Wrapping up

Wrapping Up

This course has been an opportunity for you to begin to integrate the Metta Sutta into your life and practice by investigating the original language of the sutta and understanding its message directly.

In the Metta Sutta the Buddha:

teaches how a wise and skillful person— a person who wishes to progress toward the goal of awakening — would hold themselves in the world, describing an ethical base both a strategy for attaining the goal of awakening as well as an expression of the quality of one’s character.
offers guidance in practicing loving-kindness meditation — cultivating the state of wishing well for all beings — by offering encouragement and guidance on how one should hold oneself while practicing the meditation and by stirring us to develop a boundless mind to all beings, to the entire world.
teaches that the attainment of wisdom — purification of view and the ability to see clearly — arises from diligent meditation practice developed upon a firm foundation of virtue.

Just as when offered to the monks in the forest 2500 years ago, the Metta Sutta provides a theme for meditation that gives rise to one of the most beautiful and fundamentally wholesome states of mind of which we are capable.

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Suggested tuition: sliding scale: $15 - $25

Continuing your study of metta

In the Metta Sutta the Buddha describes metta practice as “divine abiding” (brahma vihara). You can study the brahma viharas in Liberating the Heart: The Brahma Viharas, an Ashoka course taught by Sharon Salzberg, guiding teacher, Insight Meditation Society.