THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love & happiness

May 21, 2020

The Subject Tonight is Love

The subject tonight is Love

And for tomorrow night as well,

As a matter of fact

I know of no better topic

For us to discuss

Until we all

Die!

                                   —Hafiz, version by Daniel Ladinsky

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I wrote this essay last Fall:

The Noble Ninefold Path

“If you have tears, prepare to shed them now,” he said. We did and we did. The actor who Marc Antony is 34 years old. He has spent the last 17 of those years in prison, which is where Nancy and I were watching this production of Julius Caesar. After the performance, the actors talked to the audience about how much they love each other, and tried to express how much that means to them “in a place like this.”

I didn’t direct this production, but in 2008 I directed a production of Hamlet at Two Rivers prison in Umatilla, Oregon, and have directed a number of plays in prison since then—mostly by William Shakespeare. For thirteen years I went to prison more-or-less every week and facilitated meaning-of-life dialogues. After doing this for a number of months, one day I mentioned the word “love.” It’s a word you are not supposed to say in prison. It is taboo outside of prison as well. But that’s another story.

Inviting men in prison to talk about love had a strange effect. We all began to love each other. Over the years this love deepened to the point where we could all feel it. It was palpable. 

I’m not the first person to notice this, but I’ve come to understand in a deep way that everyone needs to love and be loved. Like a puppy at the Humane Society, we are all waiting for someone to take us home.

What the men in prison taught me about living in love got me to thinking about how in philosophical traditions and in many spiritual traditions knowing is privileged over loving. I looked again at the noble eightfold path and it wasn’t there. There was no mention of love!

I’m not a Buddhist and certainly not a scholar of Buddhism, but I realized something had to be done about this and so, with an utter lack of humility, I would like to suggest a revision to one of the Buddha’s most fundamental teachings and propose to all and sundry the adoption of:

The Noble Ninefold Path

right understanding

right thinking

right speech

right action

right living

right effort

right mindfulness

right meditation

right loving

This may sound like a joke, but it’s not. I’m not suggesting that all the books on Buddhism be revised. What I’m suggesting is that if you use the noble eightfold path as a guide to your practice you could add one more thing to the list. And that it would be helpful to do so. It’s not a trivial addition. 

One could argue that the Mahayana tradition has already done something like this with the bodhisattva ideal of compassion for all beings. Fair enough. Many modern Buddhist teachers—I’m thinking at the moment of Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chödrön and Jack Kornfield—put a big emphasis on love. This idea of adding one more item to the eightfold path is done, I hope, in that same spirit.

Peace, love and happiness—the hippie virtues—all tend to be scoffed at by “smart people”—maybe because these are arts which are not taught in school.

One meaning of nirvana is a kind of floating away from this world of cares—the world of samsara. But in later Buddhism, the duality is abolished: samsara and nirvana are not two.

For “intellectuals” and intellectual traditions the head is more important than the heart. This is not surprising. That’s kind of what “intellectual” means. But it seems to me that being a whole human being is preferable to performing the role of Mr. Know-It-All. Love and understanding need each other.

Head without heart leads to tragedy. In my lifetime, a bunch of geniuses had all kinds of reasons why it was a good idea to drop jellied gasoline on families planting rice in paddies. Had they listened to their hearts, the whole thing could never have happened.

What is “right loving”? I don’t know. Like all the other “rights” of the noble ninefold path, you do your best to figure it out as you go along. Love, of course, includes compassion. But love is much more than that. I love to see a beautiful flower. I don’t feel compassion for it. I love it because it’s beautiful. I love it without even knowing why I love it. Thich Nhat Hanh—that sweet man!—reminds us that we are all flowers.

My own aspiration is to love the heck out of everyone and every thing. “Unconditional love” means loving no matter what and for no reason.

In the Bible it says: “Who loves not, knows not God; for God is Love.”

William Blake says:

Love to faults is always blind,

Always is to joy inclin’d,

Lawless, wing’d & unconfin’d,

And breaks all chains from every mind.

A good way to end this little essay might be with the Meta Prayer:

May all beings be happy!

May we be peaceful and at ease!

May we be well in body and mind!

May we live in love!

—Johnny Stallings

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I shared “The Noble Ninefold Path” with a few people. I sent a copy to Shad Alexander, who lives at Two Rivers prison. He sent this reply, which I am sharing with his permission:

Regarding the “Ninefold Path,” (if I may indulge my inner nerd)… Love is not explicitly stated in the bulletpoint framework of the Eightfold Path because it is implicitly enmeshed throughout the entire path structure, and each individual path factor. The whole thing is about love. Buddha challenged us to rise above romantic love, or sexual love, or selfishly focused love, as it is commonly expressed (both then and now). He separated out the main characteristics of selfless love into qualities that each of us can strive to embody. Mettā is translated as “unconditional love,” or “universal love,” or “loving-kindness,” but a better translation involves a flavor of wishing goodwill for all others. Karunā is usually translated as “compassion,” but again the English falls flat. Karuna is the inspiration to take some action, even a trivial or symbolic action, to ease the suffering of others. If you see a homeless person panhandling, metta is the wish that the person’s life conditions will improve, karuna is giving the person a peanutbutter and jelly sandwich. Neither action will solve homelessness or hunger, but together they are “drops in the bucket” which may someday result in a shift our culture and society at large. Muditā is translated as “vicarious joy,” or perhaps the opposite of jealousy—this is the quality of feeling glad for someone else’s success. This is the cooperative and non-competitive quality of love. Upekkhā means equanimity or non-reactivity. As regards to love, this is the unconditional aspect of love. (In a broader use of the term, upekkhā is the Holy Grail of the entire practice, not reacting with attachment to the ups and downs of life.) All four of these qualities together are Buddhist concept of “love.” Buddha called these “God’s Temple” or “Living Like God.”* (A quick side note: Buddha refused to acknowledge if he believed in God as a deity or not. But he taught his followers that they could become “like God” through the experience of love.)

The four qualities of love are both tools that can be used to achieve the final goal of liberation, and they are side-effects of having achieved the final goal. Using Metta as an example: I still harbor a lot criticism towards others, so my instructions are to pretend like I have a lot of metta towards others. If I pretend long enough, it inevitably sinks in. (Buddha was the original person to coin the idea of “Fake it until you make it.”) On the other end of the spectrum, enlightened meditation masters assure me that in advanced stages of meditation, love for all beings is a natural expression from the realization that all living things are interconnected and interdependent.

Bringing this all back to the claim that the entire Eightfold path is about love… The Eightfold path begins and ends with “Right Understanding.” A beginner’s understanding is: “All living beings are terrified of punishment, all fear death. Comparing oneself to others, one should neither kill nor cause to kill. All living beings love life. Comparing oneself to others, one should neither kill nor cause to kill.” (Dhammapada.) That novice understanding leads a person to train their mind towards thoughts of non-harm and cooperation (love); to train their speech towards words that promote love; to act with love; to choose a livelihood that does not harm others (love); to make earnest efforts to free themselves from harmful thoughts/actions and to engage in loving thoughts and actions. These efforts result in increasing mindfulness, a living embodied awareness of of “Am I living with love?” or “Am I living absent of love?” Meditation is a tool to help us open up to the fullest potential of love, but once that fullest potential is achieved, meditation from a place of pure love tips the scales towards a more ultimate Right Understanding: all beings are interconnected and interdependent. To love myself is to love all others.

Or so I have been told…

(The word “sammā,” we translate as “right, proper, perfect,” as in Right Speech, Right Thoughts, etc. But what is meant by “right?” Samma has a nuance of “the absence of harmfulness” or the presence of metta/karuna/mudita/upekkha. So maybe a better translation would be “understanding with love,” “thought with love,” “speech with love,” etc.)

* The term is “Brahma-vihāra,” God-Abiding.

—Shad Alexander

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A bonus for people who get the email version of this newsletter—links to videos of two contemporary bodhisattvas, Alokananda Roy and Fritzi Horstman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OspzzO7gAiw&t=455s

https://vimeo.com/398088783?fbclid=IwAR3wrd-7igOwlGZo_R5jSI5IERo54Dld59nWAnXMSbTB11H8AEYK-RzRZRE

May we live in love.

—Johnny Stallings