Binging on sexy "Bridgerton" (video)

Leonard Price; Ashley Wells, Dhr. Seven, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation) Wisdom Quarterly

Helen and Paris (J-L David, 1788)

Netflix and chill. What's the Buddhist subtext in Netflix's new hit series Bridgerton? That love hurts? That romantic love is futile if what we're seeking is lasting fulfillment, satisfaction, or happiness -- what the Buddha called sukha. It gets us the reverse, dukkha or misery, ill, and disappointment. Look, it's a TV romp. Who knew the British even had sex? Other than the Royals, of course, who are always caught up in some scandal or another to distract and amuse the Commoners and keep them oppressed, like that class conscious Monty Python scene:

*(Kent Rushton) Monty Python and the Holy Grail: The Lady of the Lake

Buddhist romance?

Ecstatic mystical experience is far better, safer.

I have nothing higher to live for than romantic love (Eros, sexual passion, Greek love, crushes, attachments), based on grasping and clinging: I'm unable to let go, get over it, get a grip, and calm the fire consuming me. Watching Bridgerton probably isn't helping. It's hot, a fantasy of diversity in upper caste England. That one family family could have so much sexual diversity, chasing the dragon. The "dragon" is fulfillment by the common love of cupidity and sensuality. It's an old, old story.

Nothing Higher to Live For: A Buddhist View of Romantic Love

by Leonard Price (Ven. Nyanasobhano, Buddhist Publication Society)

The Old, Old Story (JW Godward, 1903)

Practically nobody questions the supremacy of romantic love, which is good enough reason to do a little poking around the foundations of its pedestal.

Who is entirely satisfied with the romance in his or her life? Who has found the sublime rapture previously imagined? And if one has actually found such a thing, does it last, or does it not rather change and decline from the peak of ecstasy?

[All component things are hurtling toward destruction, so perhaps we should seek for the incorruptible, the actual, the real of a bliss unending that is nirvana.]

And if it declines what becomes of one's purpose in life? If a purpose is achieved it is no longer a purpose; it can no longer guide or sustain us. Does one taste of nectar satisfy us forever? When we tire of crass, material goals we may go searching for love instead of, say, spiritual insight, because love seems both more accessible and more urgent, and because so much of institutional religion ("spirituality") in our time has degenerated into insipid humanism.

Heidi Hamilton's favorite period piece of throbbing action in sweat shorts.

Some claim refuge here but many more, longing for authentic and moving experience [mystic immediacy], turn to the vision of the "lover," that source of wonder, joy, and transcendence, who, it is thought, must be pursued and if captured perfected and if perfected then enjoyed forever — or until some other lover lights up the horizon.

Love is its own justification, especially for the young who have no other inspiration or no career or responsibilities to dull themselves with as their plodding elders do. Longing bursts through this one channel that seems open, dizzily insisting that the life of unreflecting passion is the highest they can aspire to.

They do not reason, but fall. Their elders do reason — obsessively — but fall all the same, thereby admitting that, with all their thought and experience, they find, when driven to extremity, 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 way. But why do we worship it so ardently, and why do we break off our search for fulfillment here? Perhaps because we see no other gods [or goals].

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.

"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 these are only the most shocking of countless tales of passion, but they do 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 happiness. Divorces, suicides, depravity, dissipation, violence, fanaticism, and other miseries great and small follow from passion, and yet passion is still, in the public mind, considered commendable, a mark of vigor and liveliness.

Though everybody 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 we define 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. More