There is a word in the Karaniya Metta Sutta that has been troubling me: Appakicco.
It appears long before the sutta reaches the verses most of us associate with metta, or loving-kindness — May all beings be happy, and so on.
The Buddha advises the practitioner who wishes to practice metta to be “contented and easily satisfied, unburdened with duties and living lightly.”
The sentence in Pāli reads as santussako ca subharo ca, appakicco ca sallahukavutti.
Appakicco can be translated as having few duties, having little business, being unburdened with activities. Kicca is something that has to be done, a duty, task or obligation.
Few duties. It sounds almost quaint until you place it beside an ordinary modern life: Work. Meetings. Messages. Family. Investments. Travel. News. Social media. Exercise. Appointments. Shopping. Entertainment. Obligations we accepted six months ago and no longer remember accepting.
Appakicco — being free from cares and duties — intrigues me. It suggests that the Buddha was telling us that our practice may require something more: We may have to become less busy.
Somewhere among all this we try to maintain a meditation practice. Perhaps thirty minutes in the morning. Perhaps an hour. Perhaps longer. We sit down, close our eyes and discover that the mind is busy. Sometimes I wonder whether the mind is simply giving us an accurate report on the life we have created.
The Mind We Bring to Meditation
There is a peculiar assumption many of us make about meditation. We expect the mind to behave very differently during meditation from the way we have trained it to behave throughout the day.
For twelve hours we encourage it to move quickly: Solve this. Answer that. Remember this.
Plan tomorrow. Check the phone. Respond to the message. Prepare for the meeting. Read the news. Buy something.
Then we sit down and say Be still.
The mind may reasonably be confused. Its restlessness did not begin when we crossed our legs. The momentum was already there. This is why appakicco — being free from cares and duties — intrigues me. It suggests that the Buddha was telling us that our practice may require something more: We may have to become less busy.
A Pattern Elsewhere in the Suttas
This concern with having fewer duties is not confined to the Metta Sutta. It appears elsewhere in the early texts, in ways that make appakicco hard to ignore.
In MN 99, the Brahmin Subha puts an interesting proposition to the Buddha. He says that household life involves “a great deal of activity, great functions, great engagements, and great undertakings,” while the life of one gone forth involves comparatively little activity and fewer undertakings. Subha assumes that the busier life must therefore bear the greater fruit.
The Buddha does not accept the premise that more activity necessarily means greater fruit. He points instead to the quality and outcome of what is undertaken. A life filled with activity is not automatically a fruitful one.
AN 5.96 makes the connection with meditation even more explicit. In describing five qualities through which a monk practising mindfulness of breathing can penetrate to the unshakable, the Buddha begins with a strikingly familiar condition: he has “few undertakings, few tasks, is easy to support, and is easily contented with the requisites of life.”
The resemblance to the Karaniya Metta Sutta is difficult to miss — few duties, few undertakings, contentment, simplicity.
Taken together, these passages suggest that appakicco belongs to a wider principle in the Buddha’s teaching. The organisation of one’s life is itself part of the conditions for practice. Meditation does not take place independently of how much we undertake, how many obligations we accumulate, and how busy a life we lead.
Buddhism as an Accommodation to Modern Life
Modern Buddhism has become very good at helping us survive crowded lives. There are meditations for the commute, breathing exercises between meetings, mindful eating, mindful walking, mindful leadership and apps that will remind us to be present and be more productive.
Much of this is genuinely useful. A few conscious breaths before a difficult conversation can change its direction. An hour of meditation in the morning can influence an entire day.
Still, a question remains.
At what point does meditation become a way of coping with a life that has become too busy, instead of asking why we are so busy in the first place?
If I am working seventy hours a week, permanently exhausted and constantly irritated, perhaps learning to observe my irritation is only part of the practice.
Perhaps another part is asking why I am working seventy hours. This is where appakicco becomes uncomfortable. The word does not seem to say, “become very skilled at handling innumerable duties.” It says something closer to “have few duties.”
That deserves our attention.
Does the Buddha Want Us to Quit Our Jobs?
We should be careful here.
The Metta Sutta arose within a culture of renunciation. Instructions addressed to those pursuing the homeless life cannot simply be converted into commandments for contemporary householders.
A parent cannot abandon a child in the name of simplicity. Someone caring for an elderly parent cannot invoke appakicco to escape responsibility. A business owner has obligations to employees, customers and creditors. And there is dignity in work.
The question, then, is subtler. How many of our duties arise from genuine responsibility, and how many arise from proliferation?
Some responsibilities find us. Others are manufactured. We buy a larger house and acquire the responsibility of maintaining it. We expand a business and inherit another layer of complexity.
We seek a promotion at work, only to end up with an extra hundred emails a week. We accumulate possessions and then insure, clean, repair, protect and eventually dispose of them. We pursue importance and discover that importance requires maintenance.
Every acquisition brings a small administrative tail behind it. Eventually we may spend much of our lives maintaining the life we have accumulated.
The Weight of Becoming Somebody
There may be something still deeper here. Busyness is connected to identity. It feels good to be needed. The phone rings because somebody wants us. The inbox fills because our opinion matters. Our calendar is full because we are important.
In professional life especially, indispensability can become intoxicating. I have spent much of my life in business, and I know the temptation. You begin to believe that every decision needs your attention: A quotation needs approval. A customer needs calling. A problem on the shop floor reaches you. Someone wants a meeting.
There is satisfaction in being the person who can fix things. Then one day you discover that you have built an organization in which everyone needs you, and a life in which you are never free.
The ego has played an exquisite trick. It has converted captivity into importance. Perhaps appakicco asks whether we are willing to become a little less necessary.
The Spiritual Value of an Empty Afternoon
We tend to think of spiritual practice in terms of things we do: Meditate. Read. Attend a retreat.
Listen to a dhamma talk. Keep the precepts.
Perhaps there is also a practice of subtraction: Declining an invitation. Leaving a weekend unscheduled. Owning fewer things. Trusting and delegating responsibility to someone else.
Turning off the phone. Allowing an afternoon to remain empty. Doing nothing for a while.
This can feel surprisingly uncomfortable. An empty space exposes us. Without activity, there is no role to perform. Nobody needs anything from us. There is nothing to achieve. We simply are.
Perhaps this is one reason simplicity appears so often in contemplative traditions. When activity recedes, we encounter ourselves without the usual scaffolding.
Why This Comes Before Metta
The Buddha’s placement of these words in the Mettā Sutta matters. The Buddha does not begin with boundless love. First comes a way of living. Be contented. Be easily supported. Have few duties. Live lightly. Be peaceful. Be wise.
Then the heart expands outward: May all beings be happy. May no one deceive another or despise anyone anywhere. As a mother protects her only child, cultivate a boundless heart toward all beings.
There is an ecological quality to the teaching. Metta requires a habitat. And perhaps a permanently hurried life is a poor habitat for love.
When we are hurried, people become obstacles. When we are preoccupied, we barely see them. When we are exhausted, generosity becomes harder.
The problem is larger than stress. It is attention. Love requires attention.
What Are We Willing to Give Up?
This leads to a question that is harder than asking how long we should meditate.
What are we prepared to relinquish for the sake of a quieter mind?
Perhaps some ambition? Perhaps some income? Perhaps a promotion? Perhaps an unnecessary responsibility? Perhaps merely the habit of filling every empty hour of the day?
The architecture of our days matters. The things we own matter. The ambitions we pursue matter. The obligations we accept matter. They enter our consciousness and they accompany us onto the cushion.
There will be no single answer.
A demanding career may be deeply meaningful for one person and spiritually corrosive for another. A busy period of caring for a sick parent may leave us exhausted while also expressing compassion at its purest. The number of tasks alone cannot tell us whether a life is wise.
But appakicco prevents us from assuming that busyness is spiritually neutral.
The architecture of our days matters. The things we own matter. The ambitions we pursue matter. The obligations we accept matter. They enter our consciousness and they accompany us onto the cushion.
And they influence the amount of attention we have available when another human being needs us. Perhaps we have misunderstood the relationship between meditation and life.
We imagine that meditation will teach us how to remain peaceful while keeping up with a demanding life.
Sometimes it does. But sometimes wisdom asks something simpler of us.
Put something down. Let something go. And as the Buddha advises: be contented and easily satisfied, have few duties, and live lightly.
