pull here and pull there, and whoever is strongest is going to pull the rest of the animals in its direction. It’s usually the crocodile. The crocodile pulls everybody down to the river, and they all drown.

You have to ask yourself, who’s the crocodile in your head? Who’s the crocodile in your mind? Make sure, at the very least, that the strongest of those is tied down with a sense of well-being inside the body, so that you don’t feel so much hunger to go out looking for things. After all, that’s why the animals are going out to begin with. They’re hungry. But you can keep the mind well fed, and that way you don’t have to let them do the feeding.

So try to have some order to the way you use your senses. Try to have a sense of mindfulness, alertness, ardency, even here—not just while you’re sitting with your eyes closed or doing walking meditation, but as you go through the day. Make sure you’re restrained in a way that shows goodwill for everybody all around.