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?

.

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")

.

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"?