Unscarred

We tend to think of metta, goodwill, as being a soft state of mind. But the images for metta in the Canon are very strong. One is like the head of a spear. Just as it’s hard to bend a spear with your bare hands, in the same way, it’s hard to harm a person, or to derange the mind of a person, who’s developed goodwill. It’s a mental strength.

The Thai ajaans also talk of it as a strength.

Ajaan Lee was in the forest one time, and an elephant in rut came into the clearing where he was sitting at the foot of a tree. Now, an elephant in rut is somebody you don’t want to mess with. Even if you don’t mess with them, they mess with you. Ajaan Lee’s first impulse was to climb the tree to get away. But as he put his hand on the tree, a voice inside him said, “If you’re afraid to die, you’re going to keep on dying.” So he went back, sat down in meditation, faced the elephant with his eyes open, and just spread lots of goodwill. He said he made his goodwill as strong as he could. The elephant stopped for a minute, flickered its ears up and down, and then went away.

Another time, Ajaan Lee was out on the edge of the ocean, in a forest, with a lot of laypeople, and he saw a huge cloud of mosquitoes coming in off the ocean. So he said, “Okay, everybody, put your umbrella tents up. We’re going to fight off these mosquitoes with metta and no holds barred.” It may sound strange to us, and I think he was being humorous at the same time, but still, the mosquitoes went away.

So when your goodwill is really strong, it may not protect you physically, but it does protect your mind. That’s the important thing. If you have ill will for others, and you act on that ill will, that becomes a wound in your mind. Over time, it either stays open, or else it gets hardened with scar tissue. Either way, it’s not good for the mind. When you think back on the things you did out of ill will, it takes a lot of the strength out of your mind. So you should always have goodwill for others.

And remember what the Buddha said about how you help others. Not so much by holding the precepts; you help yourself when you hold to the precepts. It’s when you get other people to hold to the precepts—that’s when you’re helping them. So if you’re wishing for somebody to be happy, basically you’re wishing, “May you hold to the precepts.” Keep that in mind. In that way, it’s a lot easier to spread goodwill to people who are really difficult, who are doing a lot of evil in the world.

You can’t say that you’ve never done evil yourself, because you don’t know in the long past that you’ve been coming and going, coming and going, what you’ve been doing. But in spite of whatever bad things you’ve done in the past, you’ve been able to lift the level of your mind. So in the same way you want other people to lift the level of their minds.

If that’s your attitude toward them, then your mind is strong, your goodwill is strong. You have something inside that’s not wounded—and you want to maintain that sense of not wounding your own mind. Because in the end, everybody’s going to die. The Buddha’s image was of fish fighting for water in a stream that’s drying up. The problem is, no matter who wins the battle and gets the most water, they’re all going to die anyhow.

So you don’t want to die with bad karma. You want to make sure that your karma is good; your precepts are solid. In that way, you leave this world unscarred. The same with your goodwill: Make sure your goodwill is solid, and the mind is unscarred wherever it goes.