Understanding teachings
Why Are the Four Immeasurables Called Immeasurable?
A reading guide with notebook prompts and a worked example for discussion.
When you encounter the four immeasurables in a practice text, the word “immeasurable” deserves attention. A brief list names the qualities. A commentary can also explain their scope, their place in training, and the awakening toward which the training is directed.
Four meanings of immeasurable
Buddhagupta’s commentary names loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. It explains their immeasurability under four headings:[1]
- Beings: concern extends to beings beyond any calculable total, within the Buddhist account of beginningless rebirth.
- Accumulations: these trainings generate boundless merit and wisdom.
- Qualities: the resulting qualities belong to enlightenment, including its powers and fearlessnesses.
- Primordial wisdom: the account concerns awakened knowing and the inseparability of awareness and its object.
These are doctrinal explanations. A reader counting minutes of meditation is working with a different kind of measure.
For example, suppose you note that you reflected for ten minutes before reciting. That entry can record whether you kept your appointment with practice. It cannot, by itself, tell you whose welfare you included, what you understood, or how you responded when someone interrupted you afterward. Keeping the entry useful means recording what it can establish.
The order of a training passage
Chökyi Drakpa’s A Torch for the Path to Omniscience places this training within its section on arousing bodhicitta. Equanimity comes first, followed by love, compassion, and joy. The explanation challenges partiality toward friends and enemies through teachings on past lives; love wishes beings happiness, compassion wishes suffering to end, and joy welcomes others’ good fortune, including that of an enemy. It describes a gradual widening from parents to friends and relatives, then enemies.[2]
The sequence is worth marking in your own edition. A list arranged for reference and a passage arranged for training can have different orders. Note which one you are reading before making a practice checklist.
Keep the two lists separate in your notes
The four qualities and Buddhagupta’s four explanatory headings answer different questions. On a notebook page, give them separate spaces. Under the qualities, record the term you want to understand. Under the explanatory headings, record the passage that discusses scope or fruition. This simple layout can prevent an unclear note such as “four stages,” which leaves you unsure which four you meant.
Buddhagupta also distinguishes loving kindness directed toward beings, directed toward phenomena, and free of focus. His account locates the latter two within bodhisattva levels, with focus-free activity from the eighth bhūmi onward.[1] Those technical distinctions merit study with a teacher. An ordinary experience of concentration does not supply enough information to assign yourself a level.
Bring one specific example to the reading
Imagine that a colleague receives funding for a project you hoped to lead. You congratulate her, then spend the afternoon listing reasons she should not have been chosen. Before your next reading, write down what happened in plain language: what you said, what you kept thinking, and what you know about her work.
Useful questions might be: Can I acknowledge a particular benefit her project could bring? What disappointment needs an honest account? Is there a practical decision, such as asking for feedback on my proposal, that I have been avoiding? These are editorial questions for examining an incident, not translated meditation instructions or a test of spiritual attainment.
Take the incident and the passage to a teacher if you need help connecting them. A concrete account gives the discussion something to work with: one person's good fortune, your response, and a sentence you found difficult.
A focused next reading
Start with the four explanatory headings in Buddhagupta, then read Chökyi Drakpa’s section on training the mind. Note where each author moves from a definition to instructions or a description of attainment. For related introductions, see loving-kindness and compassion and equanimity and impartial concern.
Sources and further reading
- An Extensive Commentary on the Four Immeasurables. Buddhagupta; Laura Swan, Samye Translations, 2011; revised 2016. Version 1.3, September 19, 2024.
- A Torch for the Path to Omniscience. Chökyi Drakpa. See Training the Mind in the Four Immeasurables, within Arousing Bodhicitta.
Sources checked November 1, 2026. Written with AI assistance and checked against the linked texts. The examples and brief review are supplied by this site; they do not replace instruction from a qualified teacher.