Nothing Higher to Live For: Romantic Love

Yung Gravy; Jimmy Kimmel; Leonard Price (Ven. Nyanasobhano), Nothing Higher to Live For: A Buddhist View of Romantic Love (ATI); Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

If we accept that it's a truism that "white men can't jump," what can be said of their rapping?

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I should be dressed like a Central Asian royal.

...They have nothing but love to live for.

This is not to say that such a surrender must be bad, only that it happens out of instinct and uninformed passion.

Love is sweet, and it is our nature to give in. But why do we worship relationships so ardently, and why do we break off our search for real fulfillment here? Perhaps it's because we see no other gods.

Yet if love is the highest thing to live for then this is a hopeless universe, because we should see in a calm hour that Cupid's arrows not only thrill us but make us bleed and endanger our loves, leaving pathetic and clingy.

Can I love the Buddha, my teacher?

"Man Kills Estranged Lover Then Self," "Wife Stabs Husband in Domestic Quarrel," "Love Triangle Leads To Shooting" -- so read the headlines with depressing regularity.

The stories behind them are only the most shocking of countless tales of passion, but they forcefully suggest that romantic love is not always a blessing.

One might object that hate, not love, spawns such tragedies. But where has such hate come from if not from a prior attachment now broken?

We should know from experience how easily what we call love can turn to bitterness, jealousy, and malice. And though we protest that this is not the fault of love, we ought to notice that where one passion arises another is likely to follow.

Passions are unreliable, volatile, dangerous, and a poor foundation for our happiness.

Divorces, suicides, dissipation, violence, depravity, fanaticism, and other miseries great and small follow from passion. Yet passion is still, in the public mind, considered commendable, a mark of vigor and liveliness.

Though everyone will admit that passion gone awry is dangerous, few realize that passion is by its nature likely to go awry.

Romantic love is a chancy passion that may result in the opposite of what is desired. It may have happy consequences, too — else it would not have so many devotees — but it raises the stakes in the gamble of life and makes us more vulnerable both to our own weaknesses and to unpredictable fortune.

As most of us count the joys of successful love (however one defines it) worth the pain involved in its pursuit, we must learn to step lightly and with intelligence.

We believe, with some reason, that love can ennoble and redeem us and call forth our purest energies, but we are slower to see that when the lamp of love flickers out, as it tragically tends to do, we might lose our way in a fearful labyrinth of suffering.

Granted that few will shun the pursuit of romance out of fear of unhappy consequences, what can be done to soften those consequences?

If we really have nothing higher to live for, nothing to fall back on, the sad truth is that nothing much can be done to ameliorate them, given the volatile nature of human affections.

So it would be wise to make sure there really is no superior, sustaining ideal before committing ourselves exclusively to the chase.

Nirvana

Man in front of Maitreya in Himalayas

Buddhism, of course, teaches such an ideal, which is nothing less than freedom from all sorrow, called nirvana.

While worldly joys are mutable and fleeting, nirvana is established, sorrowless, stainless, and secure.

While worldly pains are piercing, unpredictable, and unavoidable, nirvana is altogether free from pain. It is the end of suffering, the supreme refuge, the ultimate liberation.

The Buddha himself applied many terms of praise to nirvana while recognizing the essential inadequacy of words and concepts.

Nirvana cannot be grasped by language or concept, but it can be known and realized by direct experience for one who makes the right effort. This is a critical point.

Nirvana is not something that happens to us through an external agency. Rather it is something that we ourselves may experience by our efforts in calm and insight.

The Buddha certainly never would have troubled himself to teach had he not understood that his own realization was not a chance event but rightly won and that those who followed the instructions to realize it could also experience direct realization for themselves.

Yolandi Visser and motorcyclist house guest (Die Antwoord, "Baby's on Fire")

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This understanding, passed down, has sustained the Buddhist Dharma or religion to the present day. The diligent are powerful. Suffering can be overcome.

What is the Path?

Knowing ourselves to be sunk in confusion and beset by myriad defilements, we might regard nirvana as too remote to do us much good here and now.

We persist in seeing an unbridgeable chasm between enlightened beings (saints) and ordinary people like ourselves. We think practically everybody is like us (or worse), while maybe there are one or two genuine saints in the world.

Presumably they have just been born in that awakened condition or with the exceptional good luck to get themselves elevated — who knows how?

Yet the human condition is not, according to Buddhism, a fixed sentence to this or that level of wisdom and virtue. Beings are living at all stages of attainment. They do not stay in the same place.

They rise through their own good efforts and decline through their own negligence in the endless action and reaction of intentional deeds (karma) and the results of those deeds (karma-vipaka). More

White rapper Yung Gravy goes on a date with horrendous hag Aunt Chippy

Valentine's Day on Jimmy Kimmel Live! just got depraved and deplorable because Aunt Chippy is the opposite of a sport, while Yung Gravy is just about the coolest hipster around.

Who is this guy "Yung Gravy"?

Homosexuality and Buddhism: "Pandakas"

Pandaka literally means "eunuch." Generally, it is understood to be a transsexual or at the very least a transgender, often deviant, individual "lacking maleness." Homosexuality as understood today is not as it was understood in ancient India or even how it is understood today in various parts of Asia.

Leonard Zwilling
"It is evident, then, that we are dealing with a variety of sexual dysfunctions and variations categorized under the general rubric "pandaka," and the reason for this is that they all share the common quality of being "napumsaka," "lacking maleness." That is, for one reason or another they fail to meet the normative sex role expectations for an adult male.

"In the Vinaya literature [the Monastic Disciplinary Code] references to pandakas are made almost invariably within the context of sexual, specifically homosexual, behavior, and we find in many societies a tendency to label a boy or man who participates in homosexual activity as not being a "real man."[16]

"Even as early as the period of the Atharva Veda, pandakas were viewed as a distinct group, different from ordinary males and females, and apparently transvestite. The Vinaya, in fact, goes so far as to distinguish sexual activity between normative males from sexual relations between a socially normative male and a pandaka.[17]

"The pandaka was also viewed as possessing a distinct psychological makeup. According to Buddhaghosa [by far the most famous ancient scholar in Theravada Buddhism] pandakas are full of defiling passions (ussanakilesa); their lusts are unquenchable (avupasantaparilaha); and they are dominated by their libido (parilahavegabhibhuta) and the desire for lovers just like prostitutes (vesiya) and coarse young girls (thulakumarika).[18]

"Thus the pandaka is distinguished not by homosexual behavior per se, but by the failure to fulfill male role expectations, was considered in some degree to share the behavior and psychological characteristics of the stereotypical "bad" woman.

"For Vasubandhu, the psychological makeup of the pandaka is such as to have significant ramifications for his ability to practice religion. On the one hand, pandakas are incapable of religious discipline (samvara) because to an inordinate degree they possess the defiling passions of both sexes...and they lack the sense of modesty and shame...necessary to counteract them.[19].

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Buddhist monks pictured outside a nightspot on Patpong Road, Bangkok, an infamous commercial sex zone (Photo: AP; story: theage.com.au).

"On the other hand, paradoxically, the pandakas also... I can only speculate that this view of the pandaka as lascivious, shameless, unfilial, and vacillating is based on the social disabilities incurred by the pandaka as a member of a stigmatized and outcasted group, such as is formed by their present-day counterparts, the hinjras,[22] as well as on the inability or unwillingness of such offspring to bring satisfaction to their parents either in this life by producing children or in the afterlife owing to their disqualification from funerary and after death rites.[23]

"As for the etiology of the homosexual condition, Indian Buddhist tradition, at least as represented by Buddhaghosa, agrees for the most part with traditional Indian medical thought in seeing it as being essentially an organic disorder, although one with an important psychological component.[24]

"Buddhaghosa begins his analysis by pointing out that men and women obviously differ not only in what we call primary and secondary sexual characteristics, but in interests and inclinations as well....

"Also, a number of rules laid down in monastic law are meant to minimize the occasions for homosexual activity inevitable in closed, same-sex communities; for example it is forbidden for two novices to share the same bedcover[35] and it is not allowed for two novices to serve one monk; this rule having been promulgated after it was discovered that two novices had each committed a sexual offense with the other.[36]

"As to the ordination of the sexually nonconformist male, it will certainly be no surprise to find ordination denied to such individuals and that such denial has solid canonical authority.

As with all the rules in the system of Buddhist monastic law [Vinaya], this regulation purportedly arose in response to a specific set of circumstances that in the Pali tradition are recounted in the Pandaka-vatthu section of the Mahavagga.[37]

"The account is short enough, and of interest for the light it sheds on the perceived characteristics of pandakas, that I give it here in its entirety:

"At that time a certain pandaka was ordained among the monks. He approached a number of young monks and said: 'Come, Venerable Ones, defile me' (etha, mam ayasmanto dusetha). The monks reproached him: 'Begone pandaka, away with you! What have we to do with that?'

"Reproached by the monks he approached a number of large, stout novices. 'Come, Venerable Ones, defile me.' The novices reproached him: 'Begone pandaka, away with you! What have we to do with that?'

"Reproached by the novices he approached the elephant keepers and the grooms and said: 'Come, Sirs, defile me.' The elephant keepers and grooms defiled him.

"They grumbled, became angry and irritated: 'These recluses, these followers of the Buddha are pandakas and those who are not pandakas defile pandakas. Thus do they all lack discipline.'

"Monks heard those elephant keepers and grooms who grumbled, were angry, and irritated and those monks told this matter to the Blessed One who said: 'Monks, if a pandaka is not ordained, let him not be ordained. If he is already ordained let him be expelled.'"[38]

A similar prohibition would appear to be extended to the sexually nonconformist woman as well. According to the Cullavagga,[39] among the individuals to be denied ordination are the animitta and the itthipandaka. The latter, by analogy with the male pandaka, would seem to be no more than the female of the species and the equivalent of the narisanda, or lesbian, of the medical literature.[40]...

"Beyond the prohibition against ordination, Asanga, like Vasubandhu, goes so far as to refuse the pandaka recognition as a layman on the grounds that such persons are unfit to associate with or serve the samgha [Sangha] although, as a concession and perhaps reflecting a broader Mahayana perspective, he does allow them to practice the path of a layman if they so desire,[42] presumably without receiving recognition as a layman.

"Interestingly enough, the proto-Mahayana text Mahavastu recognizes that even such a highly advanced practitioner as a fourth stage bodhisattva may backslide owing to homosexual activity.[43]

"Although no explicit references to homosexuality are found in the Nikayas [the canonical divisions of the written Dharma], the collection of the Buddha's discourses in the Pali tradition, in the Puggalappasada-sutta of the Anguttara-nikaya[44] there is what may be construed as a warning to monks against homoerotic feelings.

"The Buddha warns that a monk who is devoted (abhippasanna) to another, who thinks: 'This person is dear and pleasing (priyo manapo) to me,' will be adversely affected if his friend is suspended or expelled by the Order, leaves, becomes mentally unbalanced, or dies.

"And again, Buddhaghosa, in commenting on a passage in the Cakkavatti-sutta of the Digha Nikaya,[45] describing the progressive degeneration in the life span of human beings following upon their increasing corporeality and sinfulness, takes the expression 'wrong conduct' (micchadhamma) as 'the sexual desire of men for men and women for women.'[46]

"In associating homosexuality with decline and decadence Buddhaghosa is undoubtedly reflecting a commonly held view of his time, a view also expressed in the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata.[47]

"In the sutra literature of Sanskrit Buddhism..."