Nanavira Thera on metta

I have just received your letter. It may be said, perhaps, that mettā is recommended by the Buddha for getting rid of anger, and that anger normally arises in our dealings with other people, and that it is therefore in our dealings with other people that mettā is best practised. It is most certainly true that we have need of mettā in our dealings with other people; but the trouble is this: before we can be in a position to have mettā we have first to know what mettā is, and second to have it at our command. Now, just as it is possible to practise ānāpānasati in the presence of other people when one has already become skilled in it by oneself, so it is possible to practise mettā in the presence of others only when one has practised it a great deal when alone. And just as the worst conditions for practising ānāpānasati are the noise and bustle of other people, so it is with mettā. Until you are able to practise either ānāpānasati or mettā in solitude you will never succeed in company—the obstacles are far too great.

For example, suppose there is someone you dislike, and in whose presence you become angry: unless you are already able to prevent anger from arising when you think of him in his absence (which needs much practice), you will have no chance at all of getting rid of the anger that arises when you actually meet him. Once anger takes possession of you there is very little you can do except to stop it from finding expression in words or deeds, and to allow it to subside; it is far too late to start practising mettā. But if you thoroughly practise mettābefore you meet such a person, then it is possible that anger will not arise when you do meet him. Having mettā in your dealings with other people consists in having mettābefore you deal with them, that is, in solitude—once you start dealing with them you will have little opportunity of attending to mettā (or if you do attend to mettā it will interfere in your dealings just as attending to your in-and out-breaths takes your mind away from the matter in hand).

You might, however, be thinking that, whereas ānāpānasati concerns only myself since it is a matter of watching my own breaths and not somebody else’s, mettā on the contrary concerns other people, since it is a question of my relationship with other people and of my attitude towards them. And you might think that it follows from this that the presence of other people is either an advantage or even absolutely necessary for the practice of mettā. In a certain sense this is true: you cannot practise mettā towards other people unless they are in some way present—but the presence of other people does not imply that their bodies must be present. I do not mean that their “spirit” is present while their body is absent (which is a mystical confusion of thought), but simply that “other people” is a fundamental structure of our conscious constitution.

Let me give an illustration. It happens to all of us that upon some occasion when we are doing something perhaps rather shameful (it might be simply when we are urinating or excreting, or it might be when we are peeping through a keyhole or something like that) and we believe we are alone and unobserved, we suddenly hear a slight sound behind us and we immediately have the unpleasant idea “I am being watched.” We turn round and look and find nobody there at all. It was only our own guilty conscience. Now this is an indication that in order to have a relationship with other people we do not need other peoples’ bodies: we are conscious of other people (at least implicitly) all the time, and it is this consciousness that we have to attend to when we practise mettā.

When we practise mettā we are developing and gradually changing our attitude towards other people; and we always have an attitude towards other people whether their bodies are present or not. The only thing a (living) body does when we meet one is to be the occasion for the consciousness, “This is another person.” And if we have already been practising mettā and have acquired an un-angry attitude towards other people, then when we actually meet another person our attitude towards him will be correct right at the beginning, and no anger will arise. It is only when we are already disposed to anger that we get angry when we meet someone; and if we are disposed to mettā (through long practise in solitude, on our consciousness of other people whose actual bodies are absent) we have mettā in our dealings with them.

Suttas on mettā →