Introduction Thich Nhat hanh
Waking up to what you do By Diane Eshin Rizzetto
ISBN: 978-1-59030-342-9
Publisher: Shambhala Boston & London
Happiness is only possible with true love. True love has the power to heal and transform the situation around us and bring deep meaning to our lives. The Buddha’s teachings on love are clear, scientific, and easily applicable to daily life. Every one of us can benefit from these teachings.
When the Buddha’s son Rahula was a young novice monk, the Buddha advised him to practice being like the Earth and its oceans and rivers. No matter what people pour onto the Earth, whether milk, flowers, or compost, the Earth receives it all. Why? Because the great Earth is vast and has the power to transform everything into soil, plants, and flowers. If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into the river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash and drink. The river immerse, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace and transform.
If our hearts are big, we can be like the river. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, the same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform. So the big question is: how do we help our heart to grow? With practice, your heart will become infinitely large like the heart of the Buddha, capable of embracing the whole cosmos.
The French writer Antoine de St. Exupery wrote that to love is not just to look at each other but to look together in the same direction. I reflect on that statement a lot. One day I was visualizing a couple who were looking together in the same direction and I began to laugh, because the direction they were looking in was the direction of the television set. When two people no longer find joy in looking at each other and instead look in the direction of a distraction, this is not true love.
So what does it mean to love? To love is to look at each other and to look together in the same direction. If we know how to look, then looking at each other is also wonderful. Because if you know how to look at each other and discover the basic goodness and beauty within the other person, you have a chance to discover the same thing within yourself; looking at the other person is also to look at yourself. You have a chance to discover that love is something real; each of us is given opportunities to experience love as something that really exists. Love is the energy helping us to be strong and to care for the well-being of other people and other living beings.
Because we don’t know the art of mindful living, we make mistakes in our daily lives, and internal formations arise in us and those around us. We make our families, friends and colleagues suffer because we don’t understand them well enough and we have no patience. Slowly, our relationships become strained and one day we may find communication has become completely blocked.
All of us need love and all of us need to love. The realization of the Buddha on the morning of his enlightenment was that all of us have the capacity to love and to understand. But we seem not to believe. May be we haven’t had the time to look deeply into the nature of our love, to sum up what our love is about, and understand why it is that when we love, suffering arises from it. In Buddhism, the meaning of love is very deep but also very clear. In this book, I explore the elements that make up true love and the practices that allow us to develop it within ourselves.
This book is available for sale in
Buddhist Philosophy Bookshop, Hong Kong. |
