Teaching of the Month – Cultivating the Wholesome

by Prajna Lorin Piper

In Buddhism, the brahma viharas, or the four heavenly abodes, are the individual qualities of metta (kindness), compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity. These would be the four mind states, if you will, where enlightened beings dwell. They aren’t actually heavenly realms, up in the sky, they’re maybe what we call states of being, where the heavenly beings, figuratively at least, hang out. You can understand the idea that an awakened being doesn’t hang out in mind states of ill will or grasping or agitation or torpor or doubt. They would dwell in the wholesome, the lovely states.

The first one, metta, commonly translated as loving kindness or good will or benevolence or friendliness is the basis for them all, and equanimity, often considered to be the equivalent of nirvana, is referred to as the crown. I once heard someone ask a spiritual teacher how to practice equanimity and the teacher was actually kind of flummoxed. He said maybe, after a while, just by realizing how exhausting it is to be teeter-tottering back and forth between one mood and another, one would give it up and go for balance.

It was interesting to me because I’d often wondered the same thing. If equanimity is the equivalent of nirvana, enlightenment, well, you can’t really tell people precisely how to practice enlightenment. But we can also look at it another way. If metta is the basis for the other qualities, and we all know, without a doubt, what kindness feels like, when it’s present and when it’s not, then we can simply practice kindness. This is both humbling and immediately liberating. We can know what we’re about, in the same way as the Dalai Lama, when he said, “My religion is kindness.”

The other obvious situation for cultivating the brahma viharas is in sitting practice, in meditation. We learn to sit with the unpleasant – the unpleasant sensations, the feelings, the moods and the mental processes – and then we learn to sit with the pleasant sensations, feelings moods and mental processes. And we learn to sit with the neutral. We cultivate an attitude of kindness, of friendliness, and we get more skillful in how we respond to what arises, to meet the unpleasant with compassion and the pleasant with appreciation and to stay balanced with what arises, not to contract or reject or ignore or chase after it.

In Buddhist practice, this is aided by mindfulness and effort, two of the cultivations of the Buddha’s 8 fold path. Wise mindfulness minds and cares – it’s aware of what we’re doing and knows if it’s healthy or unhealthy, if it will lead to more suffering or not. Wise effort is our response to that – we make the effort to abandon the unwholesome and cultivate the wholesome, moment after moment.

In truth, the whole path works together. In my last retreat with Christina Feldman, one of the teachers I admire most, she asked us “Do you have confidence in the cultivation of the lovely qualities as a path to liberation or do you think something else has to happen first?” I know that early in my spiritual practice I definitely thought something else had to happen, and that that metta was just some sort of fluffy side offering to sweeten things up. But as I mature in my practice, I incline more and more to the cultivation of the brahma viharas as a direct path, beginning with kindness.