Brahma Viharas - Karuna (Compassion)

This is a talk given by Lloyd to the Insight Community of Denver, Colorado on one of the Brahma Viharas - Metta (loving kindness).

Transcript

This evening we're looking at the second of the four Brahma-vajāras that the Buddha taught about.

In fact,

This is one of the four major practices in Theravada Buddhism,

You know,

Anapā,

Mindfulness of the breathing,

Insight meditation,

Vipassana,

And metta,

Or the Brahma-vajāra practices,

And the jānas,

Or meditative absorptions.

So,

I'd like to speak a little bit this evening about how the Brahma-vajāras got their name,

And why we call them what we do.

They're also referred to as the four immeasurables,

Or the divine abodes.

And it goes back to an encounter that the Buddha had with a young Brahmin student named Subha,

S-U-B-H-A,

And the story is drawn from the Subhas Gūta,

Which is number 99 in the Majjhima Nikāya.

At the time of the Buddha,

The dominant kind of religious tradition in India at the time was Brahminism and Buddhism,

And it was pretty tied up with the caste system.

And so,

There were these relatively hierarchical castes at the time in India,

And the top caste were the Brahmins,

Were the priests.

They were responsible for the spiritual well-being of their communities and for society in general.

And the tradition of Brahminism or Hinduism is theism.

And like other theistic religions,

Like our understandings of how things work,

Right,

The goal of the individual person is,

Over time,

Through practice and earnest commitment to the teachings of whatever that tradition is,

To attain union or one with the Godhead,

To bring Jesus into your heart to experience the kṛṇadī,

Or different traditions go at it in different ways.

But in almost all of them,

There is posited an external,

Omnipotent,

Omniscient being with whom or with what one seeks to attain union.

And so it was with,

And is,

With Brahminism.

The way it had gotten mingled with the caste system,

The configuration of the understanding,

If there is Brahman,

You know,

The Godhead,

And then there is ākman,

Which is sort of the individual spark of the divine within each of us,

Right,

This soul is a pretty good approximation.

And in the understanding of Brahminism,

In the practice of reincarnation,

In each incarnation,

In each life,

One seeks to purify oneself,

In order to make it increasingly likely that Brahman and ākman can be one,

Can be unified.

And the way it got mixed up with the caste system at the time,

Is that the Brahmins were teaching,

Well,

You know,

Anyone can have a shot at it,

But the way you really get there is you do your job as you were told to do your job within your caste,

And you obey all the observances and all the practices and do what the priests tell you,

And it might be that you'll be fortunate enough to be reborn in a higher caste,

And then keep it up the next few lifetimes,

And sooner or later maybe you'll get to be a Brahmin.

And of course you have to be a male Brahmin in order to actually be a Jigyani with Brahman,

But at any rate,

That was one of the things that the Buddha really found kind of irksome.

When throughout the,

Yeah,

He really didn't have good feelings about the way the caste system and Brahminism had gotten kind of old and mingled,

Which is why,

In his order,

It was open to anyone from any caste.

Throughout the discourses,

Wherever the Buddha is talking about,

Or the person who is describing the situation in which the Buddha was teaching,

They would say,

Various Brahmins and recluses.

That's how they would normally,

Or oftentimes,

Talk about the spiritual seekers who wanted to try to learn what it was that the Buddha had to offer.

Those are two relatively distinct classes of people.

The Brahmins were the Brahmin priests.

They were the ones born to the Brahmin caste.

They were the ones being trained to be the spiritual leaders of their communities,

Of their society.

Recluses could come from other castes,

And they were the ones who rather than,

You know,

The Brahmanic practices of learning the rituals and the hymns and the chants and the things they were supposed to be telling others would actually sort of go off into the forest.

And they would sit with various teachers and they would learn what they had to offer,

And there was a lot of introspective meditation and whatnot.

And the Buddha was born to the Sakya clan,

Which was a subset of the Kshatriyas,

The ones who were the warrior caste and the government leaders.

His father was a king of a small fiefdom.

And so when he went on the road to undertake spiritual seeking,

He was a Reclus.

He went into the forest and learned what he could from the various holy men who were in his part of India at the time,

The various sort of kind of implements for spiritual toolbox.

When Subha the student,

The young Brahmin,

Comes to visit the Buddha,

He had been asking around when he was in this particular part of our piece in India,

Kind of on the road,

Are there any people around here who seem to have kind of got the hang of it,

You know,

Or people who are understood or recognized to be somewhat spiritually realized?

And everyone said,

Yeah,

You should go hang out with this guy,

Gautama,

You know.

The next couple of minutes says he's really far in LA.

And so he sort of asked around,

And some of the Brahmin,

His Brahmin elders said,

Oh,

This guy's a loser,

He's clueless,

He has no idea what's going on.

And others would say,

Yeah,

He's the real thing.

You should really go spend time with him.

And so when Subha meets the Buddha,

He says,

Even though you are not a Brahmin,

I have heard that you actually have attained the ability that all Brahmin strive for,

Which is to actually follow the path to union with Brahman,

To visit with Brahman,

To reside in the abodes of Brahman.

This sort of thing was only thought in his tradition to be accessible to very senior,

Very realized Brahmans.

And the Buddha said,

Yes,

This is certain.

Even though he had extraordinarily mixed feelings about how Brahmanism was being practiced,

He was trying to use any idiom or language that Subha would understand.

And so he said,

Yes,

These people who say so are correct.

And he said,

Yeah,

But some of the Brahmans say that recluses don't have a clue because they don't know all the chants and they don't know all the rituals and they don't know all the hymns and they haven't done the proper propitiation,

The kinds of things that are basically only available to a Brahmin,

And therefore it's impossible for anyone who is not a Brahmin to actually be realized.

So then the Buddha asked,

Well,

Okay,

Among all the Brahmin elders that you know,

Are there any,

First off,

He said,

Well,

What are they teaching you anyway?

What are some of the virtues or tenets of your religion that you're told to practice?

And he said,

Well,

There's truth telling and there's generosity and there's renunciation and kindness.

And the Buddha said,

These all seem very skillful,

Very useful,

What he called tools for mental development.

And he said,

And who among all the Brahmin priesthood do you know who has used these rituals or cultivated or attained these states of mind to the point where they are in fact on occasion one with Brahman?

And Subha thought about it and he said,

None of them have a clue.

He said they talk the talk but they don't seem to know how to walk the walk.

They've really got the chance down and the hymns down and their rituals down and the alms collecting down.

And he said,

That's all great,

But he said,

I see very little in the way of fruition to tell you the truth,

Which is why I'm hanging out with you because you and your people seem to be much closer to what it is that's espoused in my tradition,

Even though you're not part of my tradition.

And so I want to know how you did it,

How you got there.

And so what the Buddha said in response was actually a pretty close parallel to what Jesus of Nazareth said when he was asked a similar question,

Which he said,

You know,

When there were these different teachings and different sects and whatnot,

He said,

How do we know who is righteous?

And he said,

By the fruits of their labors you'll know them.

And the Buddha was saying the same thing.

It doesn't matter what the teaching is.

There are a lot of teachings out there,

They're pretty virtuous,

But when you can judge for yourself what you consider to be the authentic teaching or the right path,

The way you'll know that it's the right path is the effect that it has on the people who follow it.

And then he explained to Subha the reason that it seems to you or feels to you like I and my followers have in fact found out how to be one with Brahma,

And here he is,

You know,

Basically again using Subha's language to explain something that's not really within the Brahmanic tradition.

He said the attainment of oneness with Brahma,

Of being able to be in the abode of Brahma,

To reside with Brahma,

That is not something that occurs outside of yourself.

He said the abodes of Brahma,

That houses of Brahma,

The place where Brahma resides is within your very own heart-mind.

There are these spaces within your consciousness that are there waiting to be cultivated,

Waiting to be opened up and dusted off and furnished.

And he said they are these four abodes,

These four kind of sheltered spaces,

These four refuges within your own mind that when you find out where they are and you find out how to cultivate them,

You can go to those places anytime you want to.

One of them is the abode of metta or loving kindness.

And when we were doing the Harini Ameta Sutta last time we were together,

He was saying,

You know,

Using this sutta,

Using the images that are in this teaching are a way to cultivate the open heartedness,

The loving kindness,

That in fact is one of the Brahma baharis,

Bahar means house or home or abode,

Holy space.

So the cultivation of loving kindness comes from,

You know,

May I be happy,

May I be peaceful,

May I be free,

Let no one deceive another.

As a mother watches over her child willing to risk her own life to protect her only child,

So too with a boundless heart may we cherish all living beings,

Suffusing all living beings,

Suffusing the whole world with unobstructed loving kindness.

So what he's saying is it's not me,

So will me alone as singly by myself going to be with Brahma.

It is me opening the heart-mind to the point where that kind of selfless union with all beings becomes possible.

So we can think about compassion or karuna,

Which is the Pali and Sanskrit word for compassion,

Literally means quivering of the heart,

You know,

Like if you pluck a string on a heart,

Then sometimes the harmonic string up and down the scale will quiver as well.

It's like that,

It's like being with the heart of another,

You know,

In a quivering state.

So what he's saying is that when you're in that state of mind,

Essentially the self has disappeared.

We can think of compassion as a selfless,

Open-hearted,

Caring response to suffering,

Whether it's your own suffering or that of another,

You know,

An open-hearted,

Selfless,

Caring response to suffering.

And that moderate bodhisattva,

Albert Einstein,

Described it this way,

I don't know whether he ever read the Dharma book,

But just based on his own vision,

He said,

A human being is part of the whole,

Called by us universe,

A part limited in time and space.

We experience ourselves,

Our thoughts and feelings,

As something separate from the rest,

A kind of optical delusion of consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prism for us,

Restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prism by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

So,

A little bit of that flavor,

You know,

And that's why another of the names or words for the Divine Bidings is for immeasurables,

And by that.

.

.

Reviews

An enlightening sharing and thank you for bringing in the massacre in my home state. Namaste🙏

Fantastic 🙏🏼💛✨

Wonderful 🙏. The presenters description gave me a new and better understanding to this practice

What a great listen. Thank you.

Absolutely fascinating. Will seek out more from this speaker. Thank you