Post #55: Love

11 August 2023

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell

To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians often gets read at church weddings: “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (13:13). We have a translation problem there: the original Greek reads agape, the Vulgate Latin caritas, that is to say, love of one’s neighbor or fellow man—what the Buddhists call Metta or universal loving-kindness—and not the passionate, “romantic,” sexually tinged love that weddings, and their nights, bring to mind.

St. Paul was no enthusiast for marriage—“Better to marry than to burn” (1 Cor. 7:9) was the most he would concede to the conjugally-minded—and there is something of this spirit about the Pali canon too, where some of the fiercest passages are devoted to denouncing sex in terms that make one wonder whether perhaps one is reading about serial murder,* rather than an impulse towards passionate connection upon which our species depends for its continuation, and which aims, by its very nature, to give great pleasure to both sides—a rare thing in life, as Nietzsche pointed out. Yet, traditionally at least, for a monk to have sex with a woman is the one unpardonable offense from which there can be no return to the monastic embrace.

The Tantric school has become almost synonymous, in the Age of Aquarius, with the post-romantic worship of all things sex-related—witness the yam-yub, for example, which depicts a buddha seated in the familiar lotus position, but with a naked girl wrapped amorously around him. Certainly the spiritual possibilities inherent in sexual energy have more of a place in the Mahayana than in the more austere Theravadan tradition, but the Himalayan interpretation of the entanglement focuses not on the hanky-panky but on a profound vision of spiritual union between the male (associated with skillful means and compassion) and the female (associated with natural wisdom).

The severe spirit of censorious judgment in the Theravadan schools is meant to be corrective, no doubt, designed to deter young men who must be expected to find celibacy difficult by brute force of condemnation from one of the greatest inducements that worldly life has to offer. (Our preoccupation with sex has generally appeared misplaced, even damnable, to many great philosophers and other high-minded savants who tend to dismiss such base sensualism as plainly vulgar and unworthy of the excellent life. Sheer nonsense, Schopenhauer thundered in response: for upon such union between the sexes depends nothing less than the composition of the next human generation, and what could be more important?)

Desire may look inherently problematic through the Buddhist lens, and the Scriptures (perhaps especially the Dhammapada) can make it sound as if there were no legitimate room for it in a righteous life at all. Yet it was the Buddha’s characteristic turn, when he gave up his austerities as useless and counter-productive, to recognize that the light-hearted enjoyment of natural human needs—eating and sleeping and much else besides—was not something to scorn or be worried about, but essentially innocent and harmless (see Post #10). Thus the provenance of the Middle Way, in direct and deliberate contrast to the more ascetic traditions, then as now.

Not only are many desires mere expressions of basic human needs and natural wants, and therefore quite unobjectionable so long as they are kept within reasonable bounds, but there are wholesome desires as well: the wish to be more patient and compassionate, for example, and to cultivate equanimity more assiduously; or the ambition to walk the Path with more resolve and pursue it all the way to the end one day, however long the journey may prove. The turn towards unwholesomeness depends, in large part, on just how urgent and blind one’s clinging and craving is allowed to become, especially when something cherished and desired is taken away. One may deem oneself quite detached in the possession of life’s good things, but discover something very different about oneself when they are lost. (Desire for the harmful, the hurtful, and the vicious is utterly deplorable from the Buddhist perspective, to be sure; but the Teaching holds it to be rooted less in evil than in ignorance and confusion about what really conduces to one’s own well-being. It amounts to a misunderstanding of life’s fundamental terms.)

The sexual side to life does, by its very intensity, raise special concerns that need to be taken seriously. And there is, anyway, much more to love than sensual delight, even between the most enamored couples. Even so, the passions ought not to be denied or repressed too forcefully, at least among layfolk, lest they do even more damage underground. Celibacy may be the higher calling, for the Buddhists as for St. Paul, but it is not given to all (1 Cor. 7:7). Or as the matter is presented in the particularly ancient Sutta Nipata, it is one thing for sensual desire to fall away like the old skin of a molting snake; for the same skin to be violently torn off when it is still attached, quite another. In the meantime, while we remain enthralled to the allure of the senses, sexual intimacy, despite all its complex admixtures, remains a potential connecting force that cannot be reduced entirely to the carnal, or dismissed as mere banality or beastliness. Animals copulate; only human beings make love, or fuck for that matter.

We humans have a way of getting preoccupied with who does what with whom. It makes for great gossip and vicarious titillation, but from a Dhammic perspective it is somewhat beside the point: what matters karmically is the volition behind what we do, and the crux is therefore always the how, the spirit governing an action, not the deed in isolation. The best thing done unlovingly is no longer the best, perhaps not even good anymore; whatever is done with genuine love, on the other hand, is karmically good, or at least harmless rather than damnable, even if it might also be ill-considered, imprudent, or otherwise unhelpful. Skillful means count for much, but loving-kindness counts for even more.

Lovelessness, alas, has an insidious way of appearing expedient and clever wherever the hard-boiled worldlings turn their jaundiced eyes. All manner of specious justifications for this doleful state of the soul are not only very commonly advanced and accepted, but nearly expected of the shrewd and the sophisticated. Dwell too heavily on the demands of love and you risk looking a simpleton and a sucker. But such jeers the faithful must everywhere endure, whatever the specifics of their faith may be, and who shall laugh last remains to be seen.

Dhamma-skeptics will often ask what, when the cruder impulses of selfish reward have been abated, should drive us to do necessary things that nobody would do for pleasure. Duty, one might answer: such things are to be done simply because they are right, whether there be an applauding crowd or not. But the believer in loving-kindness has a further answer: the best things are done, or even ordinary things done best, when love enters into them. Let our lives be suffused, in matters big and small, with that all-encompassing power—said to be no less than the “divine abode” of the saints and the gods in the Pali canon—and all contrary argument falls silent or rings hollow.

Much of what presents itself in the world as “tough love” looks more tough than loving to me; but it would be equally mistaken, I think, to picture the loving person as a pushover. Love does not insist on its way as do the selfish and willful; it is ever-ready to turn the other cheek, that is to say, it can and will by all means resist the urge to strike back on blind impulse—but then, when it counts, it will stand its ground undaunted before the greatest evils, if necessary.

There is much more to be said about a force that may connect us to eternity, if anything can—how forbearing and patient it is, and how kind; how impervious to envy or vaunting; how remote from arrogance and rudeness, irritability or resentfulness; how truthful and how steadfast, if it is the real thing, not a mere flight of fancy or a passing infatuation; but all this has been better said by others, not least St. Paul, and need not be belabored here.

A loving outlook is not something that anyone can argue himself into by intellectual means alone, or that can be reliably acquired by taking a leap of faith, once and for all. To arrive at lasting communion with it takes assiduous cultivation and practice, even if grace may have its part to play. The obstacles of undue self-centeredness must be continually cleared away (whatever higher help one may also be able to count on) by establishing oneself in equanimity—the twin of loving-kindness, as the seeker is bound to discover upon closer inspection. It is the nature of love to flow freely, as Thoreau puts it in Walden, but only once the channels of purity have been properly opened. And that may take some doing.

* Thus the harrowing talk of inserting privy members into the mouths of black vipers, or into blazing fire-pits, as in the Sudinna tale in the Dhamma-Vinaya, the Buddhist monastic code (see, briefly, Post #31).