Though my long history of opposition to, even enmity toward, the plantain weed did have a kind of moral aura surrounding it, I wasn’t deploying nearly all the moral weaponry I’m capable of deploying. The really heavy-duty weaponry is reserved for human beings. And yet the line across which the weaponry is deployed—the line between “good” humans and “bad” humans—is often no less arbitrary than the line separating weeds from other plants. There is a meditative technique specifically designed to blur this line. It is called loving-kindness meditation, or, to use the ancient Pali word for
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