The Four Immeasurables and the Six Paramitas

　　by Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche

　　The Four Immeasurables

　　The attitude of a bodhisattva is to want to help all beings find happiness and to relieve them of all their suffering. The bodhisattva doesn”t believe there are some beings who want happiness and others who don”t. The bodhisattva doesn”t think that there are some who need to be freed from suffering and others who don”t need to be freed from suffering. He or she realizes that absolutely all beings need to be helped to attain happiness and all beings need to be liberated from suffering. So the concern is for each and every being. In his commentaries, Patrul Rinpoche stressed the need for meditating on impartiality from the beginning of Buddhist practice.

　　Normally, we meditate on the four immeasurables as they appear in the prayers which is in the order of limitless love, limitless compassion, limitless joy, and limitless impartiality. Patrul Rinpoche stresses the need for meditating on impartiality first because this removes the danger of having partial or biased love, partial or biased compassion. When we begin on the path, there is a strong tendency to have stronger love towards those we like and lesser love towards those we don”t like. Once we have developed wisdom with this meditation, it becomes true love which cares for each and every person without any bias. This is the purest compassion because it cares for everyone.

　　We meditate first to cultivate impartiality, then we go on to meditate on great love, then on great compassion, and finally on bodhicitta. The first immeasurable, impartiality, means not being influenced by attachment or aggression. Great love means wanting everyone to attain happiness.

　　Great compassion means wanting to free everyone from suffering. Bodhicitta, however, is more subtle as it is the wish to attain Buddhahood to help all beings. Its very nature is a loving and compassionate mind.

　　What makes it subtle is that bodhicitta implies the development of wisdom (Skt. prajña). Without that wisdom, the love and compassion of the bodhisattva becomes incomplete love and incomplete compassion. With this incomplete love, one may really want to help others, but one may be ineffectual and may even harm the person one wants to help. With incomplete compassion one really wants to relieve the suffering of others and yet one doesn”t know how to free them of their suffering. So, in the development of bodhicitta it is vital to develop one”s wisdom and understanding along with one”s love and compassion. This is the real meaning of bodhicitta which is the reason why it is subtle and hard to cultivate.

　　For example, suppose there were someone who was very hungry and we didn”t have sufficient wisdom, we might think, “Oh, there”s an easy solution, I can show him how to fish.” We teach him how to fish and then in the short-term his hunger is alleviated and he can care for himself. However, we have shown him how to harm other beings10 and so this act will create negative karma which will bring him nothing but trouble and difficulties in the future. So, even though our motivation was good and we exercised compassion, because of our ignorance, we weren”t helping him at all, but made the situation worse. In other words, we need to act with love and compassion in a way that always brings good to all beings and takes into account the future implications of the act. This is the wisdom of the bodhisattva.

　　Another way of acting through love and compassion is not harming anyone. This is good in the short-term, but this doesn”t result in lasting benefit. For example, we can give a poor person a gift of food and clothes. Although the motivation is good and it doesn”t harm anyone, there is relatively little benefit because once …

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