The Metta Sutta: Discourse on Loving-Kindness

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-04

The Metta Sutta — fully the Karaniya Metta Sutta, the “Discourse on Loving-Kindness” — is a short text of about ten verses in which the Buddha teaches the cultivation of metta, boundless goodwill, toward every living being without exception. It sits in the Sutta Nipata and the Khuddakapatha of the Pali Canon, and is among the most beloved and most chanted discourses in all of Buddhist scripture.

The short answer

When people speak of “the Metta Sutta,” they mean a brief, luminous discourse whose heart is a single wish — may all beings be at ease — extended, deliberately and without limit, to “whatever living beings there may be.” It teaches that one who longs for the state of peace should first become capable, upright and gentle, and then radiate a heart of limitless loving-kindness in every direction. Its most famous image asks us to cherish all beings as fiercely as a mother guards her only child. The text appears twice in the canon: at Snp 1.8 in the Sutta Nipata and at Khp 9 in the Khuddakapatha, both within the Khuddaka Nikaya, the “Minor Collection” of the Sutta Pitaka — the “Basket of Discourses” within the Pali Canon.

What the name means

The Pali title Karaniya Metta Sutta takes its first word from the discourse’s opening line. Karaniya means roughly “what should be done” or “this is to be done”; metta is loving-kindness or goodwill; sutta is a discourse. So the title is something like “The Discourse on What Should Be Done [by one skilled in] Loving-Kindness.” In English it is usually given simply as the Discourse on Loving-Kindness, and you will also see it called the Metta Sutta for short. Different translators render the key word metta differently — most often “loving-kindness,” sometimes “good will” (as Thanissaro Bhikkhu prefers) or “universal love” — and the spread of those choices is itself a small lesson in how hard this quality is to pin down in English.

Where it sits in the canon

The Metta Sutta is one of a handful of texts that early Buddhists clearly treasured enough to preserve in more than one place. Within the Pali Canon it is found in two of the short anthologies of the Khuddaka Nikaya:

• the Sutta Nipata (“Collection of Discourses”), where it is the eighth text of the first chapter — hence Snp 1.8 (you may also see it written Sn 1.8); and
• the Khuddakapatha (“Short Readings”), a small primer of texts for new monastics, where it is the ninth and final piece — Khp 9.

Both belong to the Khuddaka Nikaya, the most varied of the five collections of discourses, which also holds the much-loved Dhammapada. For the wider map of where all these texts live — and how the canon was preserved — see our guide to Buddhist scriptures.

What the discourse actually says

The sutta moves in three unhurried stages: the character one must build, the wish one then makes, and the way one sustains it.

First, the groundwork of character

The discourse does not begin with grand visualisation. It begins, soberingly, with conduct. One who wishes to reach “the state of peace” should be — in the Amaravati Sangha’s translation — “able and upright, straightforward and gentle in speech, humble and not conceited, contented and easily satisfied,” with senses calmed and free of greed. Loving-kindness, in other words, is built on a settled, undemanding, honest life; it is not a mood summoned out of nowhere but the natural radiance of a heart that has stopped grasping. This is why metta belongs so naturally to Buddhism in everyday life rather than only to the meditation cushion.

Then, the wish itself — for all beings, without exception

At the discourse’s centre is the aspiration that gives it its power. Again in the Amaravati rendering: “May all beings be at ease.” And the sutta is exhaustive about who “all” means — it leaves no one out:

“Whatever living beings there may be; whether they are weak or strong, omitting none, the great or the mighty, medium, short or small, the seen and the unseen, those living near and far away, those born and to-be-born — may all beings be at ease.”

What is striking is the deliberate sweep of the language. The wish is not for those we like, or those who deserve it, or those near us; it is for the weak and the strong, the seen and the unseen, even beings “to-be-born.” Metta here is not a feeling that happens to us but a resolve we choose to extend until it has no edges. That same boundless reach is what the loving-kindness meditation practice trains, phrase by phrase.

The famous image: the mother and her only child

Then comes the line everyone remembers. In the Amaravati translation:

“Even as a mother protects with her life her child, her only child, so with a boundless heart should one cherish all living beings, radiating kindness over the entire world.”

It is one of the most quoted images in all of Buddhism, and worth reading carefully. An honest note from the commentarial and scholarly tradition: the comparison is usually understood to point not to the emotion a mother feels but to the intensity and total commitment with which she protects her child — that is the measure of how wholeheartedly metta is to be cultivated and guarded. Thanissaro Bhikkhu puts the same line as “As a mother would risk her life to protect her child, her only child, even so should one cultivate a limitless heart with regard to all beings.” The point is not that we must feel maternal toward every insect, but that the protective fierceness of that love is the model for a goodwill without limits.

How it is sustained

The discourse then asks us to spread this kindness “upwards to the skies, and downwards to the depths, outwards and unbounded, freed from hatred and ill-will.” And it closes by making clear that this is not an occasional exercise. Whether “standing or walking, seated or lying down, free from drowsiness, one should sustain this recollection” — a continuous, all-day awareness the Amaravati translation calls “the sublime abiding.” Loving-kindness, on this teaching, is meant to become the very air one moves through.

Metta and the brahmaviharas

That idea of a “sublime abiding” places the Metta Sutta within a larger framework. Metta is the first of the four brahmaviharas — the “divine abidings” or “immeasurables”: loving-kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity (upekkha). These are the four qualities of heart the tradition holds up as boundless, to be radiated in all directions toward all beings. The Metta Sutta is, in effect, the canon’s most concentrated teaching on the first of the four — which is why it is so often the doorway through which people enter the whole set. Because these qualities are shared across the traditions, the brahmaviharas are common ground between schools that otherwise differ a good deal; the Metta Sutta’s Pali wording, though, is specifically a Theravada treasure.

The story behind it — and an honest caveat

Many translations carry a vivid backstory, drawn from the later Pali commentaries rather than from the sutta itself. By that traditional account, a group of monks went into a forest to meditate during the rains retreat. The tree-dwelling devas, displeased at having their homes disturbed, frightened the monks with terrifying sights and sounds until they could not practise and fell ill. The monks returned to the Buddha, who gave them the Metta Sutta — to serve both as a subject of meditation and as a paritta, a verse of protection. Radiating goodwill back toward the devas, the monks were said to win their friendship and complete the retreat in peace.

It is a lovely story, and it explains why, to this day, the Metta Sutta is chanted as one of the great protective texts of the Theravada world. But we should be clear about its status: the tree-deva narrative comes from the commentarial tradition, not from the discourse’s own words, and it is best read as traditional framing rather than as datable history. The discourse stands perfectly well on its own — and its teaching of universal goodwill needs no story to recommend it. This double life of the sutta, as both meditation and protective chant, is one reason metta is among the first practices many Buddhists meet, and a natural resource for anyone working with loneliness, since it gently reorients the heart outward toward connection.

How to read it for yourself

Because the Metta Sutta is short, freely available, and beautifully translated, it rewards reading slowly and more than once. A few well-regarded English versions, all from the recognised sources this site draws on:

• the Amaravati Sangha translation, the version chanted in many Western monasteries, widely available on Access to Insight;
• Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s “Good Will,” also on Access to Insight, which makes the case for rendering metta as goodwill rather than love;
• Piyadassi Thera’s translation, which includes the full commentarial background story; and
• Bhikkhu Sujato’s modern translation on SuttaCentral, which sets the Pali and English side by side.

Read it not as information to be absorbed but as a training to be taken up — let the wish “may all beings be at ease” rest on real people in your life, then on strangers, then on those you find difficult, and finally on every being “seen and unseen, near and far away.” That widening is the whole practice. For the step-by-step method the sutta inspires, see our guide to loving-kindness meditation; for the family of texts it belongs to, return to Buddhist scriptures.