A Buddhist Guide to How to Truly Love

Maria Heim: The idea of Buddhaghosa’s chapter here is that as long as we are subject to our anger, as long as we are controlled by it, we are destructive to ourselves. And if you take that seriously and you learn to watch your experience to notice that, you begin to recognize that maybe setting down some of that anger and getting rid of it would be able to make you more free, liberate you from it, something that the text calls the freedom of the loving heart or the freedom of the loving mind. And so that connection between getting rid of anger and then finding freedom in that is really the work of loving-kindness, that to the extent that I can replace some of that anger with a desire for you to flourish, or a desire for you to be happy, I am also at the same time liberating my own experience from the anger that I’m carrying around.

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard Maria Heim. Maria is a professor of religion at Amherst College. Her new book, How to Truly Love: An Ancient Guide to a Life of Kindness, presents a fresh and accessible translation of a chapter from the Path of Purification, a meditation manual by the great 5th-century sage Buddhaghosa. Through a careful exploration of the brahmaviharas, or sublime attitudes, Buddhaghosa offers practical strategies for releasing anger and hatred and finding freedom. In my conversation with Maria, we talk about why from a Buddhist perspective love is considered a kind of attention, how love can help us see clearly and offer a kind of freedom from anger, why meditation requires a foundation in morality, and how attention to the particular can help us cultivate a universal sense of love for all beings. So here’s my conversation with Maria Heim.

James Shaheen: Okay, so I’m here with Maria Heim. Hi Maria. It’s great to be with you again.

Maria Heim: Hi James. It’s good to see you.

James Shaheen: So Maria, we’re here to talk about your new book, which is called How to Truly Love: An Ancient Guide to a Life of Kindness. So to start, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Maria Heim: Yeah, thank you. So the book is my latest translation. It is for a series that we talked about a few months back that I also did a translation for that Princeton University Press is publishing called Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers. And it consists of these little sort of self-help manuals, how-to books for the modern reader that’s taken from ancient texts, largely Western texts in the series, but they’ve increasingly been doing Buddhist texts. And they’re attractive little books, reasonably priced, that invite modern readers into the classics on particular topics. And so they’re nice because they have the original language facing the page, and the English translations are supposed to be quite accessible to all different kinds of readers. 

So How to Truly Love is a chapter from the Path of Purification, the 5th-century figure Buddhaghosa’s meditation manual from the Theravada tradition. And we do have a beautiful translation of it already by Bhikkhu Nanamoli, which is the translation of the entire Visuddhimagga, the entire Path of Purification. But this particular chapter of it can function as a standalone chapter that teaches us about love and how to achieve it. I’ve long used that chapter in my teaching, and I’ve often wanted a more up-to-date accessible translation to use in my teaching and just for myself. And so I thought it would be cool to translate it and hopefully have it reach another audience.

James Shaheen: So can you give us some background on Buddhaghosa and the Visuddhimagga?

Maria Heim: Yeah, so Buddhaghosa is a 5th-century figure. So he lived probably about eight or nine centuries after the Buddha. He’s said to be originally from India and quite a learned pundit. He would’ve known Sanskrit and been, we think, from the Brahmanic tradition. But he came into Buddhism, according to the legends, by debating a Buddhist monk and losing at the debate, which means you kind of need to learn about what that your opponent is teaching. And so he converts to Buddhism in order to learn the abhidhamma system, the intellectual philosophical system that that monk would’ve been arguing for. And so he converts out of intellectual curiosity, which I really like about him. But then he becomes, of course, a very sincere monk, and he is sent by his teachers in India to go to Sri Lanka, where the commentaries, this huge commentary tradition that had grown up around the Buddhist scriptures, had been preserved, but preserved in an ancient language of Sinhala, the language that in Sri Lanka, they want to translate it into a translocal or a more cosmopolitan language. And so he’sbeqa asked to translate into Pali.

So off he goes. And he gets to Sri Lanka, but he’s not known to the people there. And so the monastic authorities there say, “Well, who are you, and why are you going to be able to take on this project?” And so he has to demonstrate his knowledge. And so he does—according to the legend, again, we don’t know the historical veracity of any of this, but this is what we’re told about who he is. And so he gets there and so they ask him to translate or to produce a commentary based on the Buddhist text that he knows, two verses from the Buddhist scripture. And so they give him two verses and he writes a commentary on that. And it’s a very beautiful, very systematic Buddhist path, a kind of path of the whole Buddhist practice. That’s what we call the Visuddhimagga, which means the path of purification, and it’s a text that in English is about 800 pages, so it’s a very long commentary on two verses.

And so then it’s like he has a bad day at the office or something. That path of purification vanishes, he loses the text, and so he has to reproduce it. He does so, and that copy goes away too. We don’t know what happens to it. And then he has to reproduce it a third time. And then at that point, the deities are said to return the first two copies and everyone sits down and compares them, and they’re exactly the same. All three copies are the same text that he’s produced, the same commentary. So the tradition takes this. This is important. Who knows whether it’s historically true, but it’s important for what we know and what we come to understand about Buddhaghosa, which is that he’s consistent. He knows the tradition inside and out. He’s able to draw out the pregnant meaning of the texts at great length. And it’s going to come out exactly right every time. And that’s what you want in a commentator.

So Buddhaghosa then is entrusted with this whole commentary, this whole translation project, editing and translating this large body of commentary that had grown up within the Theravada tradition. And so he’s probably the head of a workshop. He’s not the only translator, but he does the bulk of it. And then we have this text, the Visuddhimagga, which is at the heart of, in some ways he keeps saying this is at the heart of the whole commentary system. And that text takes on a really important life of its own as this very authoritative path of Buddhist practice as he’s interpreting it or the tradition that he is representing has interpreted it.

James Shaheen: So the chapter you’ve translated lies somewhere in the middle of the Path of Purification. So can you talk about where it’s situated within the larger path Buddhaghosa is laying out for us?

Maria Heim: Yeah, so this is in the middle of what’s called the samadhi chapter or section. It’s one chapter within that section, and there’s a whole structure to the Path of Purification, the text as a whole, where one starts, and he’s following the verses on this, these two verses he’s been invited to comment on, one starts with sila, which is morality. And so you begin with refraining from wrong action and getting yourself morally or ethically at least avoiding problematic actions as a basic precondition for allowing you to be able to concentrate.

So there’s an initial section on sila, and then you begin to take up some of the meditations, the meditations that help calm the mind to do jhana practice. And that’s in some ways the very large middle section of the Visuddhimagga. And that’s where our chapter falls. The brahmaviharas, or the sublime attitudes, are meditation practices based on a foundation of morality.

And then the last third of the path of purification is the wisdom practices of going deeper into insight and vipassana and coming to be aware of the way things are.

James Shaheen: And you mentioned morality or ethics in terms of a calm mind. Is that correct? One that is prepared to undertake these practices.

Maria Heim: Yeah. And I think this is in some ways a practical consideration, that if you are doing violence to the world or you’re stealing or lying or practicing sexual misconduct, practically speaking, you know. You’re just sort of out of control, right? And you have lots to regret and to worry about. And so it’s going to be awfully hard to sit down on that meditation cushion and then suddenly fall into sublime states of peacefulness, right? That’s just going to be hard to do. And so I think it is super important that from the traditional perspective, meditation can only properly begin with a moral foundation. 

James Shaheen: So you point out that we’re living in angry times, so you note that in Buddhist thought, love is considered the antidote to this anger and hatred. So how can love help us see clearly and offer a kind of freedom from anger?

Maria Heim: Yeah. So that really is the question at the heart of the book. So I do think we’re living in angry times, and anger gets stoked in the culture in all kinds of ways, and I think we’re all sort of prey to it in ways that from this particular Buddhist tradition is painful and problematic not only to the culture that we’re creating and to the other people that we’re targeting with our anger but to ourselves.

And so Buddhists have a very strong sense that anger is corrosive to the personality. The particular word, dosa in Pali, means both anger and hate. So that’s something that we distinguish very clearly in English. Hate and anger are two different things. But I think this observation that anger and hate overlap or anger has elements of hate in it is a really shrewd and important observation.

And so the idea of Buddhaghosa’s chapter here is that as long as we are subject to our anger, as long as we are controlled by it, we are destructive to ourselves. And there’s a lot of language in the text about we’re sort of enslaved by it. And if you take that seriously and you learn to watch your experience, to notice that, you begin to recognize that maybe setting down some of that anger and getting rid of it would be able to make you more free, liberate you from it, something that the text calls the freedom of the loving heart or the freedom of the loving mind. And so that connection between getting rid of anger and then finding freedom in that is really the work of loving-kindness, that to the extent that I can replace some of that anger with a desire for you to flourish, or a desire for you to be happy, I am also at the same time liberating my own experience from the anger that I’m carrying around. So that’s the connections here that Buddhaghosa is really working with.

James Shaheen: So just to be clear, in Buddhism, or at least in Pali Buddhism or Theravada Buddhism, there is no positive side to anger. It’s simply corrosive and undermines one’s peace of mind. Is that correct? There’s no sense that anger motivates us in a positive way or gets us to do something.

Maria Heim: That’s correct. And so that’s an important, maybe even startling conclusion for a lot of us in the modern period because in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Jesus in his fury stormed the temple, and that was a righteous act. And then we have a long tradition from the Bible on of how some of the really important social justice work was animated by anger and righteous anger. And that that can be a resource for social change and for social justice. And so a lot of us have that intuition. But the Buddhist sources tell us that no, actually anger does give you that energy, and it does sometimes give you a certain feeling of having a very strong sense of moral purpose. You’ve been injured or you’re angry on behalf of others who are being injured.

And that very strong intuition I think a lot of us have is something they’re calling into question, that actually anger, for all of that energy, it does also distort. You pick out certain things about the person you’re angry with and you ignore other things. You don’t see all the conditions. It may have a lot to do with your own ego more than the situation itself. So there’s a whole lot of stuff that can be going on in terms of delusion and hatred in anger. And in their view that is not a resource for acting well in the world. It is not a resource that you’re going to see clearly or to act effectively in anger. And of course, there’s a big debate on this in lots of context, but this is where the Buddhists would fall, at least this particular tradition of Buddhism.

James Shaheen: So here you turn to the brahmaviharas, or the sublime attitudes, as you’ve translated them, which are described as four kinds of attention. So can you talk about the brahmaviharas and love as a form of attention?

Maria Heim: Yeah, I’m glad you picked up on that definition that we find. So, yeah, he calls them four types of attention to being. So remember, they’re meditation practices. They’re not just commands from on high to love each other, something like that. These are meditation practices where you’re learning to attend, increasingly by setting aside your own biases and prejudices and blinders. You’re learning to attend to the other that you’re trying to cultivate loving-kindness or compassion for. So you’re learning to observe them on their own terms and to really see them for who they are and what they are and to come to see with more loving eyes the world in general. So that work of attention is really important.

And of course I’ve really been strongly influenced by Iris Murdoch, who also notes the connections between love and attention and freedom. To the extent that we can set aside our pathologies that keep us from attending to the world, really noticing who people are and their complexity, that is the work of love. It’s not like love comes later. That is the very work, and love is work. bell hooks is also somebody who gets this, that is love is work. It’s a work of trying to see more clearly. And that’s what he’s trying to show us how to do.

James Shaheen: I could do a whole other podcast with you on Iris Murdoch because I remember I went through a period of reading all her books, but I won’t do that right now. We’ll stick with Buddhaghosa. So let’s talk about how Buddhaghosa recommends cultivating these sublime attitudes. He’s often quite funny, and he instructs the reader to have a meal and dispel any post-meal sleepiness, which I loved. So in his instructions on loving-kindness, he does something different from what we find in the canon. He directs readers to begin by cultivating loving-kindness for themselves. So talk about this step. Why does he begin here, and how does he justify this move?

Maria Heim: Yeah, so the basic structure of the whole series of techniques and most of the chapters actually are techniques on how to get to learn and figure out how to develop loving-kindness, particularly toward somebody whom you’re hostile toward. It’s easy to do with the people you already love, but it’s hard to do it for people we’re hostile or even neutral toward. So he is going to give us a lot of techniques for that. And as you say, he starts with, well, you have to get the emotion flowing, you have to get the experience flowing. And so who should you start with? And it’s very important for Buddhaghosa that you start very concretely. This for him is not some kind of abstract thing of, “Oh, I’m going to love all beings and sit and bask in that” or something. Buddhaghosa has always got his feet on the ground, and I like how you picked out that: Have a good meal, and when you’re no longer sleepy from it. So he’s always got his feet on the ground. It’s always like, practically speaking, how do you go about doing something? And he’s not going to think about this abstractly at all. I think I find this particular sense of particularism and groundedness very strong in the Theravada.

So you have to start with a particular person. You don’t just start loving everybody. You have to start with someone. And so you go through all these different people you shouldn’t start with. Don’t start right away with the person you’re angry at; it’s just going to be too hard. And you can’t start with somebody who’s dead. It actually has to be a living person. So he is very practical.

And so then he is like, well, then who should you start with? You should start with yourself. And he’s aware that this isn’t exactly said in the scriptures and people might disagree with that. And so he has to defend that because it doesn’t sound right that you should start loving yourself first. But remember the content of loving-kindness is “May they be happy.” That’s all it is, is I want that person to flourish. I want that person to be happy. And so that’s the content. That’s what you have to get flowing. And he says there’s nothing easier than wanting that for yourself. In our clumsy ways, we often get it wrong, but we all at bottom want to be happy. And so he is like, if you start there just to get the experience flowing, it will be easy, and then you can start branching out. And now he says, you can’t stop there. You have to work out from there. But you have to start.

And then he has this wonderful very important psychological insight where he says that actually everyone just wants themselves to be happy. And that’s just how we work. And those who truly love themselves could never harm another. And there he is quoting the Buddha. So he’s brought in the big guy on that, that those who truly love themselves could never harm another. And then you start to think about how a lot of the harm that people do in the world is perhaps due to a basic self-loathing, a basic discomfort with themselves. And so there’s a deeper thing here too. It’s not just like it’s sort of easier. You know, it is easier to get going on this practice if you know the feeling because you feel it toward yourself. But also maybe there’s something deep and problematic about self-loathing, and you do need to address that at the beginning.

James Shaheen: So he seems to spend most of his time on the more difficult practice of extending loving-kindness to a hostile person, which you mentioned, and this is where we get back to anger. So if anger comes up in this stage, Buddhaghosa has a whole host of techniques to eradicate it, including reproaching oneself or being like a burnt pyre log covered in excrement.

Maria Heim: Yeah, so if you watch what he’s doing, he offers the whole battery of techniques, with the idea that some will work for some of us and others won’t. And so he’ll get to the end of one technique, and he’ll say, “Oh, try the next thing, or if that doesn’t work, do this, or if this still doesn’t work, I’ve tried admonishing you out of your anger, because you’re so used to the slavery of this defilement, but then try this other thing.”

So again, he is aware that this is hard. There’s a lot of people I’m pretty angry about. You know, when I think about national politics or whatever, there are things to be upset about, and you have to keep drilling down until you find you may not think you’re walking around with a lot of anger or hate, but you need to find that person you actually are pretty angry and hateful toward. And when you have that person, it’s going to be hard.

But he also does use a lot of language that’s kind of aesthetic, I guess you would say, in the sense that there’s a deep idea in this traditional Buddhism that anger makes you ugly and anger and hate are very disgusting and you become like a burnt piece, like something people wouldn’t want to touch. And so that visceral kind of language that he’s working with on a lot of these techniques is part of the therapy, that you come to realize with some aversion your own tendency to want to cling to your anger and your hate.

James Shaheen: Yeah, he makes it very clear that anger is disfiguring, and it’s yet another motivation for us not to to work with that. So on the opposite end of the spectrum, another method for eradicating anger is reflecting on the benefits of loving-kindness, the first of which is getting a good night’s sleep. Again, he’s very practical, very grounded. So can you talk about the benefits of this practice according to Buddhaghosa and the canon?

Maria Heim: Yeah, so he’s again using carrots and sticks. Sometimes he launches into the hellfire stuff, that if you don’t give up this anger, it’s going to keep dogging you and you’ll go to hell for it. But other times it’s carrots. It’s like, okay, to the extent you can get rid of your anger and the festering envy or whatever’s problematic in your experience that you’re working with, you’ll sleep better. You’ll wake up refreshed. You’ll have a clear complexion, and you’re beautiful to look at. People like to be around people who aren’t angry, as beauty is what we want to be around. So it goes through all these kinds of really prudential kinds of concerns: Just think about the lightness you’ll feel, the restfulness, the calmness you’ll feel when you aren’t carrying around this burden of anger. So, again, some things will work. Some people are drawn to the benefits of this: “Wow. I am up at night tossing and turning because I can’t let something go.” Well, you can; you just have to figure out how to do it.

James Shaheen: So the next approach is turning to the teaching on not-self and the aggregates, which I found especially interesting. He recommends asking, What exactly are you angry with? Their body hair, their fingernails? And then he breaks it down further from there. So can you talk about this process of disaggregation? Because it is true when you’re angry with someone, you hate every aspect of them, so it’s not so far off to mention fingernails and hair.

Maria Heim: Right. Yeah. So here what he’s doing is he’s deploying a classic Buddhist method of disaggregation. So that the whole abhidhamma system and a lot of the work on the no-self teachings is really about disaggregating. You know, I think I’m an enduring self, an enduring person, but actually when I break down what I am, I’m a whole set of conditions, physical things and mental things, that are changing every moment that don’t have a single enduring substance. And together they’re not a single enduring substance. So he’s using that Buddhist methodology of desegregation to good effect here, that actually when I am angry at somebody, I’ve got a pretty fixed conception of who they are in my mind, a frozen snapshot of time, if you will. And something I’ve built up and to some degree, you know, they did this horrible thing to me and I’ve got this reified conception of who they are. And so he says, well, this is a good time to do some no-self work and break that down. That fixed conception won’t survive breaking them apart. And so he gets into the classic thing of breaking somebody into the thirty-two body parts, which shows the sense that human beings are always changing, and we’re a collection of parts like a chariot.

But we could also think about it in terms of, and he does some of this work elsewhere, that what a person is is a product of conditions. And just as I am a product of conditions that are fueling my reactions, that person too is a product of certain kinds of conditions that helped produce what made me angry. And they are more than that. They are other conditions I’m not seeing. But maybe I need to step back a little bit from my fixed and stable conception of who they are.

James Shaheen: So he says if all of these methods fail, you should give someone a gift. So how does a concrete act of generosity eliminate anger?

Maria Heim: Yeah, this I think is a fascinating thing, that he’s coming out of that particular reflection of this high-level Buddhist thing of desegregating into parts. And then he said that this is kind of strange, and people aren’t always going to go in for that. And so he says, okay, if all else fails, and he has given us about fourteen or fifteen different techniques at this point. So if all else fails, give the person a gift or get a gift from them. But it’s often hard to get the person you’re angry with to give you a gift, so give them something.

And he talks about, I can’t remember exactly how I translated it, but something like it’s like a magical transformation that somehow that when you reach out to somebody that you’re mad at, who has done something bad to you, and he gives a little story about a junior monk who keeps being asked to move himself to a senior monk. And he’s angry, and he gives him a nice, beautiful bowl that he had been given, an alms bowl that he’d been given by his own mother. And then Buddhaghosa says it just magically dissipates the anger.

So sometimes we need to make the gesture that’s unexpected that will break, I don’t know what else to say exactly, and I’m not even sure he knows. He just says almost magically that it can help dissipate it.

James Shaheen: Yeah. You know, my sense is that it really gives that other person an opportunity maybe to express appreciation, and your fixed view of them changes because I noticed that when I was very resentful with one particular person, he came to me and he asked me for help, and the moment he asked me for help, all of my resentment lifted. I saw an entirely different side of this person, a vulnerable humble side, “I need help.” And it changed everything. So that was out of my control. But you mentioned receiving a gift, and that was like receiving a gift.

Maria Heim: Yeah, exactly.

James Shaheen: So once you’ve successfully eliminated anger toward the hostile person—it’s a big heavy lift, but once you’ve done it, the goal is to break down barriers between these different categories, the neutral person, the person you care about, the hostile person. So can you talk about what Buddhaghosa means by breaking down barriers? How does this facilitate full absorption and what you’ve translated as freedom of the loving mind?

Maria Heim: Yeah, so he is using this breaking down barriers to really help you understand to the extent to which you are in full jhana practice. So these samatha meditations are all jhana practices, which is an important kind of meditation practice in the Theravada. And breaking down barriers is where you have achieved a certain level of full absorption. And so he says, okay, so you need to test yourself to find out to the extent to which you’ve broken down barriers. And so what you’ve been trying to do is remember you started with yourself, and then you go to a dearly loved person, and the content is always, “May they be happy.” So I’ve really got the feeling flowing, “May I be happy,” and then you move to a dearly beloved person, a dear teacher, friend, you know, “May they be happy.” Things are smooth sailing, easy. Then you move to a neutral person, somebody you don’t really care one way or the other. And then you flood them with this, “May you be happy.” And then most of the techniques we’ve been talking about is how do you then deal with the hostile person, “May they be happy,” get to the point where you really have goodwill toward them? And so when you’ve achieved it through the hostile person, then you have broken down barriers, you wish all of these that they’d be happy, you don’t see the distinctions anymore of “Oh, this is still a hostile person,” because you’ve broken down those barriers.

And so then you have to test yourself. And so he says, imagine that a group of robbers, of bandits were to seize the four of you, the beloved friend, the neutral person, and the hostile person, and demands that you hand one of them over to be sacrificed so that the others can go. It was a horrible situation. And so who do you hand over? And Buddhaghosa is really striking on this. He says you would actually not be able to hand over anybody because you cannot see the difference between you and the hostile person or any of them if you’ve truly achieved this level of wishing them well. And so for you to hand anyone over, including yourself, is to be not wishing them well: “Take this one so the rest of us can go” is not that kind of goodwill and wishing people would be happy that he’s been talking about. So this is what he means by you have really genuinely broken down the barriers that usually we throw up of partiality and against other kinds of people. And so that’s what you’re aiming for.

James Shaheen: You know, I don’t want to sidetrack us, but just briefly, you mentioned samatha and the jhanas and the relationship to the sublime attitudes. Can you just briefly tell us what samatha and the jhanas are? I understand it’s not easy to be brief about those, but just how they relate.

Maria Heim: So samatha meditations are these main topics that Buddhaghosa is treating in the middle part of the Visuddhimagga, where they are particular calming focuses. So you’re really learning how to focus and concentrate the mind on particular subjects. So some of them, like he starts with something called the earth object, or the earth kasina, which is just a disc of earth that you set in front of you, an earth-colored disc, and you spend weeks just concentrating on that. So how is it that you can focus your mind where only that object fills it?

And so jhana practice is getting deeper and deeper into that, in that case, the earth object where you’re ceasing all of the mental chatter and the distractions that immediately flood in once you start focusing on a particular object. And so he uses that earth object, earth kasina, as the kind of blueprint for the rest of the samatha meditations, of which there are forty different topics. There’s a blue disc, and there are other colored discs, and then there are the disgusting corpses, there’s ten other objects, and then there are the qualities of the Buddha, really good things that you focus on.

And so here, the four divine abidings, the four sublime attitudes are each one of these objects that you’re focusing on. And so what you’re trying to do is go into the deeper layers, the four deeper layers of jhana meditations, or three, except equanimity is four. But you’re going deeper into them in terms of full absorption. And so that’s where the breaking down barriers is, have you gotten to full absorption, as far as you can go? And you generally cannot find a difference between you and the hostile enemy. Then you know you’ve really broken down barriers and you are fully absorbed in loving-kindness.

James Shaheen: So we’ve talked a lot about loving-kindness. The next sublime attitude is compassion. And Buddhaghosa suggests first arousing compassion by observing someone who is visibly miserable with their limbs cut off. Again, he doesn’t mince words. But if you can’t find someone like that, and I haven’t found someone like that—

Maria Heim: Thank heavens.

James Shaheen: He suggests starting with an evildoer. This might seem surprising. So tell us a bit about that choice and what it can teach us about compassion in a Buddhist context.

Maria Heim: Yeah, I really love that decision, that he goes immediately from this very miserable person sitting there with maggots streaming out of their sores or the hands and mics have been cut off, and he says, if you can’t find a person like that—and again, the concreteness of it, it can’t just be, “Oh, I generally feel compassion for any being.” It has to be a very specific thing, and you start where it’s easy. So presumably all of us would feel compassion for somebody who was in that miserable state. He says, if you can’t find someone like that, then think of an evildoer, a criminal who’s being led to his execution. And it just goes right to that, and so that should be the next easy thing. It should be easy; again, you start with where it’s easiest. And so the criminal, by all accounts, is an evildoer, but he is about to be executed. People might be giving him his last meal, but he’s being marched through town. He might be eating fine delicacies, but still, no one thinks he’s well-off. And so everyone would recognize his suffering. And so that should be very natural, then, for you to feel compassion toward that person.

And so what I find so remarkable about that is to throw it up against a long tradition in Western thought that really reserves compassion for the suffering of innocents, the innocent who are suffering who don’t deserve their torments, that’s who we feel compassion for. And you see that all over the place. And so that never occurs to Buddhaghosa that it is a question of innocence or deservedness or anything like that. It’s that here’s somebody who’s suffering, very obviously suffering, and so it should be very natural for you to feel compassion for such a person.

James Shaheen: So I guess this more inclusive approach is just a recognition that they and probably all of us haven’t transcended the suffering that is life in this world.

Maria Heim: That’s true. That’s true. And yeah, that at the heart of compassion is seeing suffering. And so when we were talking earlier about what kind of attention are each of these, the compassion is about attention to suffering, and you need to open your eyes wider to see not just the suffering of physical suffering but the suffering of being an evildoer and immediately learn how to respond to that. So yeah, this is a different divine abiding. The content is not “May they be happy”; the content is “I want their suffering to end.” So the attention involved is about how you come to notice suffering and see it and respond to it.

James Shaheen: Okay, so next is sympathetic joy, and he’s pretty funny here too. He recommends starting with a fun-loving pal. So can you talk about his instructions here?

Maria Heim: Yeah, so here he is like, who do you start with? And this turns out to always be really interesting. And he figures out who you should start with. And so here he says basically somebody who’s not just a dearly beloved friend, a mentor you loved, you know, not that, but somebody who’s a fun-loving pal and somebody, I think hopefully we all know people like this, who are just infectiously fun. To be with them is to be sharing their happiness. And so he said, start with that person because it’ll be easiest. You’re happy when they’re happy.

And that’s what the content of this experience is, is being happy when somebody else is happy. And I like this because I think it hooks into this kind of thing that Adam Smith, who wrote a whole book on the theory of the moral sentiments, he’s really interested in what he calls sympathy, and not sympathy with those who are suffering so much as we have a natural aptitude, we have a natural disposition to share in the happiness and joy of others. You walk into a lively and fun party, and your mood immediately lifts and you start having fun too. He’s super interested in that capacity we have, how infectious human emotions are and how we can participate in others’ joy and happiness, and that that’s really important. In Smith’s view of moral sentiment, that’s a source of the kind of community and altruism we all should be working for, cultivating, expanding on.

Buddhaghosa also thinks, and this is a really important thing, all of these are antidotes. They’re antidotes to their opposites, And so sympathetic joy is the antidote to envy and discontent, which, when you learn to notice them, we find rather ubiquitous in our lives, that all too often we’re discontent with what we have and envious of what others have. And so the way to get rid of that, to notice it and get rid of it, is to cultivate sympathetic joy. Start with the fun-loving pal, where it’s easy. Then you move on out further and further till you’re actually having sympathetic joy for people you may not at first like or think that they deserve their happiness.

James Shaheen: Or maybe they got a position that you didn’t or something like that.

Maria Heim: Yeah, I mean, envy is everywhere. We hardly ever talk about it, but envy is everywhere, and it’s a real problem from this Buddhist perspective.

James Shaheen: Yeah. So the last sublime attitude is equanimity, which you describe as perhaps the most sublime of the sublime attitudes. So tell us about equanimity and how it sits in relation to the other three? At first it can seem like an odd pairing with the others.

Maria Heim: Yeah, so equanimity, of course, is challenging, I think. So Buddhaghosa sets it up that equanimity is something you would only practice once you’ve been well established in the other three, because equanimity does seem to involve a little bit of pulling back from the content of these other emotions.

So loving-kindness is “May they be happy,” so the kind of judgment in that. The compassion is “May they not be suffering.” There’s another kind of judgment about the state of affairs, and I think anybody’s stepping out of that a little bit.

Now, what’s complex about it is that it is still attention to beings. All of these are four kinds of attention. And so it’s not apathy, it’s not indifference, it’s not removing, but it’s still looking on to the world and being engaged in the world, but without that reactivity or without that judgment all the time, without being drawn in to the ups and downs of the world. And so this is a path to peace, and freedom from our reactivity, that is another part of the whole path.

Buddhaghosa has this beautiful thing where he talks about all four divine abidings. And for me, this is probably the most helpful part of his treatment. Of the four, he says that all four are like the mother with four sons. The mother of a young baby has loving-kindness. She wants her son to grow up and be healthy and flourish. It’s very unproblematic to feel that way. And she wants her son who is sick, she feels compassion. She wants that suffering to end. Again, very natural, very basic, you don’t want your kid to be sick. The youthful son in the prime of his youth, he’s happy and healthy and going around beautiful and young, she feels nothing but sympathetic joy. She shares his joy. She’s not envious of it. And then equanimity is like how the mother should feel for the grown son who’s left home. He’s got his own affairs. And I have to say, this really speaks to me because my own youngest son is about to leave for college in a few weeks. You know, it’s the hardest part of parenthood, stepping back. I don’t get to control things. I don’t get to manage him. He’s going to make his own decisions, and I still love him. I’m still attentive to him, but I can’t get all agitated about every up and down and every decision that I may or may not agree with. That’s just something I’ve got to step back from, and that seems to be for Buddhaghosa that these kind of basic and human emotions that many of us experience in parenthood that are very natural to us, this is how we need to kind of expand out further and further to further and further beings. But this is the content of it. I still love them. I’m still attentive to them, but I’m stepping back from the constant judging mind about every little up and down.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I really like the analogy of the four sons or the son at different stages in his life. But after these instructions on cultivating these qualities, Buddhaghosa provides further commentary on various topics, including the correspondence between each sublime attitude and a heavenly realm. So can you walk us through these correspondences? How do these meditations map onto cosmology here?

Maria Heim: Good. So this is something I discussed a little bit as the translator, that the brahmaviharas, we can talk about them in several different ways. We’ve been talking about them mostly as meditation experiences that you can sit on your meditation cushion and experience. But the content of them is like the experience of brahma deities, these particular high-ranking gods and what their content is like. And so where the brahmas come up in the canon, and I have this little passage I think in my other book How to Feel is that one day somebody asks the Buddha, “How do you get to heaven, and how do you get to the brahma world?” And Buddha says, “Well, all I have to do is think about it, because I’ve been to those places. I just have to make my mind go there.”

And so this very interesting thing in Buddhism is that our minds create the worlds we live in, and your mind can go wherever you want to. You have to train it to experience what the brahma deities experience. But that’s what these trainings are so that you are actually having the content of that particular world or heavenly world. So in this way the mind maps onto cosmology in Buddhism in really interesting ways.

So, I’ve translated the brahmaviharas as the sublime attitudes, which is fine. But they’re also brahma worlds. And so at the end of the text, the text says that each one of these is correlated to a particular brahma world, and loving-kindness is correlated to the realm of beauty. And so there’s a kind of psychological thing that’s also going on here, that loving-kindness is seeing the lovableness, the beauty of beings. And so it makes sense that when your mind is fully absorbed in that, you are in a beautiful realm. And then I think compassion is a sensitivity to, he says, the sticks and stones or something like that that break up human life, that destroy us. And so the mind that is consumed with compassion is like a mind in the brahma world where things are not material. You know, so much suffering is material.

And then I think sympathetic joy is like the brahma world of infinite consciousness, because what sympathetic joy seems to be is this attentiveness to the consciousness of others. Are you feeling happy? Are you feeling good? I want to share that. And so you are open. It’s like being in the brahma world of being aware of consciousness, others’ consciousnesses.

So I hadn’t actually planned on, I left little bits of the chapter out that were very technical, and this one looked very technical to me at the end. And I almost left it out. And then I went back and I read it, and I thought, actually this is really subtle and interesting just to think about it, even if you just want to take it at a kind of psychological level.

James Shaheen: You know, you write something interesting, and I’ll quote you. “The minds we make for ourselves here and now give us direct access to transcendent heavenly realms is one of the most marvelous ideas in Buddhism. We create the minds we want to have in this life, and so can experience heaven right here on earth.” Can you say something about that? I really love that.

Maria Heim: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s the premise of these brahmaviharas, is that you are actually creating the minds you are going to live in, both here and in the next life, so that if I live in a mind in which I’m full of lovableness,, love toward all beings, I see their lovableness, I’m already there. I’m already in a heavenly state right here and now. But there’s also this idea that, they say this in the text, that I may not achieve nirvana with the brahmaviharas, with these four practices, but if I achieve no higher, I’ll at least go to these states in my next life. So, it’s both here and now, which is pretty interesting.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it’s easy to conflate the culmination of these states with nirvana or nibbana, and that would be a mistake. Is that correct?

Maria Heim: That would be a mistake.

James Shaheen: That would be a mistake. Okay. So one dynamic that comes up throughout the text is how love emerges through the particulars. So the practice is geared toward full absorption and flooding all directions with each flavor of love, yet this happens through directing that love toward very specific beings, and when Buddhaghosa gives instructions on how to extend each attitude outward, it’s very concrete as well. So can you talk about the particular and the universal here? How can attention to the particular help us cultivate this more universal love? 

Maria Heim: Yeah, I mean, I think for me, it is part of the overall sensibility here that we’re talking about real people here, real beings. It’s easy to convince yourself, “I love everybody,” or “I have universal love for everyone,” but what does that mean? You know, the content of love is very particular and very specific. It’s seeing the lovableness of a particular being. It’s wanting a particular being to be happy in that particular way that makes them happy. And he doesn’t, I think that his whole, so he’ll say, start with the beings in your own residence, and once you’ve really broken down barriers with them, then go a little further out. But you’re not just going from yourself to the world. Then go a little further out, like it’s easy for me to love everybody at Amherst College, and then maybe the town and the state of Massachusetts. 

But what does that actually mean when I imagine other people who I may not know and what is their happiness? What’s happy for them? And so that work that he’s doing there is just to never let you off the hook in terms of “I’ve got this for everybody.” He wants you to see this is going to be particular. This is going to be specific. This is recognizing beings in their diversity. And that is the work of love. It’s not some generic thing where, “Oh yeah, I love everybody.”

But he also, we haven’t talked about this at all. He does see these, the other word for the brahmaviharas are the immeasurables. And that I think the active nature of understanding them as immeasurables is really instructive, that he sees them immeasurable in both scope and habit so that I should be expanding these for further and further beings. Okay, now I’ve gotten through the state of Massachusetts, now I have to do the nation or something, that I could always be expanding them. There’s always more beings. Well, have I thought about the insects? You know, there’s always more that I could be thinking in concrete terms about their being happy. So universal never gets untethered from that work of concrete thinking about further others further and further out that I may not have thought about. So immeasurable, that’s immeasurable in scope, and immeasurable in habit means he says, well, even for one being, you could always improve the quality of your love for them, the habit of it. So that is immeasurability in habit. So he’s insisting that, you know, you don’t get to a point where you’re like, “I’m done, I couldn’t possibly be more loving, I’ve got it,” that it would be and it is an ongoing task. Everybody who comes in front of me, I have this view, I have this habit, I have this disposition to see their lovableness. You know, that’s what universal love is: immeasurability, not one day I’m done.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know, I hadn’t really thought of Immeasurability in terms of never quite being done, and that one can always go further and deeper. But of course, I haven’t even got to the point where I’m even feeling I’m close to done.

Maria Heim: Sure. There’s nothing easy about this.

James Shaheen: Yeah, there’s nothing easy about it. I’ve got one last question. You begin the book with a quote from bell hooks, and you mentioned bell hooks earlier, as you did Iris Murdoch, and the quote is, “The moment we choose to love, we begin to move toward freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.” So could you talk about that quote and the synergies you see between hooks’s view and the Buddhist psychology of love?

Maria Heim: Yeah, so I think she’s a fellow traveler here with Buddhaghosa, and of course she’s a Buddhist too. And so in her work, she’s written really important work all about love that is really challenging a lot in contemporary American culture about a kind of culture of hate and anger. And so, I think she’s really helpful, but she too sees, and I think often speaking, particularly as a Black woman, she’s also written about Black rage in a really interesting way, that there’s something empowering and important about Black rage. And I have my students read this and we discuss bell hooks as she’s thinking about the importance of standing up for dignity and that rage is an important resource for that. And she also knows that anger can be debilitating and un-freeing and that love is the answer. So she makes all of this more complicated and more interesting. And I just like that particular quote. I thought it invites us immediately into the book of seeing the connections between love and freedom.

James Shaheen: So, it’s interesting we go back to this notion of rage as potentially a motivator for positive action. I mean, I can’t speak for bell hooks, but does that then somehow push back against this sort of absolutist view in Buddhism that anger is categorically bad?

Maria Heim: It tries to push back. And I get it, and it’s definitely a discussion worth having. But I think the Buddhist view is that if you’re aggrieved by suffering, which is where social justice and the anger that people who are using it as a resource to fight for or to fight with, couldn’t compassion do some of that work? Remember, compassion is this deep feeling for the suffering of others and wanting to get rid of that suffering. So why couldn’t we see compassion, which is not toxic in any way, which is not debilitating, which is not corrosive in the way anger is, could we see compassion as that resource that we need to undergird and to animate social justice?

James Shaheen: Maria, anything before we close?

Maria Heim: Not that I can think of. Thank you, James.

James Shaheen: Well, thank you, Maria. It’s a really wonderful book. It makes the teaching so accessible, and it’s fun because it on alternate pages has the Pali, and the translation choices you make and discuss are also very interesting, so the reader can look forward to that. So Maria, it’s been a pleasure. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of How to Truly Love, available now from Princeton University Press.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Maria Heim. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!