Love

General discussion, particularly exploring the Dharma in the modern world.
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maybay
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Love

Post by maybay »

Different paths in the Dharma have different things going for them. Some offer simple teachings that anyone could follow, some offer very practical advice, some mystery and even adventure, some an effortless path that's so profound its difficult to know where to start. But at the other end of the food chain of teachings is one we all encounter early on. Love / loving kindness - it's so natural its almost not worth explaining what it means. In any case, explaining would stray into analysis - something so incongruous with love.

I wonder how much Buddhists can really say they love the world. What is the motivation to love the world, besides some distant promise of liberation from it? Have I got it wrong? Does love even have an object? Compassion is easier. We see the suffering of the world, as the Buddha did, and we respond out of empathy. The cause of compassion is no mystery.

From another angle, compassion seems to dwell in that liminal space between habitual action and deliberate spirituality. Everything after those moments of compassion are deliberate, right up to and including the most elusive and effortless practices. If deliberate action is what defines the spiritual path (could you stumble your way up the bhumis by accident??) then where does that leave us with compassion? Should we always return to situations that engender a sense of compassion? I've heard of Buddhists visiting Auschwitz and slaughterhouses etc. Not sure what I think about that.

What I don't get is how love (the unattached kind) can be something deliberate. It almost suggests the opposite of deliberate action, like a letting be of whatever situation you find yourself in, without trying to be generous, patient, etc. Perhaps a deliberate suspension of all temporal and spiritual striving? Even of that guardedness we develop in relation to that world we learn to love to hate. Perhaps to be loving in a given situation requires overstepping vows and letting the kleshas come tumbling out in a cascade of unrehearsed ugliness?

Is this not just weakness, desperation? What is this thing love?
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DGA
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Re: Love

Post by DGA »

Loving others involves first finding something lovable about them, and responding appropriately. Hence all the meditations on all the beings in samsara equally desiring and deserving to be free from suffering, just like you. What could be more lovable?
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Ayu
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Re: Love

Post by Ayu »

Love is described as the wish for happiness for others.
Due to positive emotions like thankfulness or other realisations the wish arises "May these people be happy". The wider the view and the less selfish it is, the more people can be included in this sentiment.
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LastLegend
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Re: Love

Post by LastLegend »

What is love? Baby don't hurt me...no more.
It’s eye blinking.
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maybay
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Re: Love

Post by maybay »

Jikan wrote:Loving others involves first finding something lovable about them, and responding appropriately. Hence all the meditations on all the beings in samsara equally desiring and deserving to be free from suffering, just like you. What could be more lovable?
Just like me. Are you appealling to my sense of self love? The thing is, why would I do this, if it's not out of compassion (something distinct from love)?
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maybay
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Re: Love

Post by maybay »

Suppose we run with the "roots of virtue" idea. I think that's what Jikan driving at. Suppose seeking out roots of virtue in others is all day in the life for Buddhists. And I like seeing the best in people. It feels like I'm on a mission. A crusade even. Sometimes it feels strangely anti-establishment, where the establishment prepares for people at their worst (No wonder institutions have such a bad rap.)

But then a mission is an agenda is a deliberate attempt to *something*. So how can love be part of the spiritual progression. Hare Krsna's come to mind. Also guru yoga.

Prostration, vajrasattva, mandala, guru yoga.
Humble refuge, confession, offering, love.

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Re: Love

Post by Punya »

Love is such an inadequate word in the english language with nebulous meanings. Compassion seems closer to what is sought in a buddhist context. To have empathy is a component of this.

Sometimes compassion arises naturally and sometimes we have to work at it. In the latter case we can view it as aspiration so still a positive activity on the path. My understanding is that true compassion only arises with enlightenment.
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Kim O'Hara
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Re: Love

Post by Kim O'Hara »

Punya wrote:Love is such an inadequate word in the english language with nebulous meanings.
Indeed. It's actually worse than that, in fact - is is tricky and misleading, not just inadequate, because it has so many different meanings.
Look at this list, for instance:
I love you – will you marry me?
I love my brother.
I love mankind.
I love God.
I love my dog.
I love hang-gliding.
I love Thailand.
I love my new tennis racquet.
I love chocolate mud-cake.

:shrug:
Does "love" have any consistent meaning at all?

:namaste:
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Re: Love

Post by Rakz »

Love is an illusion (as with all other worldly attachments) and has no place in Buddhism.
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Re: Love

Post by muni »

Love as a feeling by a subject me for an object you or chocolate is actually liking the feeling love arising in oneself, which is than projected on you or the chocolate. Since the you and the chocolate connection makes this feeling arising and this feeling is loved and wished to keep.
Examples are given with chocolate, if you have to keep eating it till you become sick, there will be no feeling of liking anymore, if you hold/hug this body (which I identify with as being me) all the time without letting it free ( when I have to pee), the love will change in a little irritation. This love is a changing and so temporary phenomenon.
Being in love is the same, we love the feeling being in love which is triggered by the appearance of the other. It can turn in Love but it depends.

True Love is not subject me loving its’ object, it can arise with genuine concern for the other, putting own welfare not prior. I guess therefore in Buddhism there is so much pointing to act for the welfare of all ( already pointed here), while to criticise own mind in order to purify it. Compassion with a big C has no subject-object either and Love-Compassion-Devotion are not different things. Maybe like that is Bodhichitta?

I do not think the meaning is to love the whole world. I think it is more to realize how this world appears and is, then Bodhichitta can shine impartially.
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Re: Love

Post by Ayu »

Another word for love in buddhism is metta.
It is the first of the four unmeasurables... :smile: and it has a fundamental place in buddhism.
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maybay
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Re: Love

Post by maybay »

Ok, so love allows us to "shine impartially" through "meditations on all the beings...equally desiring and deserving" which results in a wider view, all pointing to the situation where love risks losing any meaning at all and losing it's place in Buddhism. I very real danger I think.

For a long time the only quote I thought about love was from Milarepa "Love is covert egoism". That thought let me avoid this difficult issue. Wanting to confirm the quote I found this piece on Love and Compassion by Ven. Sonam Gyaltsen:
When a Bodhisattva cultivates the habit of regarding others as equal to oneself, one learn to feel the joys and sorrows of other like his own, and does not prefer his own happiness to that of others. Thus the Mahayana elevated compassion as concerns for the welfare of living beings and willingness to sacrifice the self interest and second to no other principle in the path. True concern for other so the fruit of total unconcern for oneself: without such unconcern. love is covert egoticism. Thus we read in Milarepa's life [rNam-thar], one of his disciples eager to clarify all his doubts before the master's death bed, asked if it would be fitting for them to engage in external practice if they were performed for the benefit of living beings detachment from Milarepa answered that one could do so if there was complete self interest. Bit this was extremely difficult and as long as there was attachment, all effort for the sake of others would be fruitless. It would be like the blind leaking the blind. Rather, one should humbly refrain from trying to lead the world to bliss and engage in the quest of Buddhahood for the sake of all living beings After all, "Space is limitless, sentient beings are numberless, you will have ample opportunity for acting for the sake4 of all beings when you become capable [as Buddha] to do so". So it is clear that without a radical transformation of the self, all attempts to help others will be tainted with the "perfumation" of covetousness, hatred and delusion; however subtle this may be they will always bring about now sufferings. Obviously, all social or actions can not be more than a palliative to deeply rooted human suffering and attempts as helping other merely whitewash problems. Thus we can summarise characteristically Buddhist view of compassion in its two main points: [1] active compassion is pointless without the full enlightenment of the agent, and [2] the fulfillment of compassion takes place in the realm of the mystical.
Sounds like deliberate acts of love are in question. There's this question of loving impartiality as an engaged equanimity rather than blank indifference. What does this mean for any sort of deliberate Buddhist activism?
And how's that last sentence: love without visible consummation. Could this be a recipe for narcissism? What is marriage if not love in the eyes of the community?
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Re: Love

Post by muni »

Ok, so love allows us to "shine impartially" through "meditations on all the beings
There was a master who said; "it is like being in love with all and everything" But there is no separation, and so no this one and no that one, which can only without the thought "me". Its being, not a focussed acting.
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Re: Love

Post by Concordiadiscordi »

maybay wrote:What is this thing love?
Multitudes of answers have been proposed in response to questions such as this, amongst which none alone may be counted as absolutely final or exhaustive.
This is, perhaps, one of the most fascinating and frustrating features of topics such as love: they provoke open-ended question-problems marked by peculiar hues of fertile and irreducible ambiguity, hence spawning heterogeneous lines of flight incapable of being 'resolved' in transcendent syntheses or grand narratives of any particular sort.

In my estimation, love may only be described as a virtual singularity capable of being actualized in myriad ways; a transcendental problem which, while being amenable to multiple solutions, may never be entirely exhausted by any single solution alone; an indeterminate question which not only evokes responses and encounters, but points ever 'beyond' them toward the fecund and harrowing indeterminacy of the real; a singularly potent wellspring of creative becoming which simultaneously draws us into and beyond ourselves.

In this sense, it is perhaps not wise to ask 'what' love 'is'; instead, it might be more appropriate to ask 'how' love 'might' become.

How might love become?...
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Re: Love

Post by Saoshun »

There is no such thing as man-dog love, man-woman love, man-mother love, man-son love, man-daughter love. Love is just a certain sweetness of emotion. The method – how you are arriving at it – is the only question.
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Re: Love

Post by gloriasteinem »

and how do you arrive at it? see the ethics forum question about realms. and most of all what do you do with that sweet thingy when you get angry? as you do. and you do it freely. so you say one should leave him or her self on the feeling of anxiety. just a feeling. scare is a natural reaction to what is dangerous and harmful and has its role to protect as an instinct from bad things. its not only an inner phenomena to be observed. in fact someones anger might cause serious anxiety to another
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Re: Love

Post by gloriasteinem »

Love is not a weakness and of amuse t can be a willful effort and not simply a sweet 'condition' as Shaosun her states lol :)

also unfortunately I had the same act that I loved so much but someod stole or hurt last year. coincidentaly
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