loving kindness

this weekend gave me the opportunity to help bhante by manning a booth for taking pledges and donations for the meditation center -- and displaying several splendid piles of books. i'd never seen any of them before. i credit my focus on the more mahayana branch forms of buddhism to be a culprit in my ignorance concerning the 'smaller vehicle,' the theravadan teachings of the buddha. this is bhante's field of study and practice, and getting to help him give out books and take donations and pledges for the meditation center he's composing, i'm thankful to get to interact with this slightly more foreign kind of lessons.

after contributing a bit of monetary means to the end myself, i was sure to take some of his selections home with me to give a closer look. a couple are particularly appealing, including The Buddha and His Dhamma by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, A Tree in a Forest (A Collection of Ajahn Chah's Similes) edited by Dhamma Garden, and What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula (all which may end up on the 'engaged reading' list if i ever get past a mere skimming of their contents). i'm intrigued by how much more attention this tradition seems to give to the scriptures, compared to the 'do-it-yourself' ambience of the zen (禅) influences i've known. there's still, always, so much more to learn.

on to this week's reflections by bhante, march 7:


We must remember: the rendition of meditation we so often see in pop culture -- that is, through television, magazines, and advertisement -- is not representative of the meditation Buddhism teaches, nor the breathing meditation we wish to practice. Neither is it something altogether esoteric from the world; it is something we do in as action response to the observation of our wandering mind. We do not meditate to become like the people we see in the ads, but to habitually exercise our control over mind. The moment that we feel that our involvement with a thought is more important than our practice -- this is the moment, over all others, for us to let it go, and we do this by meditating.

There is a story of an old man who interrogated the Buddha regarding happiness. The Buddha told him to venture out into the world and find out. On the man's journey, he met a young girl, whom he asked regarding happiness. She told him that happiness is love. He then carried on to meet a king, who told him happiness was surrendering. Finally, a passing soldier confided that happiness was nothing other than peace.

The young girl's answer, love, comprises today's lesson. Love is a single word with many, varied meanings. A sense of love we can all likely identify with, however, is one that is in near proximity to its seemed opposition: hate. How is this so? How is it we can feel such love for someone, to then be capable of turning against them -- or them against you -- in the flash of a moment's passing? How is it that we can feel such love for our parents, our siblings, our children, and yet discover tempered resentment toward the object of our passions, our lover, our partner?

Love is certainly emotion; we feel it in the presense of someone we care for. Just as well, we can feel hate, and even for the same person for whom we felt love. Love of this sort is addressed in the teachings of the Buddha in the same fashion other emotions are. They are all capable of controlling us, puppeteering us, making us lose sight of what is happening beyond our tantrums and yearnings. Love of this sort, like all things, is subject to change, and like everything else, it does just this. Love transforms into one of two particular other emotions (though anyone can also easily experience both of these at a given time): pain, and fear.

Where love induces pain or fear, one can be sure to trace it to a fundamental problematic for all sufferings: attachments. Where love really takes the form of lust (though we may not immediately recognize it), one experiences attachment to the object of passions, which brings suffering as both loved and lover change through time. This is a limited love, one that can easily, and intermittently, become hatred for the other, a self-induced estrangement by the nature of attachment.

However, if one really come to understand love, as we strive to do in our personal development through meditation, we can recognize a righteous sort of love, one that bears no hint of attachment but merely an unconditional respect for one's partner. There is another story that the wife the Buddha left in his search for truth eventually became a nun under his teachings and practiced techniques of personal development as we do today.

As the two became older, the Buddha's wife realized that she would soon die and sook the Buddha out to tell him of her vision. The Buddha, whose immense respect for his wife helped him see her unconditional respect for him, weighed this new information and decided he too would leave this world. Together, they escaped samsara, leaving with what they had the good fortune to discover before their end: their undying love that, like them, took no part in the attachments of those who suffer, but in the transcendence of those who recognize the unconditional truth.

If one can cultivate a love of this second sort, they will never encounter through it the pains and fears the former love entails. The love between the Buddha and his wife is the sort that a parent feels for their children, or a sibling for another sibling. It stems from the righteous act of giving and forgiving, and in this way love resembles no emotion but deliberate, intentional action. This comparison demonstrates the difference between having love and giving love; for one can never truly 'have' anything, including love, but can always be in the ever perpetual and ever rewarding process of giving. Giving is kindness, and together we recognize the manifest characteristic of unconditional love: loving kindness.


bhante then ended with a song in his native tongue, which seemed to last forever. it was beautiful, and it made me wonder if the buddha had ever been inclined to sing that way in the midst of his enlightened understanding.

これは歌をうたうようのための感応は知慮のおかげでみつけるぞ。