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The Song of the Cuckoo and The Four Immeasurable Minds
In the Buddha’s teaching, the Four Immeasurable Minds—loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity—are not practices limited to the lower stages of meditation, but their profound nature is always interwoven with wisdom. Loving-kindness is “cherishing all beings, always wishing them peace and happiness, and bringing them benefit,” expressing love and the wish for happiness for all beings. Compassion is the ability to feel the suffering of beings in the five realms: humans, asuras, hell beings, hungry ghosts, and animals. Joy brings spiritual happiness (different from material pleasure belonging to the first five sense consciousnesses), while equanimity is the letting go of the other three minds—not clinging, not rejecting—yet still embracing loving-kindness and compassion with serenity and impartiality. The four minds inter-are: true loving-kindness contains compassion, joy, and equanimity; the highest equanimity also contains loving-kindness, compassion, and joy, and thanks to deep insight, the restlessness of compassion and joy is transformed into gentle peace.
In the practice of the Four Immeasurable Minds, body and mind are one: actions, speech, and thoughts all arise from cetana (volition)—the energy that determines karma. Without contemplating the five skandhas (form, feeling, perception, mental formations, consciousness), we cannot truly love and understand both body and mind, leading to loneliness and inner wounds. There are two great misconceptions about romantic love—believing that physical intimacy or emotional sharing will dispel loneliness—both are mistaken; only when each person knows how to embrace themselves with compassionate understanding can they truly and sustainably love another. Buddhism encourages the practice of the Four Immeasurable Minds in every daily activity—walking, standing, lying down, sitting, eating, drinking—so that love is always illuminated by wisdom and insight.
