The Four Immeasurables

The four immeasurables (appamanna), also called the divine abodes (brahmavihara), are loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. They are "immeasurable" because they are cultivated without limit of object, extended to all beings without exception, and "divine abodes" because to dwell in them is said to be to dwell as the gods of the Brahma world dwell.

Metta, loving-kindness: the wish that beings be well and happy. Its classical text is the Metta Sutta, with its image of a mother protecting her only child and its instruction to radiate the attitude in every direction without obstruction or enmity.

Karuna, compassion: the wish that beings be free of suffering, described as the trembling of the heart at another's pain.

Mudita, sympathetic or appreciative joy: gladness at another's good fortune. It is the least familiar of the four in Western moral vocabulary, which has a widely used word for its opposite, the German Schadenfreude, and no ordinary word for the thing itself.

Upekkha, equanimity: evenness of mind toward all beings. It completes the other three rather than cancelling them, by removing the partiality and attachment that would otherwise confine them to those one already favours.

Each is taught with a "near enemy" and a "far enemy", a distinction that gives the scheme much of its practical precision. The far enemy is the obvious opposite, hatred for loving-kindness, cruelty for compassion, envy for sympathetic joy, craving or resentment for equanimity. The near enemy is the counterfeit that resembles the virtue closely enough to be mistaken for it: sentimental attachment posing as loving-kindness, pity or grief posing as compassion, and cold indifference posing as equanimity. It is the near enemies that the meditation manuals treat as the real problem. Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga sets out the classical method of cultivation, beginning with oneself, then a benefactor, then a neutral person, then a person one finds difficult, and finally extending in all directions without distinction.

The four are not exclusively Buddhist: they appear in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (1.33) as the attitudes to be cultivated toward the happy, the suffering, the virtuous and the wicked respectively. In Mahayana they serve as the ground of bodhicitta, and loving-kindness practice has become one of the most widely adopted elements of Buddhist meditation in secular settings, where it has also been the subject of a substantial body of psychological research.

Loving-kindness practice has become the subject of an extensive contemporary psychological research program, and describing a few findings shows how a classical technique has been operationalized and tested by contemporary science.

Barbara Fredrickson, working within her "broaden-and-build" theory of positive emotion, led randomized trials in the 2000s finding that a several-week course of loving-kindness meditation produced measurable increases in participants' daily positive emotions, which predicted improvements in personal resources, including stronger social connections and greater life satisfaction, giving researchers a testable mechanism for effects the classical tradition attributes to the cultivation of metta itself. Other researchers have used brain imaging to compare experienced meditators with novices, finding differences in regions associated with empathy, and clinical trials have tested loving-kindness meditation for chronic pain, social anxiety and post-traumatic stress, with generally positive results.

This research illustrates a broader pattern: specific practices, extracted from the fourfold scheme and its near-enemy and far-enemy analysis, are tested using methods largely indifferent to the doctrinal context, rebirth, karma, the bodhisattva path, that gave the practice its original meaning, a pattern some welcome as evidence the practices work and others criticize as extracting a technique while discarding the worldview that gave it its point.