The Elegant Simplicity
of Buddhist Love
06/14/2017 Zach Beach,
Huffpost
You always hurt the ones you love.
Relationships take work. Marriage is complicated. You can’t love
others if you don’t love yourself.
To a Westerner, the experience of love can be
a roller coaster of challenging experiences. From passion and
romance to pain and heartbreak, the ups and downs of intimate
relationships can leave us all a little weary.
But it need not be this way. There are other
ways to think about and frame love in our minds and hearts. While
hopeless romantics will describe love as the great ineffable,
Buddhist philosophy provides us with a simple but profound
definition: love is a genuine concern for another person’s well
being.
Genuine care
It’s quite simple: if you care about someone,
you love them. If someone cares about you, you are loved. That’s
it. There isn’t any fear of abandonment, insecurity, lying,
cheating or game-playing. If you love someone, you want them
to be happy. You don’t want them to suffer. You wish them
well-being, health and joy.
In other words, feeling love does not require
being in an intimate relationship. We do not have to search the
world over for love by browsing through online profiles and going
on countless dates to find that right person. To a Buddhist, love
is not found out there in the world, love is found right here in
our hearts.
The highest emotions
Love—from this perspective—is like a river.
The source of the river is our hearts and our infinite capacities
to love. The path of the river is our attention and our ability to
consciously direct it to the people we care about. As our river of
love flows across the people in our lives, both our love and the
person we love are transformed.
These concepts are outlined in the teachings
of the Brahma Viharas, noble virtues that symbolize the
highest emotions a person can embody. These noble qualities
arise when our love touches others.
Love springs up in tender concern, it blossoms
into caring action. It makes beauty out of all we touch. In any
moment we can step beyond our small self and embrace each other as
beloved parts of a whole. - Jack Kornfield, The Art of Forgiveness,
Lovingkindness, and Peace
When our genuine concern touches a person who
is suffering, our love transforms into karuna, or compassion. Their
pain becomes our pain, and we experience what Buddhist scriptures
call the “quivering of the pure heart,” and a desire for this
person to be alleviated of their suffering.
When our love touches someone who is doing ok
in their lives, it turns into metta, or loving-kindness, a desire
for that person to be happy. Metta is often described as an
“unstoppable friendliness,” or an overflowing of goodwill where we
care about a person and want the best for them.
Lastly, when our love touches someone who is
successful and happy, our love turns into mudita, or sympathetic
joy. In mudita, our happiness is their happiness.
With this understanding, our love becomes
quite easy. When we love someone, we care about them, we want the
best for them, we want them to be happy. If they are suffering, we
feel compassion. If they are doing ok, we feel kindness. If they
are doing well, we rejoice.
Simplify your love
One monk described a Zen garden as, “not
empty, but abundant in simplicity.” Seeing the elegant simplicity
of Buddhist love clears open a vast field of potential for our
hearts to step into. We can freely and openly extend our loving
attention to others, from our friends to our coworkers to strangers
on the street.
We do not have any reason to hold back our
love, since we are not giving anything away. We can love others
more easily and also tap into a deep love for ourselves. Even the
pain of others and ourselves is held in the arms of love through
compassion and kindness.
Let the disciple cultivate love without
measure toward all beings. Let him cultivate toward the whole
world—above, below, around—a heart of love unstinted… This state of
heart is the best in the world. - The Buddha (source)
Just as the sun offers its light so freely, we
can light up the world with this love. By recognizing that every
human being seeks happiness, we can let our river of love cover the
entire world with kindness and compassion.
Nothing can compare to such an
all-encompassing love. As the Buddha put it, “this state of heart
is the best in the world.”
Let your love grow
But we do not have to be Buddhists to bring
these ideas into our lives. We only need an open heart. During even
the most challenging times of love and loss, passion and betrayal,
connection and abandonment, lust and boredom, we can stay rooted in
our own hearts, in a love that is always available.
You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to
surf. - Jon Kabat-Zinn
Our perfect love then simplifies our imperfect
relationships, where we no longer complicate them, no longer
confuse real connection with codependency or attachment. For
simplicity is not found in eliminating the challenges of life, but
sailing through them with elegance and grace.