Buddhist GeeksThe Grammar of Social Metta
Vince Fakhoury Horn on the grammar of social metta—why a metta phrase needs a wish and only optionally a subject, how Sharon Salzberg’s “pith metta” shortens the phrase once the wish starts coming true, and why open-heartedness is a byproduct of the practice rather than its purpose, so there is always more to aspire to.
💬 Transcript
Vince Horn: Today as we continue to unfold the social metta instructions I wanted to talk a little bit about the grammar of social metta, meaning the linguistic structure of how this practice works at least as far as I understand, which is very much an emerging understanding. And I think talking about grammar with this stuff is really helpful, because as one of my mentors Ken Wilber often points out, you know, you can be a completely fluent speaker without having any understanding of the grammar of the language you’re speaking.
In fact that’s how all of us learn language, unless you have like linguistic professor parents or something, who are teaching you grammar early. You know, we all learn to speak without knowing the rules of the language. And then later in school, you know, we go to school and still most of us don’t learn the grammar of the language we’re speaking.
And so, to know the grammar, to know how something works is not required to do it. But it’s very much helpful if you’re going to try to help other people do it, or if you wanna have a deeper understanding of what you’re doing. So I wanted to just share a little bit of sort of the grammar here of what we’re working with.
At the heart of how we’re working with social metta, and I think this is because it’s an out-loud practice, and out-loud practices seem to really be aided by words. We’re working with a phrase, this metta phrase, and we started with a very simple phrase: may it arise.
May loving awareness arise. May compassionate presence arise. May happiness arise. Whatever the it is, working with a quality of presence or of a dimension of the open heart and inviting it to arise. That’s a simple phrase and it has in that phrase a wish. This is the kind of one of the key parts of the metta phrase, is there’s a wish embedded in the phrase.
There’s something that we’re wishing for, in this case, compassionate presence. Now I’d say at the very minimum, a metta phrase has to have a wish. There has to be something that we’re wishing for. That’s kind of what makes it a metta phrase. It’s a well wish. It’s a prayer using other language.
Metta is Buddhist prayer in a way. And the other thing that often can show up in the basic structure grammar of social metta, but it doesn’t have to, as you can see with the phrase “may it arise,” is that there can often and is often a subject as well in the phrase. That is a person or group of people or category of beings that we are sharing that wish with.
So, instead of just “may it arise,” where there’s not a clear sense of the subject, it could be for everyone, it could just be for me. Who knows what is going on in the interiority of someone who’s saying that phrase. It’s kind of hard to tell. But when we actually include a subject, and we are using things like pronouns, or we’re coming up with particular categories.
For instance, you know, with the situation, the political unfolding in Russia, we could — “May all Russian people be happy.” And really, you could call to mind a particular group or category of beings. “May all animals be happy and healthy.” There’s really no limit there in terms of how we parse out who it is that we’re wishing this for.
But that’s the subject, the who, in this practice. And so I’d say that metta phrases have to at least have a wish in them, and then can also have a subject. In a sense, that’s the elementary grammar of a social metta practice that include that as a kind of minimum.
Then you can build, you know, more complex structures and sentences and things. You can rotate through phrases. You can pick phrases. You can go through a sequence of different subjects with a particular intention in mind. You know, these practices are very versatile in terms of how you can apply them.
So that’s why we’re focusing on the core grammar. If we understand the elemental aspect of this, it becomes easier to build. Once you understand how a sentence works, it’s much easier to write a paragraph and then a book, and so forth. So yeah, just a little bit about that.
And this is important, too, for our practice today. We’re going to explore the practice of pith metta, which I first learned about this through Sharon Salzberg and working with her instructions on loving-kindness practice. And she would often share with people and suggest that say you’re on a deep metta retreat, and you’re doing a lot of metta practice. And here I’d say, or if you’re doing social metta and it starts to happen, because social metta in some ways maybe can be like the equivalent of being on a retreat. You start to notice that you are actually feeling it. The wish becomes reality. You know, your wish comes true, and you’re suddenly not just wishing for compassionate presence to arise, but you are feeling compassionate presence, or you are being compassionate presence.
In that case, Sharon would suggest that having this whole phrase can become clunky and get in the way of the living experience of the practice. And in that case, she said, feel free to shorten the phrase down to its pith. What’s the essential wish, the one or two usually words that points to what you’re wishing for.
And you could just shorten it down to the pith in those cases, and just say happy or compassionate presence or just compassion, whatever feels the most pithy. The most kind of simple. And so in this practice too, in social metta, we found it really helpful to introduce the pith phrase. And that is essentially just working with the wish, just being with the wish.
Here what’s important, I think, to highlight is that sometimes metta practice, we are aspiring, you know, we’re wishing, and sometimes we are realizing.
It moves from inclining the mind toward the open heart to being open-hearted. And important, I think, to recognize those two different possibilities because the purpose of the practice isn’t to be open-hearted. It is actually to incline toward open-heartedness. And if it arises, great. That’s beautiful, and it’s a byproduct of doing the practice. But it’s not the purpose of the practice. It’s a result that can happen from doing the practice. So, even if you’re using the full phrase or you’re just working with the pith, it’s always possible to share it in a way where it’s more of an aspiration.
It’s like, may compassionate presence arise. I’m not feeling it. I don’t even know what it is. I sure wish it were here. That’s fine. Like, that’s actually totally legit to practice metta in that way, to wish for it to arise. It’s also totally legit if it arises to just say “compassionate presence.”
Or even you can say, may compassionate presence arise, and you can feel it. It may have arisen here, but has it arisen everywhere for everyone throughout all space and time? Well, if not, there’s more. There’s more to aspire to. And I think that’s always the case with metta.
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