The sixth Field of Zen Practice is Opening Your Heart.* Working explicitly to open your heart not only benefits other living beings, it puts you in accord with the Dharma and supports all other aspects of your practice. You work on radical self-acceptance to make Awakening and compassion possible. You work on real and personal relationships with other beings – overcoming your social fears, becoming more willing to be seen and known, learning to be authentic, and recognizing the Buddha-Nature manifested in others. Ultimately, self and other are not separate; in practice, you seek to manifest and realize this simultaneously.
*Some changes have been made to my Ten Fields since publishing this episode, so the audio may not exactly match the website!
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Quicklinks to Article Content:
An Enlightened Heart is an Open Heart
The Four Sublime Social Attitudes, or Brahmaviharas: Practices to Open the Heart
Extending the Sublime Social Attitudes Unconditionally and Universally
Extending Metta: Goodwill, Loving-kindness, or Friendliness
Extending Karuna: Compassion
Extending Mudita: Sympathetic Joy
Extending Upekkha: Equanimity
This episode is the first part of the sixth chapter of my book-in-progress, The Ten Fields of Zen: A Primer for Practitioners. I’ll finish up the chapter in the next episode.
From the beginning of practice to the culmination of your spiritual aspirations, your relationships with living beings – including yourself – constitute an essential field of practice. Some people get the impression that the Zen ideal is going off alone to a cave to meditate deeply, allowing you to awaken to profound truths that have nothing to do with human relationships, but this is not the case. While it’s true that Buddhist monastics have traditionally minimized their personal social obligations for practical reasons, Buddhism has always emphasized that a generous attitude of goodwill toward all beings is not just a prerequisite for practice, it’s the evidence of successful practice and one of the defining qualities of an awakened person.
An Enlightened Heart is an Open Heart
When you fully awaken to Reality-with-a-Capital-R, you naturally have an open heart toward all beings. You recognize that you have no inherent, independent, enduring, and autonomous self-nature that needs protecting. Instead, your being is ultimately boundaryless and interdependent with all things. You realize how all things, in their Emptiness, are complete and luminous just as they are, infinitely precious in their Own-Being – including you, and each person you encounter. You recognize in yourself the inexplicable draw toward truth and wholeness that we call Buddha-Nature and become able to see it in others even when they themselves are deeply alienated from their true nature.
A classic description of the enlightened heart in Buddhism is the Karaniya Metta Sutta (Metta can be translated as goodwill, friendliness, or loving-kindness). This just a portion of the beautiful, inspiring text:
Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all beings:
Radiating kindness over the entire world
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths;
Outwards and unbounded,
Freed from hatred and ill will.[i]
Hopefully there are people – or non-human beings – in your life toward whom you readily feel goodwill and kindness. Because of their innocence, connection to you, or generosity toward you, it is easy and natural to have an open heart in your relationship with them. (At least most of the time!) You wish only the best for such beings and move to aid them without a thought for yourself. You may have a long list of people you feel this open-hearted towards, or you may only be this open with one person or even one animal companion. In one sense it doesn’t matter how long or short your list, it matters that you know pure open-heartedness in your own direct experience.
Other people you meet with your heart closed to a greater or lesser degree. This closure can be due to all kinds of reasons, including defensiveness based on past injuries and disappointments; judgments about another person’s worthiness or your own; skepticism about whether relationships are worth the trouble they inevitably entail; feeling threatened or confused by the way another person manifests, or because you have an agenda and will only start opening your heart when someone begins meeting your expectations or needs. Once we get to adulthood, the default setting for most of us is a closed, wary heart.
Your efforts to awaken and move closer to manifesting an enlightened, open heart happen on two fronts simultaneously. On one front, you practice within the other Ten Fields of Zen so your growing intimacy with Reality softens your sense of a fixed, separate self and opens you up to the truth of interdependence. On the other front, you deliberately cultivate the qualities of an enlightened heart. This doesn’t require you to start from scratch, it simply requires you to broaden the circle of beings toward whom you can turn with an unconditional open heart. The broader your circle, the more stable, peaceful, and genuinely joyful your life will be. So much time and energy can be wasted on useless defensiveness, judgment, competitiveness, comparison, resentment, and skepticism! Open-heartedness not only benefits self and others, it’s a pre-requisite for deep practice.
The Four Sublime Social Attitudes, or Brahmaviharas: Practices to Open the Heart
The Buddha taught the importance of the four Brahmaviharas, or sublime social attitudes: Goodwill, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. These are the emotions we should cultivate toward other beings in order establish a strong foundation for spiritual practice. They are also the best attitudes to have toward people if we want our relationships to be harmonious and beneficial.
The Pali term for goodwill is Metta, alternatively translated as friendliness, loving-kindness, or even love. Metta is an active sense of goodwill toward beings (including oneself), sincerely wishing for their welfare and happiness. It’s generosity of spirit, the opposite of ill-will. Metta may manifest as a warm, loving feeling, but sometimes it’s enough for you to turn toward someone with a lack of ill-will. Compassion, or Karuna, arises when you feel goodwill toward someone, and you see them suffering. It’s a natural feeling of concern based on a recognition they are fundamentally like you and it hurts to suffer, plus a sincere wish for them to be free from their suffering. Sympathetic Joy, or Mudita, arises when you feel goodwill toward someone, and you see them experiencing happiness or good fortune. Equanimity, or Uppekha, is the ability to remain grounded and centered in your human interactions.
Extending the Sublime Social Attitudes Unconditionally and Universally
The key to practicing each Brahmavihara is summoning the sincere attitude within you, however you need to do that, and then gradually extending it past the limits set by your habitual self-interest. The challenge – and reward – of the Brahmaviharas comes when we try to break down the barriers between self and other, dear person and stranger, people who’ve been kind to us and people who’ve hurt us, “good” people and “bad” people, likeable people versus unlikeable people, etc. The ideal is to be able to sincerely feel goodwill, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity toward all living beings. This will not be easy, especially if you have experienced trauma in your life.
Why is important to work toward this ideal of an unconditionally and universally open heart? It’s important to remember that, while the Brahmaviharas may have a positive effect on the beings toward whom they’re extended, the main point is about what’s going on in your own mind and heart. The ordinary way of viewing emotions is that you can’t do much about them, and which ones you feel toward people pretty much depends on the characteristics and actions of said people. From the Buddhist point of view, any restriction on your ability to extend the Brahmaviharas is based in self-attachment (one of the critical ingredients in creating delusion and suffering).
For example, you might be stingy with your goodwill because someone has hurt or disappointed you – as if, by withholding goodwill, you’ll be able to punish them for what they’ve done. You might resist feeling compassion for someone who’s caused a lot of hurt and damage and willfully continues to do so – as if, by withholding your compassion, you can make them mend their ways. Frankly, the stories you tell yourself about needing to hold on to your ill-will, hard-heartedness, envy, and anger are deluded and harmful. Now, it may be very difficult for you to extend the Brahmaviharas to certain people – it may even feel close to impossible – but that’s another matter entirely. The block you experience in opening your heart reveals an opportunity for deepening your practice. (Note: Make sure not to use it as an opportunity to beat yourself up because you’re not a saint!)
As you try to expand the circle of people toward whom you can offer an open heart, it may help to keep in mind that goodwill, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity are always more effective ways to deal with people than ill-will, hard-heartedness, envy, and emotional volatility. As the Buddha said in the most widely quoted passage from the Dhammapada:
“Hostilities aren’t stilled
through hostility,
regardless.Hostilities are stilled
through non-hostility:
this, an unending truth.”[ii]
No matter how open your heart is, there are circumstances where you need to draw boundaries with people, say no, communicate expectations, hold people responsible, or even take drastic measures to stop someone from doing a harmful behavior. What the Buddha’s teaching of the Brahmaviharas states is that you can take all those actions with goodwill, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity in your heart. It’s not easy! But it’s possible, and infinitely preferable. Not only will your own heart and mind be more at ease, the people you’re dealing with will sense your goodwill and be much more likely to respond in a positive way.
There is immense value in the practice of extending the Brahmaviharas unconditionally and universally, and it lies in the discovery that a closed heart impoverishes you and does not necessarily protect you from harm, while an open heart frees you and does not necessarily set you up for disappointment or victimization. By extending the Brahmaviharas, you confirm, through your own direct experience, the truths of non-separation and interdependence. You discover that the gifts of goodwill, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity are not things given to others by the small self from a limited store of positive energy, but are the manifestation of positive energy flowing through the universe as long as you don’t obstruct them.
Extending Metta: Goodwill, Loving-kindness, or Friendliness
Ill-will comes easily to human beings. Given our assumption of separateness, we are quick to become defensive, angry, irritated, suspicious, judgmental, and competitive with one another. Our practice isn’t to beat ourselves up about the arising of these emotions; they’re just part of our human nature. Our practice is to respond appropriately to them, recognizing them as reactions which are rarely – if ever – helpful, and as attitudes which lead to a closed heart.
You can work on expanding your capacity to extend goodwill, or at least pacify ill-will, by calling to mind a being for whom it is easy to feel Metta. Sit quietly and contemplate this being, allowing the warmth of your unconditional care and good wishes for them to permeate your body, heart, and mind. You may wish to say a verse to yourself, “May you be free from fear and anxiety. May you be at ease. May you be truly happy.”
Then call to mind someone for whom you easily feel Metta but with whom you have a somewhat more complicated relationship. Repeat the same steps, noting where you tend to resist or hold back. Lean into the experience, trying to extend Metta just a little farther than you feel comfortable doing. Perhaps you only get as far as wishing for the person to be free from fear and anxiety, but judgment creeps in when you wish them to be happy. Once you find you can fully extend unconditional goodwill to the person, maybe only after a number of sessions of Metta practice, you move on to someone you feel neutral about, then someone you feel ambivalent about, then someone you feel some resentment for – only moving on to more challenging subjects once you’ve been able to include your current subject in your circle of Metta. Eventually, you practice sending Metta to all beings.
Over time, you’ll realize that carrying around ill-will for anyone is an unnecessary burden and hindrance. No matter what someone has done or is doing, your ill-will – if they are even aware of it – will not result in them changing for the better. It also becomes clear that when people act unskillfully or destructively, they are not truly happy. Wishing for them to be truly happy means wishing for them to find clarity and peace of mind – for their sake, as well as for the sake of others. There are many creative ways in the Buddhist tradition to help you feel Metta toward someone, such as those found in the teachings of Buddhaghosa.[iii] Goodwill is the basis for the other three Brahmaviharas, so don’t give up!
Extending Karuna: Compassion
When you feel goodwill toward someone and you see them suffer, you feel compassion, or Karuna. Therefore, goodwill and compassion are closely related. In theory, you can’t feel compassion for someone unless you already feel goodwill toward them, but in practice it’s sometimes compassion which arises first. When you see someone suffering, you empathize and recognize in what way they are like you. You naturally want them to be free of their suffering, which flows easily into goodwill. This is why the recommended verse for Metta practice essentially starts with a phrase about compassion, “May you be free from fear and anxiety.”
What makes it difficult for you to extend compassion to people? Certainly, any of the things that obstruct your flow of Metta also obstruct your Karuna, including defensiveness, resentment, or judgment. You may also find your flow of compassion constrained by a conviction that someone is at least partly to blame for their circumstances, by a belief that they aren’t your responsibility, or by a sense that there’s nothing you can do to help.
When you find compassion limited or blocked, it may help to expand your attention beyond someone’s immediate distress to their situation as a whole. For example, you can sincerely wish for someone to find a way to break out of their destructive habit patterns as well as be relieved of suffering the consequences of those patterns. It can be difficult to feel compassion for someone who continues to cause harm to others, but you can recognize how their actions have roots in deep-seated delusion and suffering and wish for such a person to be liberated from those root causes.
Extending compassion unconditionally is what makes it a spiritual practice. What does this mean? Essentially, it means you allow your heart to remain open in the presence of another person’s suffering, regardless of that person’s relationship to you. When you do this, a compassionate response – meaning a call to action – may arise. Maybe you won’t be called to action, but by remaining open, you are allowing for this possibility.
Often, we are at least somewhat on guard against our compassion being activated. We usually overthink compassionate action, trying desperately to find the perfect thing to do – something that will fix the situation without enabling, encouraging dependence, or allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of. There are times when it’s appropriate to consider such things, but the purest kind of compassion is said to be “like a hand reaching for a pillow in the night.”[iv] You respond spontaneously and naturally, because you are fundamentally not separate from the suffering being in front of you. Your response is completely in keeping with your capacity, so there’s no need to keep a closed heart in order to protect yourself.
Extending Mudita: Sympathetic Joy
Sympathetic joy arises when you feel goodwill for someone and you witness them experiencing happiness or good fortune. This Brahmavihara is often more difficult for people to grasp than compassion because you can imagine why it’s important to feel compassion (so you’re motivated to help others), but what’s so important about feeling happy about someone else’s happiness? Especially if the feeling doesn’t arise spontaneously? Why work on extending sympathetic joy to all beings or situations? As one of my students put it, “Why should I feel glad some neighbor just got new countertops?”
Again, Brahmavihara practice starts with opening your heart, more or less for your own sake. It’s not so much about how sympathetic joy is going to benefit the neighbor with new countertops; after all, he’s doing fine. It’s more about noticing and letting go of what’s getting in the way of your sympathetic joy, which should arise naturally if you feel sincere goodwill for someone and witness them experiencing happiness.
It’s helpful to me to imagine myself feeling unconditional sympathetic joy for a child who’s just accomplished a task like brushing her teeth all by herself for the first time. The child smiles with pride and raises her arms in triumph and excitement. In an uncomplicated way, I think and feel, “Yay! Good for you!” That’s pure sympathetic joy, the generous, connected, and friendly attitude that it’s theoretically possible to feel for anyone when they experience a success or reason for joy. Can you summon that simple, pure feeling of sympathetic joy and extend it toward a person for whom it’s just a little bit more difficult to feel it?
Lots of things get in the way of sympathetic joy in almost any circumstance more complicated than witnessing a child’s innocent pleasure. You consider whether someone’s joy is deserved or wonder why they’re experiencing better fortune than you are. You judge whether their joy is silly or merited, shallow or deep, material or spiritual. Are people looking down on you because you don’t have a similar reason to rejoice? Envy, jealousy, judgment, and comparison impede your natural sympathetic joy, and all these things are negative internal habits you are much better off without. Alternatively, maybe you can’t really care less about someone’s good fortune because they’re not important to you. In that case, what’s missing is an extension of goodwill beyond the people directly relevant to your own life.
To extend your sympathetic joy further and more often, it helps to recognize the self-centered thoughts that get in the way. When you witness someone’s success or happiness, watch what happens in your body and mind. Chances are good you immediately start thinking about yourself even if you smile and congratulate someone. For example, someone’s just gotten engaged to be married but the first thing you can think of is that you’re all alone. Or you know they’re silly to be so excited about getting married because marriage ends up being miserable. Or you wonder whether they’re feeling superior to you now and think desperately about something that you can report from your life that would be comparable.
To extend sympathetic joy, you can practice putting your self-concern aside. Or, on a more positive note, shift your attention and concern to the other person. Without envy, jealousy, judgment, or comparison, just witness the person’s joy. Remember what it’s like to feel joy. If the person’s joy seems shallow, conditional, or misguided, no problem! After all, when you rejoice with the child who has just brushed her teeth by herself, you aren’t concluding that she will never attain anything else. Remember that your withholding of sympathetic joy is extremely unlikely to change anyone’s behavior. As you rejoice with someone, include your sincere hope that they, too, have experienced joy and happiness that are independent of material wealth or pleasurable conditions.
Extending Upekkha: Equanimity
Sincere goodwill, compassion, and sympathetic joy are noble, but inevitably the beings you care about suffer and meet difficulty – if only when they encounter old age, disease, and death. The first three Brahmaviharas alone can be unsustainable if you’re too wrapped up in the changing fortunes of life. It can end up feeling like you’re on an emotional roller coaster – causing you to close your heart back up because it takes too much out of you to keep it open.
Equanimity is what gives you the ability to remain strong and keep your heart open no matter what happens. It’s difficult to describe the experience of this Brahmavihara, so what springs to my mind is a bunch of metaphors and descriptions, none of which exactly nail it: Keeping the largest possible perspective, creating a bigger container to hold everything, taking refuge in the unconditional truth of our lives, or finding ground to stand on that doesn’t depend on anything.
Practice in the other Ten Fields of Zen will help broaden your perspective and give you unconditional grounding, but to some extent you obtain greater equanimity simply with experience and maturity. You see dramas play out over and over. You witness good fortune come and go in your life and in the lives of others. You know first-hand how much everything changes. With enough experience, it becomes difficult to get too excited or upset about things because you see them from a larger perspective.
True equanimity doesn’t diminish your goodwill, compassion, or sympathetic joy in any way. For example, imagine a child comes to you in tears because they have just broken their favorite crayon. Hopefully, you would comfort and encourage the child with affection and sympathy. You would have compassion for their suffering, which is very real. However, you yourself would not be the slightest bit upset about the broken crayon. Unlike the child, you know not just that there are many other crayons, but that the world is full of wonders the child has not yet imagined. You know that five minutes from now the child will be happily playing with a different toy, that their sorrow is temporary. Because of your equanimity, you can remain strong, calm, and clear-headed for the child.
It’s absolutely essential to differentiate equanimity from indifference or pity. Equanimity is expansive and warm, and contains goodwill, compassion, and sympathetic joy in abundance; all it does is give those attitudes context. Indifference or pity can masquerade as equanimity because they allow you to remain untroubled, but that’s where the similarity ends. When you are indifferent, your heart is closed because of atrophy, defensiveness, or delusion. When you feel pity, you are unmoved because you judge the suffering of others to be unreal, self-inflicted, or due to their weakness of character. An indifferent response to the child crying over a broken crayon would be to ignore him; a response based in pity might involve laughing at or shaming him for his ridiculous reaction to such an unimportant event.
It’s also important to recognize that cultivating equanimity doesn’t mean you stop caring about people, or that you won’t experience intense grief during times of loss. If anything, equanimity allows your heart to remain open. At times your heart may break, but that breakage is experienced in a larger context and it’s less likely to overwhelm you. Just as a wave that seems large in a tiny pond will seem small in the ocean, the challenges of life can seem more manageable if you’re able to expand your sense of yourself, life, and time.
Stay tuned for part two of this chapter in the next episode!
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Endnotes
[i] Gunaratana, Henepola. Loving-Kindness in Plain English: The Practice of Metta (p. 125). Wisdom Publications. Kindle Edition.
[ii] “Yamakavagga: Pairs” (Dhp I), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.01.than.html.
[iii] Buddhaghosa, and Ñāṇamoli (translator). The Path of Purification: Visuddhimagga. Berkeley, Calif: Shambhala Publications, 1976.
[iv] Blofeld, John. Bodhisattva of Compassion: The Mystical Tradition of Kuan Yin. Boston, MA: Shambala Publications, 1988. Page 86.
