4/15 TRANSMISSION of the LIGHT: to Guanzhi

Baby, who do you love?

I am sometimes asked if Buddhists should be free of all attachments, and thus all love.

As in so many facets of this Way of Life, I feel to say YES! ... and NO! Like two faces of a no-sided coin, without the least incongruity or conflict.

I feel that we can love passionately, be totally connected to and romantically united with people in this life, maybe some special things too we hold dear.

At the same time, we must be willing to let go, hold lightly ... also we must see that realm beyond me and you, two people to love, separate beings and things.

All these faces of Love can be known at once. What results is a Love beyond and sweeping in and giving birth to a "me" to love "you" and no me, no you too.

What can result is, for example, at the time we may lose someone we love ... a broken heart hand-in-hand with a Heart Never Broken. We may cry tears of loss tasting too that nothing is lost, nothing can be lost. Yet we cry.

I think that, in early Buddhism, the idea was for monks to move away from a romantic love as a source of "attachment" and "passions". In later Buddhism as it moved through China, Japan, Tibet and now the West, perhaps the above flavors of attachment-without-attachment, passionate love-free of the passions, etc., became better mastered.

Oh, and beware the "false Zen" mentioned in the writing who, so removed from the people and things of this world, is lost in a cold emptiness.

Cook from 209
Hixon from 195

Gassho, J

There is nothing to be acquired, yet people try to acquire love, which is how they get hurt. But if you ARE love then there is no one to be hurt. Same goes for reality. We love our reality, which gets us all caught up in it and hurt. So the best way to love reality is to be Reality, the Original Awakeness Reality beyond relative and absolute, even beyond love. It's all right here, really!

Hiyas
sticking to our love of that which we see as separate, something to cherish and cling to becomes mired in our desire and so our loves become suffering.
If this love can lead us to being stuck, "shackled",well then Do we toss our current possessions to the street, leave our homes and shun our loved ones?
Doing this, we are senselessly careening the in the opposite (yet eerily similar) direction tossing it all in to the idea of a mistaken idea of emptiness and voila stuck again :D
Holding all this in an open mind, loving the coming and going and realizing the connectedness we all have in it...all of this as it is... that nurtures a love beyond what we ordinarily seek to love.

Gassho
Shohei

If we love as a desire for love then we are attached to form..sensations etc.
If we love as in being attached to the formless, we live through a sense of 'duty' to love, whereby a person has subjugated themself to that ideal.
To be free of both, we love as a dynamic interaction and we are in relationship with something more, as Alan put it, 'the best way to love reality is to be Reality'.
In Chinese and I think Japanese the idea of love is more akin to harmony. Maybe being in harmony better describes this non attachment.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jundo

Oh, and beware the "false Zen" mentioned in the writing who, so removed from the people and things of this world, is lost in a cold emptiness.

---

At times I can see the attraction of this...sort of a numbness..a sojourn away from others. As Hixon states, "Falling in love with formlessness." But it is compassion, which to me has a suggestion of emotion, that brings us back.

Gassho,
BrianW/Jisen