Jeremiah 32:18 · World English Bible
You show loving kindness to thousands, and repay the iniquity of the fathers into the bosom of their children after them. The great, the mighty God, Yahweh of Armies is your name:
Mettā: Loving kindness Mettā is the wish that beings be well, held without preference. Praying while the Babylonian ramps rise against the wall, Jeremiah opens with kindness and only afterward reaches for armies.
From the Buddhism reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
BUDDHISM
Mettā: Loving kindness Mettā is the wish that beings be well, held without preference. Praying while the Babylonian ramps rise against the wall, Jeremiah opens with kindness and only afterward reaches for armies. Warmth that reaches thousands was never earned by any one of them; it falls the way sunlight falls across a whole field at once, on the good soil and the stony patch alike.
Appamaññā: The immeasurables Appamaññā names goodwill with no boundary drawn around it. "Thousands" here is a refusal to count, since any total leaves someone standing outside the circle. Kindness reserved for a family, a tribe, or a besieged city has a wall around it, and the wall is the trouble.
Kamma: Action and its ripening Kamma is a deed carrying its own result forward. Iniquity repaid into the bosom of children looks like a judge assigning a debt to the wrong party, yet the ripening needs no judge: a father's cruelty or drinking or theft lands in the house where the children sleep. Fruit falls near the tree that grew it.
Santati: The continuing stream Santati is how a process carries on without anything solid passing across. Those children "after them" inherit no guilt anyone could charge them with; they inherit consequences, the way a debt or an emptied granary is inherited. Nothing of the fathers travels over intact, and still the river below the bend is the same river.
Anussati: Recollection of qualities Anussati steadies a shaken mind by calling qualities to mind one by one. "The great, the mighty God, Yahweh of Armies" is a string of epithets recited by a man watching a siege from the inside, and the reciting itself is the work: soldiers frightened in battle were told to look up at the standard and take heart. Fear thins when attention has something firm to rest on, and the name is what Jeremiah has within reach.
Buddhism lens
Where does your kindness currently have a wall around it?
Heaven and earth are not partial. The rain does not sort the field into deserving and undeserving rows before it falls.
Marcus reminded himself each morning that he was a citizen of the whole world, not just of his own city, so his goodwill had no border to stop at. Kindness kept for your own people has a wall around it.
Pirkei Avot teaches that one good deed pulls another after it, and one wrong does the same, so acts carry forward on their own momentum. What a person does lands in the house where their children sleep.
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Buddhism