Notes on True Love
Love is usually considered to be something between people, or as Thay suggests, between people and hamburgers. But the four immeasurable minds aren’t traditionally presented in that way. Here is the stock formulation found across the early sutras:
He meditates, spreading a heart full of love to pervade the first quarter, and the second, and the third, and the fourth. In the same way above, below, across, everywhere, all around, he spreads a heart full of love to fill the whole world—abundant, expansive, limitless, free of enmity and ill will.
This formulation is usually repeated with the other three of the four immeasurable minds: compassion, joy, and equanimity. In the early buddhist texts, not much more elaboration is given on this practice. Loving kindness gets the honor of its own sutra, and I highly recommend reading it. Equanimity gets a little more play as one of the seven factors of awakening. Joy and compassion are left almost entirely to the commentarial tradition for elaboration. If you want to know what the buddha himself thought of these practices, you’re out of luck. What is clear is that these were widespread practices in the earliest period of buddhist teaching.
In the spirit of a child who can find hours of entertainment with an ordinary stick, I think there is a lot to get out of this very sparse presentation of the practice of true love, as Thay calls it. Set an interval timer that will make a sound every five minutes, and do a 20-minute meditation on the four immeasurable minds:
- Loving Kindness – Make your wish for wellbeing something that pervades all space, or if that seems too lofty, make it something that accompanies your awareness of the space around you. Fully embody this goodwill for the entire duration of the in and out breath.
- Compassion – Do the same with your desire to relieve suffering.
- Joy – Do the same with joy.
- Equanimity – Do the same with your dedication to freedom. This is a special case that requires a little clarification: it is most important to wish all things to be free from having to comply with your wishes, your attachments, your aversions. Equanimity is the opposite of grasping, which is why Thay translates it as letting go.
If you don’t have much time, you can set a shorter interval. But early on in the process, you need to be realistic with yourself. It may take several minutes to settle into the cultivation of one or another of these qualities. As you develop some confidence, you can try a 16, 12, 8, or 4 minute version of this meditation. If you can complete the meditation in four minutes, you will certainly never have an excuse for skipping a day. When you have practiced this meditation enough, you will find that the duration of one breath is more than enough time to bring each of these qualities into full flower in the garden of the mind.
There are a lot of interesting elaborations on this practice in later buddhist teaching, some of which Thay draws upon in the chapter, but I’m going to stop here where the buddha stopped.
A note on the text: Thay mixes two separate concepts of joy from the nikayas in this chapter: mudita, the third of the four immeasurable minds, and piti, one of the early jhana factors (a factor of mind that arises as the mind begins to enter into powerful concentration.) The section about joy being more mental and happiness being more bodily is not something connected to mudita in any buddhist tradition save Plum Village. I won’t go more into this here, but when we study the sixteen exercises of mindful breathing we’ll have a chance to return to it.
