The Metta Sutta: Discourse on Loving-Kindness

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 4 June 2026 · Updated 7 September 2026

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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.

What is the Metta Sutta and where is it found?

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.

The discourse, verse by verse

The Karaṇīya Metta Sutta is ten short verses long — Sn 143–152 in the Pali Text Society’s numbering — and it is given here in full, in Bhikkhu Sujato’s translation for SuttaCentral, which he has dedicated to the public domain. The Khuddakapatha version (Khp 9) is word for word the same text in his rendering: two canonical addresses for one poem, not two versions of it. Where his English parts company with the versions chanted in monasteries, the reason is usually a genuinely hard Pali word, and the table further down shows what is at stake in the hardest of them.

Verses 1–3: the character the poem asks for

The discourse takes its Pali name from the first word of this verse, karaṇīyam, “what should be done”. The whole opening is karaṇīyamatthakusalena, and the compound atthakusala is the hardest thing in the poem: attha carries meaning, goal, benefit and welfare at once, and translators divide over it — the table below sets the main choices side by side. Sujato’s note on this line points to AN 5.169 for the sense he takes. Notice what the verse asks for: nothing mystical, only capable, upright, easy to speak to. “Upright, very upright” renders ujū ca suhujū ca — the same word said twice, the second time carrying the intensifying prefix su-.

The vocabulary of this verse is monastic, and two words say so plainly. Subharo means “easy to support” — the kind of person a village can feed without strain — and kulesvananugiddho (resolved, kulesu ananugiddho) is literally “not greedy among families”, naming a specific monastic failing: the cultivation of lay donors. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu gives “no greed for supporters”; the Amaravati Sangha’s chanting version, made for congregational recitation, keeps no mention of families at all and closes the verse simply “Not proud or demanding in nature”. Either way the ethic is the same, and it comes before any mention of meditation: do not make yourself expensive to other people.

The poem turns here, mid-verse and without warning, from conduct into aspiration. The first half gives the early canon’s ordinary ethical test — the measure is not a rule but viññū, “those who are wise” (Sujato’s note compares AN 4.121). The second half is the refrain the whole discourse is built on: sabbasattā bhavantu sukhitattā, where sukhitattā means something closer to “happy in themselves” than merely comfortable, and Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu renders it “happy at heart”. That same line returns to close verse 5, so the catalogue of beings sits between two statements of one wish.

Verses 4–6: the wish, and who it is for

The catalogue is the discourse’s legal instrument: it exists to close every loophole by which a being might be left out. “Frail or firm” translates tasā vā thāvarā, and Sujato’s note observes that the pair is a common Jain idiom, citing the Uttarādhyayana, Sūyagaḍa, Dasaveyāliya and Ācāraṅgasūtra — shared vocabulary among the wandering ascetic communities of the day for the moving and the stationary, that is, everything alive. The size words that follow (dīghā, mahantā, majjhimā, rassakā, aṇukathūlā) sound almost comic in English, and that is the point: they are exhaustive rather than descriptive.

Two things to notice. “Unseen” (adiṭṭhā) covers whatever is merely out of sight, and also — for the tradition that made this a protective chant — the non-human inhabitants of the deva worlds, which is what the commentarial story below turns on. And the last pair, bhūtā va sambhavesī va, is genuinely contested: Sujato notes that he follows K. R. Norman and Bhikkhu Bodhi in reading sambhavesī as a future active participle, “those about to be born”, where Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu has “born & seeking birth”. Then the refrain returns and the sweep closes.

Before the famous image, the poem states loving-kindness negatively — as what one refrains from wishing. The third line, byārosanā paṭighasañña, names two conditions: hostility roused, and the perception of resistance or irritation. The verse concedes them. It does not ask you not to be provoked; it asks that, provoked, you not wish the other harm. That is why metta is better understood as the opposite of ill-will than as affection. AN 6.13 states it flatly: “it is the heart’s release by love that is the escape from ill will” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato).

Verses 7–8: the mother, and the boundless heart

The line everyone knows, and the Pali is sparer than most English versions: mātā yathā niyaṁ puttam āyusā ekaputtamanurakkhe. The verb governing the mother is anurakkhe, “would guard”; what is held up for imitation is the guarding, not the feeling. The second half then changes object entirely — what is to be developed (bhāvaye, Sujato’s “unfold”) is mānasaṁ aparimāṇaṁ, a boundless mind. So the verse compares an action to a cultivation, not a mother’s love to yours. We take the line apart, in the Amaravati wording chanted in Western monasteries, on its own page: “even as a mother protects her only child”.

Only now does mettā appear by name — mettañca sabbalokasmi — seven verses after the poem began describing it. Note too that the second line repeats verse 7’s fourth line word for word in the Pali (mānasaṁ bhāvaye aparimāṇaṁ): a hinge of the kind a text built for memorised chanting leans on. “Above, below, all round” is the formula the suttas use when they describe the immeasurable abidings — at MN 7 the same spread runs “above, below, across, everywhere, all around … free of enmity and ill will” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato). For what that spatial language is doing, see radiating kindness over the entire world.

Verses 9–10: how it is held, and how the poem ends

The four postures are the canon’s shorthand for every waking hour, and the last line is where the discourse names its own category: brahmametaṁ vihāramidhamāhu, this, they say, is the brahmavihāra here. Sujato renders that “a divine meditation in this life”; the Amaravati Sangha has “the sublime abiding”, Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu “a sublime abiding here & now”, Piyadassi Thera “‘Noble Living’ here”. The reported “they say” (āhu) is worth hearing: the poem reaches for a term already in circulation rather than coining one.

The ending is abruptly doctrinal — view (diṭṭhi), virtue (sīla), insight (dassana), and the end of rebirth. Sujato’s note argues that it is a later addition, on two grounds: the verse is in a different metre from the rest, and verse 9 already brings the poem to a close. That is his judgement, not a settled fact — and every translation this page draws on carries the verse. He adds one small caution for readers of the Pali: na hi jātu here is an idiom meaning “never”, and has nothing to do with jāti, “birth”.

Read end to end, the shape is unmistakable: three verses of ordinary decency, three that widen the wish and fence off ill-will, two on the boundless heart, one on holding it through the day, and a doctrinal coda. Almost none of it is confined to the cushion — the postures of verse 9 are the postures of an ordinary day, which is why metta belongs to Buddhism in everyday life as much as to formal practice, and the widening of verses 4 and 5 is exactly what loving-kindness meditation trains, phrase by phrase.

How the translations differ

Most of this discourse translates without much argument. The first line does not — and it is the line that decides who the poem is addressed to. (Line breaks in the verse are marked with a slash.)

Everything turns on attha, which carries meaning, goal, purpose and welfare at once, and on kusala, which is both “skilful” and “good”. Read attha as welfare and you get Amaravati’s “skilled in goodness” and Piyadassi Thera’s “skilled in (working out his own) well being” — a moral competence. Read it as goal and you get Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu’s “skilled in aims”: someone who already knows what they are aiming at. Read it as meaning and you get Sujato’s “skilled in the meaning of scripture”, where the skill is in understanding what has been taught. The stake is small and not small: whether the opening is an invitation to anyone who wants to be good, or a door that opens only for someone already trained.

Metta and the brahmaviharas

Verse 9’s closing term 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

The whole discourse is above, in Bhikkhu Sujato’s rendering. Because the Metta Sutta is short, freely available and beautifully translated, it also rewards reading in more than one voice — the places where the versions part company are the places where the Pali is doing something interesting. 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 its companion in the same collection and the same chanting repertoire, the Mangala Sutta; and for the family of texts it belongs to, return to Buddhist scriptures.