Love Encompasses All Human Beings

By Category: Harmonious LivingTags:

Love and affection are infinitely valuable. There are various levels of love and affection that we can aspire to. Some people describe how people love this way: Young people love with their words, middle-aged people love with their actions, and elder people love with their hearts. 

This means that as we age, our love matures. Spiritual development also deepens and expands our love.

Love starts at home. We love our spouse, our children, and our siblings. From here, we extend our love to our relatives and friends. Further, our love encompasses all human beings and then all beings. From a possessive kind of love, love matures into a giving kind of love, and finally into the enlightened love that bodhisattvas and Buddhas have for everyone. This kind of love is the great compassion that is described by the saying: “I will not seek pleasure just for myself. I long for all sentient beings to be free of suffering.”

Love is like water. On the one hand, it can nurture our lives; on the other hand, it can drown us. Thus, if we do not know how to love properly, love can bring us many problems and ruin our lives. If we are ordinary and selective about whom we love, instead of embracing all beings, the vast dimensions of love are hardly actualized. How do we love properly? Let me offer the following four guidelines:

  • Love wisely—We should use our wisdom to purify our love.
  • Love compassionately—We should use our compassion to manifest our love.
  • Love in accordance with the Dharma—We should use the Dharma to guide our love.
  • Love morally—We should use morals and ethics to direct our love.

Love is such an important subject of our lives. How do we love selflessly and offer our love to all? How do we transform a possessive love to a giving love, to a love for the Dharma? How do we purify our love from one of discrimination to one of great compassion? How do we love in the spirit of this common saying: “Cultivate our loving-kindness without conditions, and ground our compassion on oneness”? How do we manifest the true potential of affinity? These are very important questions for us to ponder! When we seek to go beyond ourselves and offer our love and affection in service to the community, then our lives and the lives of others will be more rewarding and more joyful!

From Living Affinity, written by Venerable Master Hsing Yun.

Image from Pixabay.

More Featured Articles

How is a Life of Perfect Wealth Attained?
The Sumati Sutra discusses fulfilling both worldly and supramundane needs. Sumati’s first three questions are regarding obtaining an elegant appearance, obtaining wealth, and keeping a harmonious family life—all of these are concerned with success in this life. Being satisfied in this way ensures that a bodhisattva will not be hindered, and can freely walk the bodhisattva path.Rewards and blessings are not stolen, forcibly taken, or Read more
Grounding Relationships in Oneness
When we can practice viewing ourselves and others through a lens of oneness, we will no longer engage in meaningless mind games that prevent us from forming positive connections with all beings. Read more
Walking, Standing, Sitting, and Resting
"Walk like the wind, stand like a pine, sit like a bell, and rest like a bow."This basic etiquette not only applies to Buddhists; everyone should practice it as well in daily living.When we first meet a person, we can tell the level of his/her education and cultivation by his/her manners. We know how refined a person is by the way he/she speaks and conducts Read more
Live Well Through Observing the Precepts
Observing the precepts is the concrete manifestation of compassion and the bodhisattva path. Read more
To Think Positively
Humans are thinking animals! Since the beginning of time, there have always been people who fantasize, who have delusions, who dream—and many who have ideals. When we lie in our beds at night, we should be free from worry. Yet thoughts about our lives often arise then; thoughts about family, country, or even the world. Everything is within our minds.The average person often tends to Read more
The Cure for Anger
Anger is distinguished from greed in that anger is a form of revulsion created by something we do not like while greed is a form of attraction brought on by something we do like. In this limited sense, and in this sense only, greed can be said to be “better than” anger. Greed at least has some positive components while anger generally has none at Read more
The Intrinsic Nature of Women’s Rights and Equality in Buddhist Philosophy
Equality is a truth of human life within the universe, it is an aim of humanity, and it is also the basis of Buddhism.The Avatamsaka Sutra says:“All sentient beings are equal.”The Great Perfection of Wisdom Treatise says: “From the very highest level of all Buddhas to the low level of animals, all are equal and there are no differences between them.”The Diamond Sutra says: “All dharmas are equal with no Read more
What is Chan?
Chan is meditation throughout our lives. When we live with Chan, the taste of food and feel of clothes will change. We will not feel difficulty when dealing with our affairs. Any matter can be laughed away. The human world has its ups and down, but when we have a Chan mind it is like the world is ours and nothing is lacking. All human Read more
Speaking with Kind Words
If we want to understand what the Dharma teaches us about building affinity and living in harmony with others, we must first understand the four great all-embracing virtues. The Buddha teaches that for us to realize our true capacity of connecting with and serving our fellow citizens, we have to first build a good rapport, and the four virtues are tools to that end. The four Read more
Ridding Ourselves of Stress
In this modern world, people are constantly saying, "Life is too stressful!" Why are people so stressed out? How can we rid ourselves of stress? Students feel stressed because of heavy schoolwork; parents feel stressed because they have too many chores and family obligations; policemen feel stressed because they have too much work; and workers feel stressed and are unhappy because their work hours are Read more
Transformed by the Precepts
The Buddhist precepts are here to protect us from wrongdoing, lead us away from what is bad, and towards what is good. Vinaya Master Daoxuan of the Tang dynasty composed the Simplified and Amended Handbook of the Four-Part Vinaya [Sifenlü Shanfan Buque Xingshi Chao], in which he analyzed the precepts in terms of their “rules,” “essence,” “practice,” and “characteristics.” When one puts the actual rules Read more
Friendship
In the Buddha's teachings, there are four kinds of friends: friends who treat you like a flower, friends who act like a balance, friends who are like the mountains, and friends who are like the earth.Friends who treat you like a flowerWe all enjoy flowers, especially when they are fresh. We put them in vases to decorate our homes, we give them to our loved Read more