Metta Sutta

The Metta Sutta is a short Pali text, forty lines or so, recited daily across the Theravada world and used as protection, as a meditation instruction, and as a statement of ethics simultaneously.

It begins practically: this is what should be done by one skilled in goodness, be capable, upright, straightforward, easy to speak to, gentle, not proud, contented, unburdened with duties. Then it turns to the aspiration: may all beings be happy and secure. Then it does something structurally interesting. It enumerates categories in pairs designed to exhaust the field, whatever living beings there are, weak or strong, long or short, large or middling, seen or unseen, near or far, born or seeking birth, so that no being can fall outside the wish.

The image at the centre is the one everyone remembers: as a mother would protect her only child with her life, so should one cultivate a boundless heart toward all beings.

The exhaustive enumeration is the technique rather than the rhetoric. Metta as a meditation practice works by extending an attitude first to easy objects and then deliberately to difficult ones, and the sutta's pairs are a procedure for making sure the extension does not quietly stop at people one likes.

The commentarial tradition supplies a setting: monks meditating in a forest were harassed by tree spirits, went to the Buddha, and were given this to recite, after which the spirits became friendly. It is used as a protective text on that basis.

The dating here is straightforward in a way that little else in this collection is.

The text appears in the Sutta Nipata, which is generally regarded as among the oldest strata of the Pali canon on linguistic grounds, it preserves metrical and grammatical forms archaic relative to the prose discourses, and again in the Khuddakapatha, a short collection used for teaching novices. Nothing about it is disputed in the way authorship and composition are disputed for most of the material here. It is early Buddhist, it is canonical in the Theravada, and versions of it exist in other early Buddhist textual traditions.

Its modern reception has been unusually smooth as well. It translates well, requires no doctrinal background to be moved by, and contains nothing a secular reader must bracket. It has consequently become one of the two or three Buddhist texts most likely to be encountered in a Western context, read at funerals, printed on cards, and taught in secular mindfulness programmes that otherwise avoid canonical material.

There is a small cost to that. The sutta's opening lines are conditions: it addresses one who has already undertaken a particular discipline, and the list of qualities at the start is not decorative preamble but the ground the aspiration stands on. Extracting the mother-and-child image alone, which is what usually happens, produces a sentiment rather than an instruction.

The Pali is also more austere than most English versions suggest. The sustained warmth is genuinely there; the sweetness is often added in translation.