Buddhaghosa · Theology
Buddhaghosa’s detailed method for cultivating the four <em>brahmaviharas</em> or divine abidings - loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity - and above all his technique of ‘breaking down the barriers’ so that goodwill extends equally to self, friend, stranger, and enemy alike.
Among the meditation subjects Buddhaghosa maps in the Visuddhimagga, four hold a special place: the brahmaviharas, the ‘divine abidings’ or ‘sublime states.’ They are loving-kindness (metta), the wish for beings to be happy; compassion (karuna), the wish for the suffering to be free of pain; sympathetic joy (mudita), rejoicing in others’ good fortune rather than envying it; and equanimity (upekkha), an even-minded serenity toward all. They are called ‘divine’ because to dwell in them is to live as the gods of the brahma-world are said to live - in boundless, radiant goodwill - and because they are the noblest way a human being can hold their heart toward others. Buddhaghosa treats them not as vague sentiments but as definite mental states to be deliberately cultivated, each with its own object, its own method, and its own way of going wrong. They are, in his hands, a precise training of the heart.
The heart of the method is a deliberate expansion of goodwill through four kinds of person. First oneself; then a dear person, such as a respected teacher or friend; then a neutral person, someone toward whom one feels neither affection nor dislike; and finally a hostile person, an enemy. The meditator develops warm, steady loving-kindness toward each in turn, and does not move on until goodwill toward the present person is as strong and unforced as toward the last. This is genuinely hard work at the later stages. Extending real warmth to a neutral stranger, in whom one has no emotional investment, turns out to be surprisingly effortful; extending it to someone who has wronged you is harder still, and Buddhaghosa supplies a whole armoury of reflections for dissolving the resentment that blocks it. The circle of the heart, naturally drawn tight around the self and its favourites, is patiently widened until it takes in even those outside every ordinary boundary of care.
Once the barriers are broken and goodwill is even toward the four persons, Buddhaghosa has the meditator expand it without limit. The loving-kindness is radiated outward in every direction - to all beings in the east, the west, the north, the south, above, below, and all around - and to beings sorted every way the mind can sort them: all women, all men, all noble ones, all ordinary people, all gods, all humans, all in states of woe. The pervasion becomes total, leaving no being anywhere outside its warmth. This is why the brahmaviharas are also called the appamanna, the ‘immeasurables’: the love has no measure, no edge, no one left out. And because a mind unified in such boundless goodwill is also deeply concentrated, this practice leads into the meditative absorptions (jhana). Love, systematically cultivated, becomes both a moral perfection and a doorway to profound states of calm - the heart’s warmth and the mind’s stillness deepening together.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned the four divine abidings - loving-kindness ( metta ), compassion ( karuna ), sympathetic joy ( mudita ), and equanimity ( upekkha ) - and Buddhaghosa’s method of ‘breaking down the barriers’ between self, friend, neutral, and enemy so that love becomes truly boundless. Explain in your own words.
Leads to Marcus Aurelius.
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