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Love
This talk is about love—the necessity to love, the need to love. It begins with the questions asked by Maitreya, the future Buddha of love: Is there anyone happy on earth? Is there anyone who can understand pairs of opposites without getting stuck? Who deserves the title ‘great human being’? Love is often a search to fill a feeling of emptiness, a belief that we lack basic goodness, beauty, and truth. This kind of love is based on fear—fear that the object of our love is an illusion, and fear of impermanence. We try to live up to an image, using spiritual and moral cosmetics, which leads to a feeling of being unworthy.
True love is discovered when we touch the real energy of goodness and beauty in another, which gives us a chance to touch it within ourselves. The Buddha discovered upon his enlightenment that everyone has the capacity to love and understand, yet we let ourselves sink in suffering. A good teacher helps you discover the teacher within, because you have everything you need. The Buddha taught four elements of true love:
- Maitrī (loving kindness), which brings beauty.
- Karuṇā (compassion), which brings infinite space and transforms suffering.
- Muditā (joy), which brings limitless consciousness.
- Upekṣā (equanimity or freedom), which brings “nothing at all,” meaning you have everything.
The happy person is a “man or a woman of nothing,” not caught in pairs of opposites like being and non-being, or birth and death. This is illustrated with the story of the two insight gathas from the Fifth and Sixth Zen Patriarchs. The first gatha is practical: “The body is like a bodhi tree. The mind is like a bright mirror. And that is why every day you have to remove, to take care of the mirror so that the dust of the world will not be able to cover the light.” The second is transcendental: “Body originally is not a tree. The bright mirror is not really a mirror. Since the very beginning, nothing has existed. Where, and then where the dust can fix themselves on?” Without the practical, daily mindfulness of the first poem, the deep insight of the second may not be very helpful.
