In today’s article, I would like to explore new territories with you. These are new and old territories at the same time. I want to look with you at something so essential to our lives, something that we have all experienced plenty in our lives, day in and day out. Something that a newborn would not be able to survive with, although it is not a basic bodily requirement. I am talking about love. 

In every religion of the world, love plays a major part. For example, the bible (1 Corinthians 13) has a very famous and inspirational phrasing about love: 

“If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

As you can see, love is considered to be one of the greatest forces in the world. When I use the word “love”, what does that actually mean? Many people would answer in very different ways, and that is partly the beauty, or the “mystery” about love. There can be romantic love, love towards our parents, towards our nation, towards God, and many others. So, certainly, it is impossible to make justice to the word love in just one article like this one. The Buddha also spoke of love. The love he spoke about is called “metta” and is usually translated as “loving-kindness”. That is particularly interesting because it makes us ponder whether the metta that the Buddha taught and internalized is really the same as the love we commonly know in our day to day lives. Sometimes we come across words such as “conditional love”, “unconditional love”, “selfish love” and many other descriptions that identify different ways to love, some of them purer than others. 

In this article however, I would like to stay very pragmatic and simple, but still offer you a new perspective through which you can look at love. 

Father’s Day 

June 16th was a great opportunity to pay our gratitude to our fathers. Let’s take this opportunity to talk about love. Father’s day is a great opportunity to show and express love to your father. When you think about your father, you might immediately feel this warm feeling of love within you. Even if not, perhaps because there are some reasons that prevent you from feeling this way, that’s still okay. Maybe this article can be a inspiration to rekindle a frozen relationship. When I think about fatherhood, I of course immediately think about my father. When I recently discussed this topic with another Anagarika friend of mine, him being of Indian origin and me being from Germany, he explained to me the role of a father in Asian cultures. He told me that in his culture, the father takes the role of a strong character who will always make sure that the child learns and adopts the right manners and behaviours. He will hesitate to punish the child if it is necessary and beneficial for the child’s development. In this way, the child might suffer for a small while, but will eventually avoid a lot of suffering in the future, if the child actually learns the lessons that the father wants to instil within the child. When my Anagarika friend told me this, I also recognized the same behaviour in my father back when I was a child. When he wanted to deter me from playing computer games that I played day after day, and night after night, which was a particularly problematic habit I had in my teenage years. He did not want to punish me to make me unhappy, although that was the way I had intuitively felt about it at that time. He just understood a little more about the consequences and dangers of that behaviour than I did at that time. However, me being the immature teen who thought that I knew it all, and my father, not much, always felt resentful in those moments.

At that time, what he did, he did to restrict the amount of computer-time I was able to play to just one hour per day. To me, that seemed, at that time, way too little. When I came home from school, playing on the computer was the only thing I wanted to do. So, in that situation, I just could not bear to have such restrictions laid down on me.
If someone had asked me at that time, I would have said that his actions were unfair and unreasonable. Certainly, not actions that were filled with love.

Now that I look back on those years, I see it through very different eyes. Growing up and learning about life, learning about the Dhamma, I understood that real and long-lasting happiness does not come from playing games. Instead, long-lasting happiness comes from rejoicing in the truth of the Dhamma, having a set of values such as compassion, empathy, interest towards others, the willingness to sacrifice ourselves for others, or as my teacher would put it: to live and breathe for others. Because what we give, we get, and by giving happiness, we get it back. If we give love, we get love. 
When I look back at the events and my father’s actions, I know I can see the event in a very different way. As my views have changed since, now I perceive that these actions were the ways in which he expressed his love for me, although I could not see it in that way, at that time.

Can we give love?

This example leads me to an interesting question that I would like to pose to you:
Can we actually give love to someone? 
Let me rephrase the question matching to the above example: Were his actions loving or were they not?

Can we say whether the actions that I was subject to were loving or not? After all, as a teenager I felt they were unfair, and now I feel they were full of love. What changed was not the action, since both times I talk about the same action that happened. What changed is a view in my mind, not anything about the external event. Before my views about life changed, my mind did not interpret the same event as loving, but interpreted it as “unfair” because of the views that were present in my teenage years.

It is interesting, because we can understand something important about love in this example: Love is a perception, it is a perception that arises in our mind, it is an interpretation of external events. Today I perceive the an event as loving, whereas I did not perceive it as such before. The thing with perceptions, or interpretations is this: they arise based on a multitude of causes. The action itself, or the event itself, is only one cause. The views and expectations we hold are other causes.

We all know the experience of “feeling loved by someone”. This kind of love, is it something we gain from the outside world? Is it something that the other person can actually give us? As you have seen in the above example, this is not possible. My father might have had loving intentions. I don’t deny that. Yes, we can have loving intentions towards others. But having loving intentions does not mean that we are able to give or transfer that love to them. The love the other person feels arises based not only on the outside event but also on their views of what love means for them.

You might gift your spouse a CD of a famous rock band, and you might have the best of intentions when doing so. But if she does not like rock music, then your gesture might not make her feel that you appreciate her very much at all. However, if she likes rock music, it might make her very happy. This happens because of her view that rock music is good, and because of her view that a spouse should give each other a present. She must also have the view about love, namely, that love means to get something nice from another person.

You might have heard about stalkers. Socially, they are considered a menace. A person who follows another person without his/her agreement. Here, although one person wants to spend as much time as possible with the other person, the other person does not perceive that as an expression of love. The reason is, because his/her views are different. For example, let’s assume that someone rings at another person’s door and gift him/her a self-drawn picture every day as an expression of their affection. But if the recipient does not perceive any value in the giver or the picture, he/she would most likely be annoyed after a while. He/she would not feel loved, even if the giver’s intentions were so.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Martin Luther King

Love is a manifestation

As you can see now, love is a feeling that manifests within our minds when certain external situations as well as internal views  and expectations align, when these conditions match in the presence of complimentary conditions. It is an example of the principle of Cause and Effect: When the causes come together, the effect manifests. As I have explained, the love we feel is not something that comes to us from someone, such as the other person's actions. It is similar to when you clap your hands: when both of your hands come together with some momentum, the sound of a clap manifests. Both hands are contributing causes, but also the momentum or kinetic energy is another cause. The sound that manifests is not an entity that came from somewhere or that goes somewhere. It is not an existing entity, but rather a process driven by causes. And the same holds for love. 

Which is also the reason why it is not possible to hold on to “love”. It is like trying to grasp on to a block of ice: It appears solid at first, but when the causes change (e.g. ice is heated up), the ice melts and the water seeps effortlessly right through between our fingers. 

Usually however, we feel that love is an entity. Something that, once it is created, exists and can be obtained by outside people and events. We feel that there are people around us who give love to us. That means, based on our past experiences we now project a certain behaviour onto the outside world. We expect a certain behaviour from others, which makes our love no longer unconditional and pure. We expect our love for another to be reciprocated.

Noble Love
Conditional love is an emotion that arises in our mind based on a multitude of factors. It is a mental perception that manifests as certain causes come together, not something we can gain or expect from the outside. Now some readers might think: “So, is it wrong to show affection to others?” which is a very good question.
The Buddha gave us the following advice: No, it is not wrong at all, but it is a must to do as much as possible of it! To commemorate fathers of the present, past and future, I wholeheartedly invite you to think about ways in which you can appreciate the immense service your father has rendered you. Not just your father, but also other fathers and more generally, anyone who has been a father-figure, including the great men among us who play the role of a father to others, even when they are not bound by paternal obligation.

The Buddha asked us only to understand that we cannot give love and appreciation to our fathers directly, but we can only help to provide the necessary environment; words, actions and gifts that lead to the feeling of love in your father’s mind. You cannot give love to your father, you can only evoke within him a sense of feeling loved based on what he considers are signs of love, based on the views he holds.
Doing that is part of our duty towards our parents. And it is part of our practice of loving-kindness, the Noble intention to wish and work towards the well-being of all sentient beings in this journey of Sansara. If we can do that unconditionally and without expectations, that is the most noble of affections. It is the one kind of love that is not self-seeking, the one that was mentioned in the bible quote at the beginning. It is our chance to pay back our debts to them by helping them live a happy life and supporting them to attain the supreme bliss of Nibbana. 

I hope that we can make this day a small step in that direction. It starts with making a small selfless step towards others. To express our gratitude, to cool down swelling conflicts or reheat cold relationships. Remember: No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever in vain.