Filed under: Uncategorized
So, here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. Maybe we can discuss it. Or maybe someone else can make another post about something they’ve been thinking about, and we can discuss that.
A few weeks ago, I went to see my friend Joe Fenstermaker’s Division III film, which was about Quakers, and more specifically about Quaker peace activism. You can watch the trailer here: http://vimeo.com/3120825 , and I believe it will be screened again during the Div III presentations next Thursday, if you’re interested.
Anyway, many of the people in the film spoke a lot about love as the basis for their contemplative practice and for their peace activism, and it made me think about how I don’t hear love spoken about so much in the Buddhist communities I have been a part of. We talk about wisdom and compassion. I am curious about what people see as the differences between love and compassion–some types of love seem very similar to compassion, while others obviously don’t.
I was at a zendo in Seattle and someone asked the teacher about the role of love in Buddhist practice. He asked, “Isn’t it just another form of attachment?” The teacher said, if I remember correctly, that love, like anything else, could be an attachment or could not be, and it had to do with how you approached it and thought about it. But my concern is that, for Western convert Buddhists, this misconception that love is an attachment that has no place in Buddhism, is somewhat widespread.
And then I think of a Zen story that I heard once, which I will try to recall accurately. (I’m pretty sure I read it in “Zen: Merging of East and West,” by Philip Kapleau, if you want to check it out for yourself). There was a young man who lived with his mother, and they were all that each other had. But the young man wanted to study Zen, so he made the difficult decision to leave his mother and to join a monastery. He eventually became the head of the monastery, and was responsible for the several hundred monks that studied there. His mother, close to death, wanted to see her son one last time, so she undertook a difficult journey and reached the monastery where she believed him to be. She told the monks there that she was the mother of the abbot, and they went in to speak to him. The monks returned and told the woman that the abbot had said that she was not his mother. Then she died.
But (says Kapleau) the point was that she actually was the abbot’s mother, and that he said that she wasn’t because he had a responsibility to the temple and he knew that if he saw her, his love for her would overwhelm him and he would no longer be able to carry out his responsibility to the sangha. So he made a difficult choice, and I think that the story says that his mother understood and forgave him. I am interested in the positioning of love here as a barrier to one’s being able to carry out one’s responsibility to the community, whereas in the Quaker community mentioned at the beginning of this post, it is portrayed as a motive and sustaining force for fulfilling responsibilities to the community.
Okay, so there are some thoughts on love and Zen. I am curious what other people think, or what other people’s experiences have been with the discussion of love in Buddhist communities.
Please comment!
– Ellen
Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment
Hampshire College Buddhist Resource Group 