Isaiah 60:15 Meaning Whereas You Have Been Forsaken and Hated

Aṭṭha Loka Dhammā: The Eight Worldly Conditions Loss, disrepute and blame are three of eight states that swing back and forth across every life. Being forsaken and hated, with the road grown over and the gate unused, is the low side of that swing, and the promised honor is the high side of the same one. A city that sees this will hold its coming glory the way it should have held its ruin, lightly, since the wind that brings one brings the other.

Khanti: Patient Endurance Khanti is the capacity to bear hard treatment without hardening. Long years of being passed by, with travelers choosing the road around you, are a heavy thing to carry, and the promise arrives after the carrying, not instead of it. Bearing it without souring into hatred of the ones who walked away is what leaves a heart able to receive joy when joy comes.

Suññāgāra: The Empty Dwelling An empty hut is where a practitioner is told to go and sit. Roads with no one passing through, gates nobody enters: the desolation is exactly that hut, and the absence of traffic is the very condition for seeing clearly. A city stripped of visitors was handed, without asking, the quiet that people leave home to find.

Asaṅkhata: The Unconditioned Asaṅkhata names the one thing never put together out of parts. Excellency made of walls, trade and reputation wears out like everything assembled, so "eternal" points past the rebuilt city toward what no ruin reaches. Taken that way, the hope rests on something steadier than masonry.

Muditā: Gladness At Another's Good Fortune Muditā is the gladness that rises when someone else does well. A joy of many generations belongs to people who were absent for the ruin and had no hand in the rebuilding; they walk in through the reopened gate and are simply glad. Joy of this kind spreads without thinning, the way one lamp lights another and loses nothing.