Finally, "Big Bang Theory" lives up to its name as Raj and Penny fall into each other's arms.
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| Romans/Greeks knew "Desire." |
Is romantic love a universal emotion? In the West it often seems
we live, die, and even kill for love.
(We have
"Nothing Higher to Live For"? A Buddhist View of Romantic Love).
Love is passionate, foolish, and
cherished. But in many cultures,
arranged marriages are the norm. And
romantic love is, well, disruptive. It turns out people across the globe
feel romantic love, but they do not necessarily act on it.
Yes, people around the world fall in love. That seems like an obvious truth today, but it used to be quite controversial in the social sciences.
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| "Love feels like you're walking on a beach hearing the sound of waving coming over and over and over again while your feet is touching the sand softly." - Suzette Chu, 30, Shanghai |
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| Tell the World in a tee (SpencerFinnley/flickr) |
In fact, some scholars still believe that romantic love was invented
by European troubadours in the Middle Ages, and that people outside of
the Western tradition do not really experience it.
“We decided to see if that was true,” says anthropologist Ted Fischer, who teaches at Vanderbilt University.
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| Oh, this is what they're talking about? They think we didn't know about this? (Dan Zen/flickr) |
In 1992, he and William Jankowiak, an anthropologist at the
University of Nevada Las Vegas, did a survey of anthropological research
on 166 different cultures around the world.
“We looked for evidence of romantic love, and that could have been
love poetry, or elopements, or just general descriptions of what we’d
consider to be romantic love,” Fischer says. “And we found it in an
overwhelming majority of cultures.”
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| We're gay. State mandates you accept it (TW). |
Fischer says in the few places where they didn’t find evidence of
love, the anthropologists who did the original studies were not
looking for the factors he and Jankowiak were looking for.
So elopements
or love-related suicides might have occurred and just not been noted.
“So we thought it’s very likely romantic love is found in all cultures,” he says.
Jankowiak and Fischer’s paper made a big splash, and today it’s
widely accepted that people in cultures outside of the West experience
romantic love.
More
(BBT) Penny finally hits on Sheldon, America's favorite nerd!
Worshiping a "devil" on Valentine's Day
No, since the time of the ancient Romans and Greeks it is a menace in the form of a comely child --
Cupid (
cupido, "desire," aka
Eros).
"Cupid" in Buddhism is
Mara Devaputra, the angelic beguiler, the Lucifer figure, the great Satan when he's angry, the
puckish mischief maker when he's out to besot our vulnerable hearts.
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| Cupid/Mara (wikimedia.org) |
Ancient India recognized "Cupid" as
Kama-deva (the Indian personification of "sensual desire" called
kama as in the famous Hindu classic the
Kama Sutra). And many Hindus must give in to Western temptation because of modern American hegemony and the ancient Greco-Romans, which as
Bactria/Afghanistan overlapped on northwestern India (
Gandhara) many centuries ago.
What does
Mara, the great tempter and discourager in Buddhism, want? It is not that living beings fall into the hells or to be tested for
the god (Great
Brahma). No, his terrible aim is that living beings remain distracted from liberation, freedom, enlightenment, and nirvana and instead wallowing in ever-disappointing sensuality.
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| Thx, Catty Purry, you're doing Mara's work! |
So from a modest celestial world or heaven in the "Sensual Sphere" (Kama Loka), Mara/Cupid/the Devil makes it his business to keep everyone tempted and running around like Greek and Roman godlings, filled with lust, pride, jealousy, envy, and avarice. This deviant artist captures it:
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| Hey, don't judge. The third wheel is still a wheel, and as long as everybody knows. ;-) |
Language?
QUESTION (Robert Thomas): I read a book about
the occupation of Japan after WWII. I became suspicious that the
emphasis placed by the author on what even then seemed to me to be a simplistic understanding of
the idea of the Japanese emperor as a Shinto "divinity" (
kami).
Understanding of this
cultural and spiritual idea (Showa emperors and their place in superstitious Shinto
beliefs) is better explained in English texts these days. But it
struck me back then that words such as "divine" were likely to have been
translated poorly, by persons with little sociological (much less,
theological) understanding, to the point that the translated description
of their meaning was useless.
Why should we
accept that Mandarin-speaking people and English-speaking people have
the same thing in mind at all when talking about "romantic love"? How is this not utterly contingent on the
competence of translators?
(Big Bang Theory) Yoga, Penny, and Sheldon, the Third Wheel
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| Jampa Yeshi, 3-26-12 (globalpost.com) |
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