The Translation of the Bizarre Term “Loving-Kindness” in Christianity and Buddhism

“Thy loving-kindness is greater than life, O Lord…”

It was a verse from a song I remember well in my early days of navigating the religious landscape of the Evangelical Church. It was one of those songs with multiple renditions, sung by numerous peoples and appearing on worship albums throughout the land so that no one could claim it as their own. The verse itself comes from Psalm 63:3 in the Bible. I never thought much about it. Not knowing its origins, I simply assumed “loving” was added to “kindness” to amplify how much the Lord thinks on us as his creation.

I discovered the word again years later in my readings in Buddhism. Where I first assumed the word something of an anomaly in Christianity, one of many encomiums heaping praise on God, in Buddhism the use of the two-word term seemed much more intentional, if not systematic. Judaism has also tried to co-opt this word, but it seems almost anachronistic given the word's origination as we will see moving forward.

Of course I tried the dictionary first. Maybe I had missed something all these years.  So where does loving kindness come from and why did the translators decided on such a strange word?

In the case of Christianity, we have an easier answer, one that is documented to around the 16th century. Miles Coverdale, in looking for a word to convey the difficult meaning of the Hebrew word chesed decided on the meaning “loving-kindness.” Other translations for the word include simply “kindness” but also “covenant.” We do have a better word for covenant in the Hebrew, bereth, and there seems to be at least some indication that it might be etymologically linked to bara (to cut). So too there is at least one instance in the context of the Hebrew Bible where a case for “covenant” might be made that uses chesed.  Here we see the word kerath – to cut. This word almost always appears with respect to covenant (bereth). The formulaic structure accompanying this word (to cut covenant) is usually not far behind.  The meaning of the cutting of covenant comes from the ritual exercise of cutting a beast in two parts and walking between the two pieces, a strange ritual that was said to have been undertaken by Abraham and God.

If loving-kindness is a neologism that comes about in the last four hundred years, my question becomes all the more urgent: Why would translators in two different religious traditions chose a word so similar?

Buddhist scholars also recognize that the Pali word metta often translated as loving-kindness is likewise difficult to translate. The word metta comes from two roots in Pali – one suggests to be “gentle” and the other is for “friend” (mitra).

It is difficult to track down loving-kindness and its link to metta. We have “love” as a proposed translation, as do we have “friendship.”  But loving-kindness is so far off the beaten path. It’s a word one does not find in the dictionary or in any reliable context that finds its way into the regular nomenclature of secular English. Was it perhaps borrowed from the English translation of the Christian God’s loving-kindness shown towards his followers. Could an early Buddhist translator have picked up a Christian Bible, saw this word, and thought that it demonstrated the same notion of Buddhist compassion? It’s worth thinking about. We certainly know that translated words move indiscriminately from culture to culture. When hell moved in the Japanese culture and certain Japanese Bibles picked up on the word, the translation reflected a entrenchment in cultural Shintoism that was itself a translation from the Chinese for “yellow spring.” That phrase was “Yomi no Kuni” for the land of the dead.

My admission here is that I don’t know how loving-kindness because the translated phrase of choice for metta in English. My theory, however, stands that it most likely had to do with words that were picked from the culture, and it may have been that a well-meaning translator looking for the precision of an English word that would not suggest physical love or simply friendship, or even compassion, decided that loving kindness was a much more visceral word. In such cases, this example amply demonstrates the problems with elevating translations of religious concepts into second or third languages with the task of trying to adduce comparative meaning only through those translations, rather than going to back to the sources that may affirm or deny the usefulness of such exercises.