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How does the Buddha love?
This is an age-old question. Yet, we are still confused about it. The problem is that people use the word “love” to mean so many different things. But intuitively, we know that there is such thing as “true love” and “false love,” although we find it difficult to specify the difference. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek said that “If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.”
I agree with Žižek. There is a Buddhist teaching which goes like this: “Great kindness has no conditions; great compassion sees no separateness.” If you need reasons to love someone, then it is a “love” that looks for a return. A “love” that requires reasons is a “love” with strings attached. It is more an exchange, a trade.
If we say that genuine love has no reasons or conditions, then such “love” must be very different from our common sense of love. Let me clarify that “love” is different from “like.” In our daily life, we run into people we like and people we dislike. Like or dislike is based on certain attributes of a person. Many people think that parental love is unconditional. But is it really? What I say about liking or disliking holds true even in a parent-child relationship. If a child has certain features or behaves in a certain way, his parents will like him. If not, they will dislike him. As parents, we are supposed to love our children regardless of everything. In other words, our…
