The Second Treatise on the Perfections – 2847
wishing them prosperity, can hatelessness (
adosa-cetasika
) be called loving-
kindness (
mettā
).
With reference to the aforesaid, in the perfection of forbearance (
khantī-
pāramī
), too, forbearance
may mean hatelessness (
adosa-cetasika
), but not all
hatelessness is forbearance; when one is wronged by others, one restrains oneself
from showing hate or anger (
dosa
) to them, and only such hatelessness should be
taken as forbearance. Similarly, not all hatelessness should be taken as loving-
kindness but only that hatelessness that arises in the form of goodwill towards
other beings should be.
Kinds of Loving-Kindness
With reference to loving-kindness, people say that loving-kindness is of 528
kinds. But in reality it is not so. It should be noted people say so because
according to the Path of the Analytic Knowledges (
Paṭisambhidā-magga
), there
are 528 ways of developing loving-kindness. Of the 528 ways, five are without
specifications of beings (
anodhiso
). They are:
1. All beings (
sabbe sattā
).
2. All breathing beings (
sabbe pāṇā
).
3. All existing creatures (
sabbe bhūtā
).
4. All persons or individuals (
sabbe puggalā
).
5. All those who have come into individual existences (
sabbe atta-bhāva-
pariyāpannā
).
When one directs one’s thought to all beings that exist in the 31 planes of
existence in any one of these five ways, they all are embraced without any one
of them being left out. Since everyone is covered by these five ways, these five
are called the five unlimited (
anodhiso
) individuals.
Odhi
of
anodhiso
means
“boundary, limit,” hence
anodhiso
is “having no limit.”
437
When loving-kindness is directed towards beings who are specified, the
classification is as follows:
437
The next paragraph on the usage of
satta
and
puggala
deals only with the meaning of
those words in Myanmar; it is, therefore, left out from our translation.