Metta
October 22, 2023

Close your eyes and focus on your breath. Know when it’s coming in; know when it’s going out. Notice where you feel it most clearly in the body. Focus your attention there and then ask yourself if it’s comfortable. If it’s not, you can change. Make it longer, shorter, faster, slower, deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter. See what feels good for the body right now, and what feels good for the mind.

This is one way of showing goodwill for yourself. We go through the day, breathing all the time. Nobody is forcing us to breathe in an uncomfortable way, and yet we let it happen. When we’re breathing in an uncomfortable way, our sense of the body gets uncomfortable. And when that’s uncomfortable, then we’re in an irritable mood and start lashing out at other people.

So for your own sake, and for the sake of others, start right here. Show goodwill to yourself, show goodwill to others, by breathing in a comfortable way.

When the Buddha talks about being helpful to yourself and helpful to others, it’s interesting. He says by observing the precepts—by not killing, stealing, etc.—you’re showing goodwill for yourself. You’re working for your own benefit. When you get other people not to kill or steal, engage in illicit sex, lie, or take intoxicants: That’s when you’re working for their benefit.

We all know that we should be spreading goodwill to all beings—ourselves and others—but it’s good to stop and think, “Well, what does that mean” Because sometimes that practice can get kind of dry. You know you’re supposed to have goodwill for everybody, but then somebody cuts in front of you in traffic, or people do something really dishonest around you. If you try to have goodwill for them, it comes out kind of dry and grudging—“May they be happy”—but you don’t really believe that. You just say it anyhow. But you’ve got to think, “Well, what does it mean for them to really be happy?” It would have to come from their skillful behavior.

So what you’re actually saying—if you really have goodwill for others—is, “If there’s any way I can help this person behave more skillfully, I’ll be happy to do it.” That’s something you can think—an attitude you can have toward everybody—without hypocrisy.

Otherwise you think about what they’ve done for you, and you may say, “Have gratitude for the fact that they made life difficult for me so I can become stronger,” but that’s not gratitude. Gratitude is for people who actually have worked for your own well-being, and you appreciate the fact that they went out of their way.

With goodwill, you want to make wish that other people behave skillfully. But because some people will not be interested in behaving skillfully, for those cases, you have to have equanimity, realizing that you can’t design the world the way you want it to be. If each of us could design the world to be the way we wanted to, it would be a very different world.

So we have goodwill for everybody in a potential form, and then you see where you can actualize it. You see other people are happy; you’re happy for them. You see other people are suffering; you feel compassion for them. All this is part of goodwill.

So remember that goodwill has to be done with understanding for it to be genuine. You can’t just generate a nice feeling for somebody, because that’s not what goodwill is, feeling nice about somebody or doing what they want. What it means is hoping that they will find true happiness—hoping that they would understand the causes for true happiness, and be willing and able to act on them.

The other day I was talking to an executive at a company. He was complaining about how he has a temper that tends to fly off the handle. He realizes that it’s not good for the atmosphere where he works. Yet because he has high standards, he wants everybody else to live up to his standards. And he was expecting me to say, “Well, try to lower your standards a bit. Don’t try to be so harsh on other people.” But my response instead was, “Make people want to live up to your standards. What can you do to accomplish that? Obviously flying off the handle is not working. You’ve got to find something else. So put a little thought into what you can do to raise people’s standards.”

Of course you have to set a good example by having high standards yourself. This is why we take the precepts every week, every week, to remind you that this is the baseline for being a human being. For a lot of people, it’s hard even to meet the baseline. But if we’re serious about our happiness, we have to take this as our baseline. Everything else has to build on this for it to be solid and lasting. For the happiness we want to be solid and lasting, we have to build it on our precepts—on our behavior—being skillful in all situations, even when it’s difficult—which is why we have to have goodwill for all beings even when it’s difficult—especially when it’s difficult.

As the Buddha said, even if bandits were sawing you up in little pieces with a two-handled saw, even in a case like that, you should have goodwill for them. To say nothing of people who are not sawing you to pieces but are doing things you don’t like, or that you feel are wrong. You still have to have goodwill in all situations because only then can you trust yourself to behave in a skillful way that’s for your own good.

Then, when you’re looking after your own good in this wise way, it’s a lot easier to look after the good of other people too. That’s how your goodwill becomes a perfection: when it really is sincere, really is all around and is really done with understanding. So it’s no longer grudging. Your goodwill isn’t grudging; your gratitude isn’t dry. It’s sincere and heartfelt.