https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/questions/45408/to-hell-with-metta-how-to-understand-this/45415#45415
To hell with metta - how to understand this?
Quote from Aṅguttara Nikāya 4.125 Paṭhamamettāsutta:
Firstly, a person meditates spreading a heart full of metta (friendly kindness)
love[...]
If they abide in that, are committed to it, and meditate on it often without losing it, when they die they’re reborn in the company of the gods of Brahmā’s Host. The lifespan of the gods of Brahma’s Host is one eon. An ordinary person stays there until the lifespan of those gods is spent, then they go to hell or the animal realm or the ghost realm. But a disciple of the Buddha stays there until the lifespan of those gods is spent, then they’re extinguished in that very life. This is the difference between an educated noble disciple and an uneducated ordinary person, that is, when there is a place of rebirth.
Why would an ordinary person, a worlding (puthujjano), go to hell after a lot of metta? I cannot believe this. My first guess was that this is probably meant to be a possibility, meaning lots of metta will not 100% prevent descending to lower realms forever. However, as I cannot read Pali, I compared other translations to modern languages, but none of them suggests the possibility. Instead they all seem to agree (at least by their grammar) on this direct chain of results:
(a lot of) Metta -> gods realm -> one of the lower realms
for a householder, at least. Disciples are better off. Grammatically, I fail to see any room left for interpretation as a possibility.
I must be misunderstanding something with this sutta. What is it? Wording, context, translatation, missing background?
frankk replies
Practicing metta correctly leads to rebirth in brahma realm, not to hell. What propels that brahma realm being to hell and animal realm after death, is not the practice of metta, but their previous karma. The sutta is not describing an absolute rule, it's just citing one possibility. For example, other suttas show beings who perform enormous meritorious karma have successive rebirths in many devas realms consecutively. The point of this sutta, is to show that for a skilled disciple of a buddha who is reborn in the Brahma realm, they are very likely to follow up that life with final nirvana at death, whereas a non Buddhist would be propelled to a future rebirth based on their accumulated past karmas, which is most likely to be a step down in rank (human, animals, hell, etc.) after their wholesome karma that led to that Brahma realm rebirth has been exhausted and not replenished with new wholesome karma.
The important general issue you're addressing, namely whether the pali source is actually this vague or imprecise in explanation of Dharma, is unfortunately fairly common. That is, the suttas being memorized teachings in an oral traditions, tend to be terse and not explicit and clear in all its implications when read in isolation. The full meaning has to be drawn out from reading many suttas in the entire collection and connecting the dots.
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