Seeing Without Grasping

A loving-kindness practitioner sees only the pure, noble qualities in beings — not because faults go unseen, but because the mind rests in loving-kindness, which gives ease to oneself as much as to others.

In truth, a loving-kindness practitioner perceives beings’ faults clearly, exactly as they are. But this seeing is always guided by wisdom, and that wisdom understands two things:

First, that faults themselves — unwholesome karma — bring harm and no benefit to the being who carries them.

Second, that for the loving-kindness practitioner to seize upon and dwell on those faults would bring harm to their own mind as well. So the faults are seen, but never grasped — not held onto, not turned over in thought, not allowed to take root in the heart.

The Law Beneath It All

Attention is never neutral. What the mind dwells on, it slowly begins to become.

Underlying all of this is a simple law: cause and effect never fails. What we give our attention to shapes what we come to embody — and the sutras bear this out, both by praise and by warning.

In the Śūra–ṅgama Sūtra, among the twenty-five sages who describe how they reached perfect penetration, Pūrṇamaitrāyaṇīputra attained it through teaching the Dharma — through praising the precepts and the excellence of the Buddha’s teaching. By dwelling on what was worthy of praise, he came to embody it himself.

The reverse holds true as well, as these two well-known karmic accounts show:

So if the aim is loving-kindness — joy for oneself, and joy extended to others —
the practice is simple to state, if not always easy to hold:
see only the pure and noble in others,
and let their faults pass without taking hold.