Mudita

Well, it's a simple question.

regular daily practice, I would bring up the thought based in the Brahmavihara Dhammas, Metta, Karuna, Mudita, Upeka.

Maybe as a meditation first thing in the morning, but also as a wise reflection through the day.

So how can you do that? Well, one way, just look at people as more like your relatives or as if they were your family or relatives.

That's where depression comes from.

You need to try and listen to your needs and say, what do I need right now? But I like Mudita.

Mudita holds envy, joy.

It holds all of it.

The Japanese are smart.

Compassion and kindness.

So the third practice I wanted to share is called mudita.

Mudita is appreciative joy of another person's success.

It's a Sanskrit and Pali word meaning sympathetic or appreciative joy.

It's the ability to feel genuine happiness for another person's happiness, success, beauty, or good fortune.

I see.

Mudita is, uh, directed towards the happy people.

You identify with the happiness of them.

I see.

And then we have karuna which is compassion.

Metta is like well-wishing, may you be happy is kind of the phrase that gets used and then compassion, karuna is more like may you be free of suffering and mudita.

Mudita is normally translated as sympathetic joy and I tend to think of this as like rejoicing because we can also have mudita for ourselves.

It doesn't have to be for another and one tactic I've used to develop mudita is imagining whoever I want to cultivate mudita towards, imagining them reaching liberation, reaching the end of suffering and then imagining them meditating and like sometimes think of like a halo appearing behind their head then giving rise to a sense of rejoicing, a sense of mudita for that and then upeka is equanimity, reflecting on kamma to develop equanimity and this is kind of interesting is in a lot of these Jataka tales about the Buddha developing sila, developing virtue.

You know there's this sense like well we don't want people to walk all over us so if isn't that a drawback of equanimity and people are going to take advantage of us, walk all over us then but the Bodhisatta in these Jataka tales he does just that.

This is such a beautiful mood.

Oh, I see someone says, "Mudita." Exactly.

[laughs]

Mudita, Pietro.

That's ...

Aw, I f- I feel so uplifted.

Let's say, uh, goodbye and mudita.

Bye.

I will be giving a talk today about mudita, which is translated as sympathetic joy.

Mudita is one of the four Buddhist heart practices.

I recall a Dharma teacher named Booker who was speaking about the origin of the term Brahma Vihara.

Brahma refers to a Hindu god who is free of hatred.

And Vihara means abode or a place to live.

Therefore, the best spiritual home for us to inhabit is the realm of the Brahma Viharas.

And Mudita is one of those Brahma Viharas.

Booker likened those divine abodes or Brahma Viharas to phases of the sun or the moon.

And what, uh, upekkha or equanimity does is it allow— it gives us a stability in our compassion so that we're not swept away by the suffering of the world.

And what upekkha does with, uh, mudita is that it helps it to stay steady.

Mudita can get rather effervescent like a carbonated beverage, you know? Um, and so what equanimity does, it gives it a kind of steadiness so that it can be sustained over time and over, over our lifetime and, and also over, um, the wish to share it with all beings.

Yeah.

So the first three are really expressions, we could say, of, of love.

And, and mudita, joy...

I live on a houseboat, by the way.

Like floating on the tides of life, and the name of my boat is Mudita.