May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness,
May they be free from suffering and the root of suffering,
May they not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering,
May they dwell in the great equanimity,
Free from passion, aggression and prejudice.
This is an aspirational chant, known as the Four Immeasurables, that I’ve taken to reciting almost daily for four years. With this piece, I’m going to unpack it from the bottom up, starting with what the words mean before examining the meaning and message of this passage as a whole.
As ever with my reflective pieces, I do not think myself an expert nor a ‘knower’. I am merely a humble student of the dharma conducting what has become a meaningful and beneficial process in my personal practice. By taking what I’ve contemplated and challenging myself to put it down in a cohesive way, I am testing my understanding — how well I truly grasp a teaching as a lived experience, rather than just an academic study of a concept. I encourage the reader to ask questions, seek out further instructions, and conduct their own examination of this chant.
When I begin to contemplate any teaching I always start by examining the words in it. I might look into the translator or translation committee’s reasoning for choosing the words they did. I’ll look up definitions of the words and listen to how others in the Buddhist community use and define them. I also consider how I define a word — be it an examined or unexamined definition — and whether or not how I understand a word is a reflection of how it is commonly used versus how it is meant to be used, or something entirely different.
While ‘prejudice’, ‘aggression’ and ‘passion’, will be words with which most any English speaker is familiar, it would be wrong to assume that there is a universally known definition for each. Language—even a shared language—is arbitrary, and our experiences often influence how we understand certain words.
A dictionary definition of ‘prejudice’, for example, is ‘a preconceived opinion not based on reason or actual experience’. While there is nothing wrong with referencing this definition, what we read in a dictionary can fall short of capturing the complexity of language. If you ask someone to explain what prejudice is, they will likely do so through examples of how they have experienced or witnessed it. Most often it’s used synonymously with discrimination, but in the case of this chant, and in how I’ve seen it used and described throughout Buddhist teachings, it’s pointing to unexamined bias. Indeed, a common substitute and alternative translation is ‘ignorance’.
Personally, I prefer ‘ignorance’ over ‘prejudice’ as we often think of prejudice as a choice. Whether read as prejudice or ignorance, teachers emphasise that it is about delusion — conscious or not — and the wish to free all sentient beings of their delusions, however they may arise.
‘Aggression’ is such a common term in Buddhist teachings that it can seem like we totally get it. For my part I certainly did. I didn’t consider myself as someone who had a lot of aggression. I thought of it as very outward — brusque or harsh speech and violent actions. I was so convinced I understood what aggression was, I would tune out when listening to a teaching and the subject came up.
My prejudice (see what I did there?) was challenged one day when listening to a talk by Ani Pema. It was one I’d listened to many, many times before but this time I heard it in an entirely new way. I realised that aggression could be, and often is, incredibly subtle — disappointment in myself and others, for example, is a form of aggression.
The last word, ‘passion’ is an interesting one. It’s an emotive word that will mean many things to many people — the painter passionate about their work, the musician passionate about their music, the young lovers passionate about each other, the social activist passionate about change, the spiritual practitioner passionate about their path.
There is anything wrong or bad with being driven, falling deeply in love or experiencing intense highs in life. But passion often turns into clinging, which, when everything is impermanent, can and will cause us pain. When we are passionate about something we can become blind to the harm it might cause — our ignorance leading to aggression.
I came to appreciate this as an activist. When I was a teenager, I was pretty opinionated — something that probably goes without saying. I had a tendency to get righteously indignant about causes that meant a lot to me. This approach did little to educate and eradicate the prejudices of others. It mostly provoked a lot of anger and resistance, reinforcing other people’s patterns of ignorance and apathy (another aggressive aspect of human experience). No one likes to hear they are a bad person for buying a particular pair of shoes, but I was so passionately attached to a cause, I was ignorant to how ineffective my righteous indignation made me as an activist.
Of course, all three of these qualities: passion, aggression and prejudice, are human. We come by them honestly, and it’s not helpful to take an approach of ‘badding’ ourselves when we notice we have been hooked by them.
Which brings me to ‘dwelling in equanimity’. Equanimity is the path of the middle way. It is about cultivating a mind that doesn’t shut down around dualistic thinking, that groks genuine equality and can see the fullness of a situation. The great equanimity is sky-like mind, free of obscurations and the trappings of ego, able to discern the most skilful way forward in even impossible situations. It is free of the three poisons of passion, aggression and prejudice not because it rejects them or gets rid of them, but because it can see when they are arising and choose not to fall into habitual patterns of causing harm.
Taken together this chant is a heartfelt wish for all beings to achieve enlightenment, to see their inherent ‘Buddha-mind’ free of intense longing and attachment, hostility to the self or others and obscurations and biases. When we see with such clarity, we see that these three poisons are the root of suffering and freedom from them is the root of happiness.
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Originally published on Medium.
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