Metta is Not for Wimps

An hour and a half before sunrise on election day, I open the garage door and begin to chant. It has become habit, on my short walk to the yoga shala, to recite an homage to the Buddha and the five precepts in Pali, followed by a melodic invocation of the bodhisattva of compassion’s name in Chinese. After the third sambuddhassa, I spot a flash of brown fur. Many mornings at this hour, a bunny bounds across the empty street toward the grassy park. Today’s rabbit, gently illuminated by the lights of the corner gas station, is still—almost close enough to touch.

I pause in silent greeting before continuing on, past the parking lot (I undertake the practice of refraining from killing; from stealing, from sexual misconduct), the sports bar (from lying; from intoxicants), the Ann Arbor Art Center advertising their latest exhibit with a photo of the 44th president: right arm outstretched, rainbow shooting from his palm, preparing to leave Kingston, Jamaica on Air Force One (Namo dabei guanshiyin pusa).

I’ve just sung the third round of Guanyin’s name—one more street crossing and I’ll be at the shala—when I see a person walking briskly along a perpendicular alley, heading my way. I recognize him right away, from an online neighborhood forum I’d read several months ago. Snippets from the 200-comment-long conversation flash in my mind: once-gentle teen, over two decades living on the streets with mental illness, recent bouts of unprovoked aggression.

“As you’re hugging this person, whose reality is unfathomably different from your own, you might have the thought that not all is gloom and doom.”

As pusa dies from my lips, fear and dread flood through me. Will he try to punch me? The streets are eerily empty for a weekday morning. Who would hear my cries for help?

“Ma’am, ma’am!” the man shouts, blocking my path.  

I stop, fists clenched in the empty pockets of my raincoat. I’m ready to fight. 

“Is there a Buddhist story that’s especially meaningful to you?” poet Shin Yu Pai asks me over the phone the day before the election. 

“Just one?” I stammer, hoping to buy more time. 

I think of the forest spirits who are none too pleased when hundreds of the Buddha’s disciples enter their grove. What a disruption to our daily lives! Surely this is just a one-time inconvenience? But no, the monks are back the next day, and the next. Two weeks later, they’re still there. The forest spirits concoct a plan. 

The monks are suddenly stricken by coughing, sneezing, and demonic voices. They see bodiless heads and headless bodies in the trees around them. How can they possibly practice in this frightening and inhospitable place? They flee the grove and return to the Buddha for guidance. 

The Buddha says they should not have entered the grove without a weapon. He will give them a weapon.

If we could build a cosmic scale to weigh the aggregate mass of violence and suffering in the world, what would it read? It’s hard not to feel that it’s all become so much heavier than four years ago. Sadness, distrust, fear, and anger have accreted into grief, cynicism, horror, and rage; are fermenting into anguish, paranoia, panic, and vengeance. What scale can measure the devastation wrought by more than 110 armed conflicts, by war and genocide and weather disaster and polarization so extreme it severs friendships and shatters families and cleaves apart nations?

Four years ago, I waited for election results with Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World. In this poetic essay, 13th-century Japanese Buddhist monk Kamo-no-Chomei offers reflections on decades of societal upheaval and widespread calamity:

with often troubled mind,
I struggled on for thirty years
In this unkind world. 

In his fifties, Chomei built the ten-foot square hut from which he would write Hojoki. Living as a recluse, he observes: 

Reality depends
upon your mind alone.
If your mind is not at peace
What use are riches?
The grandest hall will not satisfy. 

Since moving from California to Michigan last year, I’ve biked through several neighborhoods within a ten-mile radius of my downtown condo. Usually there’s a consensus of political yard signs within a given locality, though on a longer ride one afternoon, I find a bloom of Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz lawn signs, dense as wildflowers. The poster equivalent of a pair of concert stages set too close together, each one blasting at ear-splitting volume.

Rereading Hojoki this election cycle, I linger over these passages, perhaps because I now live in a place with seasons:

In autumn
The voices of evening cicadas
fill the ear.

They seem to grieve 
this husk of a world.

Then in winter—
snow!
It settles
just like human sin
and melts,
in atonement

Across Buddhist traditions, rituals of atonement and repentance offer embodied methods for contemplate the workings of greed, hatred, and delusion in our lives. The detailed confessions in the lengthy Cambodian Buddhist poem “Absolving All Faults” are almost comedic at times: “When monks chanted sacred texts and preached the Dharma, I didn’t listen. Chin in my palm, I chatted with my neighbors, thinking of other places.” Once on the other side of the equation as a fully ordained monk, our narrator schools his novices with a self-righteous approach that will later join his litany of remorse:

In my anger, I snapped at them, my face all red.
I glared down at my students, hoping they’d beat
their ignorance

I don’t have a yard, so you won’t find any lawn signs in front of my home, but to be honest, when I think about the people who would attend that candidate’s rallies, I feel like screaming until I’m red—or should I say blue?—in the face. 

The repentant Cambodian monk’s prescriptions are kindred with Chomei’s:

“Ma’am!” The shouting man reaches his arms toward me. My shoulders tighten.

He tells me he hasn’t had a shower in two days, and he’s hungry. Could I give him a bit of money for a shower, for food?

I furrow my face in regret. I explain that I’m on my way to yoga and don’t have anything on me. No wallet, no keys, no phone. 

You’re going to yoga? he asks. Do you have your yoga mat?

No, because I keep it at the studio. 

You could get cash at the ATM? We could go to the gas station to get a sandwich?

I wish I had my ATM card or some cash on me, I say. I reach my empty palms toward him and feel an ache in my belly for the pangs he must feel in his.

We arrive at the next thought at the same time.

“Well, if you don’t live too far away, maybe you could go home?” / “Tell you what: I’m going to dash home and come straight back.”

“Ok, I’ll be right here. Will you be a minute? Two minutes? Five?”

I chuckle. “I don’t think I can run that fast. Give me five.”

The weapon the Buddha offered to the monks was the Metta Sutta. They chanted upon entering the grove, their well-wishing evoking friendliness from the forest spirits, who turn from tormentors to champions of their cause. Metta, then, is a weapon for protection rather than harm.  

Whenever I think of this story, I remember something my late friend Aaron Lee marveled over toward the end of his life: “Metta is not for wimps!”

I didn’t end up telling Shin Yu about the forest spirits. Instead, I invoked the famous story about mass-murderer-turned-patron-saint-of-pregnant-women Angulimala. Here too, a connection to Aaron. Between the last presidential election and this one, I joined a group of his friends for Meditation Study Group (Aaron would definitely approve of the acronym). We read Bhikkhu Sujato’s English translation from Pali of the Angulimalasutta (MN 86), with the option of comparing it to a similar but parallel Chinese sutra (Ekottarāgama 38.6). As I slowly picked my way through the Chinese, a backstory for Angulimala’s motives and actions began to emerge. Angulimala become not just ruthless killer but also myopically devoted student obeying a teacher’s instructions to complete his students through a necklace of severed fingers. 

When a sprinting Angulimala fails to catch the sauntering Buddha, he comes to a standstill and shouts, “Stop, stop, ascetic!”

The Buddha, still walking, says: “I’ve stopped, Angulimala—now you stop.”

I wonder if this is the first time Angulimala is addressed without fear. I wonder how we can cultivate the power to overwhelm violence without violence.  

The Angulimala Paritta is a protective spell for safe childbirth This sense of paritta as a kind of magic spell that guards against harm is first present in the Khandha Paritta. This protection of loving-kindness begins with metta for the four snake kingdoms. It continues:

From me there is mettā for those with no feet;
For those with two feet, there is mettā from me;
From me there is mettā for those with four feet;
For those with many feet, there is mettā from me.

May those with no feet not hurt me;
May those with two feet not hurt me;
May those with four feet not hurt me;
May those with many feet not hurt me.

May all beings, all those with life;
May all who have become, all in their entirety;
May all see what is good;
May suffering not come to anyone.

I ran home and grabbed an apple, a handful of mandarins, an energy bar, a couple napkins, and some cash. I considered making a sandwich, but the bread was in the freezer and I didn’t think I could keep my five-minute promise if I took the time to toast it. Hurrying back, I took the shortcut through the alley, beneath the giant VOTE! banner featuring Uncle Sam in a familiar pose, pointer finger aimed like a shotgun. Human body, stove pipe hat—and a furry, whiskered cat face. The exclamation point after VOTE! featured a pawprint in place of the dot.

Before darting home, I’d asked his name, expecting to hear Theodore.*

“I’m Theo.” He offered his hand. 

“I’m Chenxing.” Theo’s palm was warm and raspy, like this morning’s breeze and the leaves they’d scattered to the ground. 

“Are you Chinese? Korean?” There were time and places when this question might have grated, but not here, not now. 

“Chinese.”

“Xiexie! Chen-… Shen-…?” 

“You can call me Zina.” 

“I’ll be here, Zina!”

Five minutes ago, I had feared a man’s presence. As I rounded the corner beneath Feline Sam, I prayed not to be met with absence. 

And there was Theo, leaning against my favorite planter, painted just this summer with jewel-toned frogs and lotuses. 

“Theo!”

“Zina!” 

We flung our arms to the still-dark sky like we were rooting for the same team and that team had just won the national championship. 

And once your arms are like that, you might as well just embrace the other person, even if the sun has not yet risen, there on Liberty Street. And in that moment, standing flush with a line of bare trees draped in holiday lights, the two of you might just join their ranks to become a beam of vulnerable brightness.

And as you’re hugging this person, whose reality is unfathomably different from your own but with whom you share an appreciation for sandwiches and showers, you might have the thought that not all is gloom and doom, even if tomorrow morning when you arrive at the shala at 5:45am your heart will feel awfully heavy, and the unreadable number on the cosmic scale will seem terribly high. 

“Do you believe in Christ?” Theo asked before we parted.

I considered how to respond simply but truthfully. “I believe in Buddha, and Christ, and many things.”

“Buddha! You know, he’s a prophet in Islam.”

I smiled. 

“Ok, go go go, go to yoga,” he urged.

“You take good care, Theo.”

“No, I take better care of you than I do myself. And you take care of me.” 

An inversion of the Sedaka Sutta, I thought. But I wasn’t going to argue with him. 

Theo surprised me again with his parting words.

 “You are my prophet.”

Fifteen minutes prior, I thought I was meeting Angulimala on the road. I was wrong and not wrong. I forgot that Angulimala, like all of us, is more than the harm we’ve caused in the past. In Theo, I met a bodhisattva, a prophet, a Christ, a Buddha. I met someone who reminded me that if I must take up weapons, I should consider the disarming force of metta. If I must kill, could try vanquishing the habit of judging others by what I read about them online. 

*A pseudonym