This day(25. 8. 2010) is the full moon day of Wa Khaung. We Buddhists regard the full moon day of Wa Khaung as an auspicious day of Metta (loving-kindness) (Metta A Khar Taw Nayt). Why do we Buddhists regard this day as the Metta (loving-kindness) Auspicious day? I am going to explain to my Dhamma fellows the reason why we Buddhists regard this day as an auspicious day of Metta (loving-kindness).
According to Suttanipata commentary of Kuddaka Nikaya, while residing at Jatavana monastary in Savatthi, the Buddha spoke Metta Sutta, with reference to the five hundred monks.On one occasion, the five hundred monks learnt meditation method under the Buddha. The Buddha taught the objects of meditation them according to their temperaments. As soon as they got the objects of meditation from the Buddha, they went to Himavanta Mountain to practise meditation and they went into monsoon retreat there. After that, some monks practised meditation under the trees and some monks engaged in the course of meditation inside the caves. When Vipassana meditation was practised by the monks, the spirits who had been living in the caves got out of caves and the spirits who were in the trees got down from the trees. They have done so for a long time. As a result of it, they got angry with them and made them frighten with the dreadful visible form, sound and foul odour. The monks who were being harassed by the ghosts could not continue to stay there. Thus, they went back to Jatavana monastery in Savatthi even a period of Vassa(War Twin Kar La). When the Buddha asked them “Why do you come back here during rainy season?” they explained to the Buddha their experiences. When the Buddha knew of it very well, He expounded them the Metta Sutta (Loving-kindness meditation) which can be loved and looked after by the spirits and gave them the object of Metta.
Having got it, they went back to Himalaya Mountain and went into the second monsoon retreat (Du Ti Ya War) there. And then, they cultivated the Metta meditation to all beings including the spirits who are living in the trees and caves. When the spirits knew that the five hundred monks were cultivating Metta meditation to all of them, they helped the five hundred monks to meditate easily. So the five hundred monks could practiced Metta meditation happily and easily. Through it (Metta meditation), they noticed the arising and disappearing of the five aggregates (Khan Dar Ngar Par ). As they kept meditating on the arising and disappearing of the five aggregates (Khan Dar Ngar Par ), they gradually attained the two high developedstages of Vipassana knowledge, namely Yathabhutanana (knowledge according to reality) and Nibbindanana(the knowledge of disgust); and eventually they gained the Arahattamagganana (Path knowledge) during rainy retreat. When we search for the reason why the five hundred monks attained to Arahants, it was because of the basic Metta meditation.That day which the Buddha taught the Metta Sutta the five hundred monks was the full moon day of Wa Khaung. That is why we Buddhists regard the full moon day of Wa Khaung as an auspicious day of Metta (loving-kindness) (Metta A Khar Taw Day). At an auspicious day of Metta, loving-kindness (the full moon day of War Khaung), we should practised Metta meditation.
The Meaning of Metta In this case, I am going to explain to you about Metta(loving-kindness) The term of Mettā has been translated as "loving-kindness," "friendliness," "benevolence," "amity," "friendship," "good will," "kindness," "love," "sympathy," and "active interest in others." It is one of the ten pāramitās of the Theravāda school of Buddhism, and the first of the four Brahmavihāras. The mettā bhāvanā ("cultivation of mettā") is a popular form of meditation in Buddhism. The object of mettā meditation is loving kindness (love without attachment). Traditionally, the practice begins with the meditator cultivating loving kindness towards themselves, then their loved ones, friends, teachers, strangers, enemies, and finally towards all sentient beings. Commonly, it can be used as a greeting or closing to a letter or note. Buddhists believe that those who cultivate mettā will be at ease because they see no need to harbour ill will or hostility. Buddhist teachers may even recommend meditation on mettā as an antidote to insomnia and nightmares. It is generally felt that those around a mettā-full person will feel more comfortable and happy too. Radiating mettā is thought to contribute to a world of love, peace and happiness. Mettā meditation is considered a good way to calm down a distraught mind by people who consider it to be an antidote to anger. According to them, someone who has cultivated mettā will not be easily angered and can quickly subdue anger that arises, being more caring, more loving, and more likely to love unconditionally. Recent neurological studies have shown that compassion meditation can increase one's capabilities for empathy by changing activity in brain areas and increase the subject's ability to understand the mental and emotional states of othersas well as deal more effectively with external stressors.
The Various kinds of way for Radiating Metta In the Khuddaka Nikaya's Paṭisambhidāmagga, traditionally ascribed to Ven. Sariputta, is a section entitled Mettākathā (Ps. 2.4, "Metta Instruction").In this instruction, a general formula (below, in English and Pali), essentially identical to the aforementioned Cunda Kammaraputta Sutta verse (especially evident in the Pali), is provided for radiating metta:
"May all beings be free from enmity, affliction and anxiety, and live happily." Sabbe sattā averā abyāpajjā anīghā sukhī attānaṃ pariharantu. In addition, this instruction categorizes twenty-two ways in which "the mind-deliverance of lovingkindness" (mettācetovimutti) can be radiated as follows: • five ways of "unspecified pervasion" (anodhiso pharaṇā): 6. all beings (sabbe sattā ) 7. all breathing things (sabbe pāṇā bhāvapariyāpannā) 8. all creatures (sabbe bhūtā bhāvapariyāpannā) 9. all persons (sabbe puggalā bhāvapariyāpannā) 10. all with a personality (sabbe attabhāvapariyāpannā) • seven ways of "specified pervasion" (anodhiso pharaṇā): 8. all women (sabbā itthiyo) 9. all men (sabbe purisā) 10. all Noble Ones (sabbe ariyā) 11. all non-Noble Ones (sabbe anariyā) 12. all deities (sabbe devā) 13. all humans (sabbe manussā) 14. all born in lower realms (sabbe vinipātikā) • ten ways of "directional pervasion" (disā-pharaṇā): 11. of the eastern direction (puratthimāya disāya) 12. of the western direction (pacchimāya disāya) 13. of the northern direction (uttarā disāya) 14. of the southern direction (dakkhīṇāya disāya) 15. of the eastern intermediate direction (puratthimāya anudisāya) 16. of the western intermediate direction (pacchimāya anudisāya) 17. of the northern intermediate direction (uttarā anudisāya) 18. of the southern intermediate direction (dakkhīṇāya anudisāya) 19. of the downward direction (heṭṭhimāya disāya) 20. of the upward direction (uparimāya disāya).
Moreover, the directional pervasions can then be applied to each of the unspecific and specific pervasions. For instance, after radiating metta to all beings in the east (Sabbe puratthimāya disāya sattā ...), one radiates metta to all beings in the west and then north and then south, etc.; then, one radiates metta to all breathing things in this fashion (Sabbe puratthimāya disāya pāṇā ...), then all creatures, persons,and so forth until such is extended for all those born in the lower realms.In the Metta Sutra, the Buddha has expounded the nature of love in Buddhism. ‘Just as a mother would protect her only child even at the risk of her own life, even so, let one cultivate a boundless heart towards all beings. Let his thoughts of boundless love pervade the whole world, above, below and across without any obstruction, without any hatred, without any enmity.’ If we can radiate Metta to all beings so, we are sure to get the benefits of radiation of Metta. The Benefits of Radiation of Metta He who practices ‘METTA’ sleeps happily & sleeps immediately on closing his eyes. As he goes to sleep with a loving heart, he awakes with an equally loving heart. He will not have bad dreams, either he falls into ‘ deep sleep’ or have pleasant dreams. He becomes dear to all human beings. As he loves other, so do others love him. He becomes dear to non-human beings as well. Animals are also attracted to him. He becomes immune from poison fire & weapons. These do not affect him. 'METTA’ leads to quick mental concentration. Invisible deities protect him because of the power of his ‘METTA’. ‘METTA’ tends to beautify his facial expressions. His face becomes serene. He dies peacefully. Even after death, his serene face reflects his peaceful death. Since a person with ‘METTA’ dies happily, he will be born in a blissful state. He will be born is a ‘Brahmin realm.’ I conclude my Dhamma message here while I admonish all of my Dhamma fellows “Please radiate your Metta to all beings from the full moon day of Wa Khaung(Metta A Khar Taw Nayt) onward if you want to get the benefits of radiation of Metta”. May all of my Dhamma fellows and all livingbeings be free from enmity, affliction and anxiety, and live happily!
According to the Buddha’s teaching, there are four kinds of action (Kamma). ျမတ္ဗုဒၶ၏ တရားေတာ္အရ ကံေလးမ်ိဳးေလးစားရွိပါေပ၏။ What are the four? ထိုကံေလးမ်ိဳးေလးစားဟူသည္အဘယ္နည္း? (1)There is dark action with dark result; မဲေသာအက်ိဳးကို ေပးတဲ့ အမဲကံ (2) There is bright action with bright result; ျဖဴေသာအက်ိဳးကို ေပးတဲ့ အျဖဴကံ (3) There is dark and bright with dark and bright result;အမဲအျဖဴႏွစ္မ်ိဳးလံုးေရာေပးတဲ့ အမဲအျဖဴကံ and (4) There is Path action ( Magga Kamma) that is neither dark nor bright with neither dark nor bright result, action that leads to the destruction of Action.အမဲအျဖဴႏွစ္မ်ိဳးလံုးေသာ အက်ိဳးကို ျဖတ္ေသာ အမဲအျဖဴမေရာေသာကံ (မဂၢကံ) Among them, first one is dark action with dark result. ထိုကံေလးမ်ိဳးတြင္ ပထမကံသည္ကား မဲေသာအက်ိဳးကို ေပး ေသာ အမဲကံျဖစ္သည္။ What is dark action with dark result? မဲေသာအက်ိဳးကိုေပးေသာ အမဲကံဟူသည္ကား အဘယ္နည္း? Here someone commits ten kinds of evil deed. ဒီေနရာတြင္ တစ္စံုတစ္ေယာက္သည္ အကုသိုလ္ဆယ္ပါးကို ၾကဴး လြန္တယ္၊ Having committed the ten kinds of evil deed, he reappears in unhappy worlds such as hell, Peta (ghost), animal.ထိုအကုသိုလ္ကံ ဆယ္ပါးကို ၾကဴးလြန္တဲ့အတြက္ေၾကာင့္ သူသည္ ငရဲ ျပိတၱာ တိရစၦာန္ဟူေသာဆင္းရဲေသာ ဘုံဌာနမ်ားမွာ ျဖစ္ရတယ္။ Here, I would like to explain the ten kinds of evil deed. ဒီေနရာတြင္အကုသိုလ္ကံဆယ္မ်ိဳးအေၾကာင္းကို အနည္းငယ္ရွင္းျပေပအံ့။ They are as follows:အကုသိုလ္ကံဆယ္မ်ိဳးဟူသည္ ေအာက္ပါအတိုင္းျဖစ္သည္။ (1) Killing any living being;သက္ရွိသတၱ၀ါတစ္ဦးဦး၏ အသက္ကို သတ္ျဖတ္ျခင္း (2) Stealing other persons’ belongings; အျခားသူမ်ား၏ ပိုင္းဆိုင္ေသာ ဥစၥာမ်ားကို ခိုးယူျခင္း and (3) Making sexual misconduct. ကာမဂုဏ္တို႔၌ မွားမွားယြင္းယြင္းက်င့္ျခင္း These three are called Kayakamma (bodily action).ထိုသံုးမ်ားကို ကာယကံသံုးပါးဟူ၍ ေခၚသည္။ (4) Telling lie;လိမ္ညာေျပာျခင္း (5) Slandering;ဂံုးတိုက္ျခင္း (6) Telling harsh works; and ၾကမ္းတမ္းေသာ စကားကို ေျပာျခင္း (7) Telling frivolous talk.အက်ိဳးမဲ့ေသာ စကားကို ေျပာျခင္း These four are called VacÊkamma (verbal action). ထိုေလးပါးကို ၀စီကံေလးပါဟုေခၚဆိုသည္။ (8)Greed;လိုခ်င္ျခင္း (9)Hatred; and ေဒါသၾကီးျခင္း (10) Wrong view.မွားယြင္းေသာ အယူ These three are called Manokamma (mental action). ထိုသံုးမ်ိဳးကို မေနာကံသံုးပါးဟုေခၚသည္။ These ten kinds of evil action are called Dasaakusalakamma. ထိုမေကာင္းေသာ ကံဆယ္ပါးကို ဒသအကုသလကမၼ ဟုေခၚသည္။ If someone commits these ten kinds of evil deed (dark action), he or she will reap dark result or evil result. တစ္စံုတစ္ေယာက္သည္ အကယ္၍ ထို အမဲကံျဖစ္ေသာ သို႔မဟုတ္ မေကာင္းေသာကံဆယ္ပါးကို လြန္ၾကဴးလွ်င္ သူသည္ သို႔မဟုတ္ သူမသည္ မဲေသာအက်ိဳးဆက္ကို သို႔မဟုတ္ မေကာင္းေသာ အက်ိဳးဆက္ကို ခံစားရမည္ျဖစ္သည္။ It is called dark action with dark result (Kanhakammakanhavipaka). ထိုအရာကို မဲေသာ အက်ိဳးကိုေပးေသာ အမဲကံ (ကဏွကမၼ ကဏွ၀ိပါက)ေခၚဆိုသည္။ To continue (ဆက္ရန္)
