Upekkha · Pāli: upekkhā; Skt: upekṣā

Upekkhā is equanimity: a steady, clear-eyed balance of heart. It is the last of the four Divine Abidings, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists as loving-kindness (mettā), compassion (karuṇā), sympathetic joy (which that entry calls pamudita, more usually muditā) and equanimity (upekkhā), and which “most lineages of Buddhism, including the Theravāda, value and practice”. Its particular work, the same entry says, is that it “makes it possible to see situations as they are, without preference or prejudice” and “to extend the other three Divine Abidings equally to all beings”.

In the Brahmavihāra Sutta (AN 10.208) equanimity is not a private mood but something radiated outward. The practitioner “keeps pervading the first direction with an awareness imbued with equanimity, likewise the second, likewise the third, likewise the fourth”, and so “above, below, & all around, everywhere, in its entirety”, an awareness “abundant, expansive, immeasurable, without hostility, without ill will” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu).

The word is easily misheard as coldness, and later Theravāda writers guard against that. Nyanaponika Thera calls equanimity “a perfect, unshakable balance of mind, rooted in insight”, which “has to be based on vigilant presence of mind, not on indifferent dullness”. Real upekkhā, he writes, is “not dull, heartless and frigid”; “its perfection is not due to an emotional ‘emptiness,’ but to a ‘fullness’ of understanding”. He treats it as “the crown and culmination of the four sublime states” and as “the guiding and restraining power for the other three”, the quality that steadies goodwill, compassion and gladness instead of cancelling them. For the four together, see our guide to the four brahmavihāras.