On Love (Part 2) - Ajahn Jayasāro
Mundane love has natural limitations simply through being a part of the world. It is always in some way deficient. That is the bad news.
But the good news is that there is another, superior kind of love, namely lovingkindness {metta). It is an unconditional love, expressed universally without bias, for all living things. It is a truly pure love. When an attachment is boundless, it does not cause suffering. On the contrary, lovingkindness brings only happiness of a most satisfying kind, because rather than being a part of the unfulfilling world, it lies on the path to liberation.
The Buddha’s teachings point out two significant drawbacks of mundane love:
- The lover, the beloved, and the love itself are all impermanent by nature. Fluctuations and changes in accordance with causes and conditions mean that nothing in the world, including personal love, is permanent or capable of being a real refuge.
- The lover, as an unenlightened human being, will always bear in his or her heart negative emotions (known in the Buddhist idiom as defilements or kilesa) which render love unsatisfactory and may cause problems in loving relationships at any time. It IS already naturally difficult for mundane love to last, and we make it worse with our ignorance and unwise desires.
Those who have what the Buddha called “right view” (samma ditthi) train themselves to see love in terms of the Four Noble Truths. They train themselves to acknowledge love’s inherent deficiencies, to try to find the appropriate value and meaning they should give to love in their lives. They attempt to abandon impurities in the heart that cause suffering in spite of the presence of love. Their goal is to avoid or minimize the suffering that arises from love, and to achieve and give as much happiness as possible. Finally, they use the Buddhas teachings to train their action, speech, and mind to lead their love in the direction of lovingkindness as much as possible, inspired by the awareness of the beauty of a love that is unconditioned.
Certain readers might not see any benefit in this training and might question why we should bother to meddle with love at all when it’s fine as it is. To this I would answer with a query: Is it really fine, and if so, how long will it remain so? How do you know?
The Buddha showed US that if something is real, it will withstand being put to the test. Only false things do not withstand examination. So if our love is genuine we should not fear putting it to the test. If we want to let go of falseness and reach authenticity, we must learn to examine our own hearts. That examination must include all feelings, including those dearest to our hearts such as love.
As spiritual practitioners we strive to understand love. When we examine love with a neutral, unbiased mind, attachments that have arisen from delusion will gradually dissolve along with the various impurities that have entered into our hearts and become bundled together with love. We will begin to appreciate the taste of non-toxic love, and finally in the hearts of those who have practiced well will remain only a clear, clean and unconditional love that overflows naturally from a joyful mind.
The kind of personal love that we experience from the beginning of our lives is the love between children and their parents. As we grow up we tend to take our parents for granted because they seem to be as fixed a part of the world as earth, water, fire, and air. We feel entitled to our parents’ love. Given how prone we are to complacency, it is a strong point of society here in Thailand that it places such emphasis on gratitude, encouraging people to remember how much they owe their parents and to experience the joy of reciprocating their parents’ kindness. When finally our parents must leave US, our sorrow does not need to be tinged with regret. Our memories can be full of pride at having performed our filial duties well.
There probably isn’t a parent anywhere who can insist that loving his or her children brings only happiness. It is rather that the suffering that arises as a consequence of parental love is considered to be redeemed by the joys of parenthood. Whenever their children suffer, be it physically from an illness or emotionally from a disappointment or not being able to get what they want, loving parents often suffer even more than the children. Parents can endure their own suffering but find their children’s suffering almost unbearable. In child-rearing, most parents are willing to sacrifice and endure years of exhausting physical and emotional hardship so that their children may be successful, capable, and happy.
Love for our parents and for our children is a natural attachment that is shadowed by suffering. It is a suffering that is for the most part willingly borne, but nevertheless we should be interested in learning whether there is any aspect of that suffering that we might relinquish without affecting our ability to be a good son or daughter or a good parent.
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