What is love?

What is love? I really tried to answer this question during our meditation to send love to one another.  Love is a term used frequently, perhaps even overused. In the play the Idiot by Dosteoevsky, the battle over different forms of love is constantly recurrent.  Many of the characters (Anastassya, Aglaya, and Parfyon) fall into this very personal and emotional state of love, where the character is completely devoted to a person, there sole being longs and desires for that person, they complete each other.  However all of this love conflicts with another form of love, compassionate love.  The play’s protagonist, The Prince, loves everyone, he wants nothing more than to help and care and end suffering for anyone he meets.  However this form of love does not easily coincide with devotional love.  The women, Anastassya and Aglaya, who fall in love with the Prince, can never deal with the fact that even he is married to them he does not love them anymore than any other person.

    

Here is the scene where Aglaya first falls in love with the Prince for his compassionate love.  I could only find the seen in Russian.

 In many ways I can relate myself to the Prince.  I believe I do love and feel and am compassionate for people.  However I don’t know if I have ever felt that completely devotional love for one person. All encompassing love can be a wonderful gift, one that I think Bump has been trying to culminate in this class all year, and yet as witnessed in The Idiot it can have terrible consequences.  In the play all the bonds and friendship are broken, destroyed and ruined, because the Prince is unable to commit, because he continuously tried to end suffering and yet no matter what he does suffering exists.

The Image of Buddha suffering

             Buddhism deals a lot with the truly compassionate being confronting suffering.  In Herman Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, the reader sees that Siddhartha is surrounded by the personal devotional love, and yet it was not satisfying.  Knowing that there was pain in the world, a truly compassionate soul could not be content with selfish love of two people. “He had started to feel like his father’s love, his mother’s love, and the love of his friend Govinda wouldn’t make him happy forever, wouldn’t bring him peace, satisfy him, and be sufficient for all time.” (Hesse 7)  And so Siddhartha must go on a quest to reconcile his compassionate love with the suffering of millions. On his journey Siddhartha read the great philosophies, meditated on the why’s and how’s and suffered with his fellow man and yet nothing he did gave him the truth.  Nothing explained how to reconcile true love for your fellow man with the pain you felt at his misfortune.  “Everything was a lie, everything stank, everything stank of lies, everything feigned meaning and happiness and beauty, and yet everything was decaying while nobody acknowledged the fact.  The world tasted bitter; life was agony.” (Hesse 16)  And so moves much of Buddhist philosophy, it is not easy to understand true pain for your fellow man.  So the only way to move past this pain, to achieve a peaceful state is to “become empty, to be empty of thirst, of wishing, of dreams—empty of all joy and pain…to no longer be an ‘I,’ to find peace with an empty heart.” (Hesse 16)

Perhaps suffering will never end, so what does a truly compassionate person do?

            I don’t plan on converting to Buddhism in the near future, but this whole idea of suffering and compassion has had a huge impact on my plans for the future.  I came to UT with the original idea of working for peace.  Traveling the world and trying to help people.  However my experiences, much like Buddha’s have been cushy.  I have never had to truly suffer, nor have I been surrounded by suffering.  Since I’ve entered college I have been exposed to all sorts of human suffering around the world and the great attempts to help it.  And yet despite people’s greatest efforts it still persists.  Life is always suffering.  So what is a truly compassionate person to do?  Is the lesson of love Bump is teaching, one that will only lead us to feel an overwhelming sense of futility for the pain of our fellow man? In Buddhism one must accept suffering, as a part of life.  That non-suffering during life is a delusion that one must see through and ignore.

            “I know Thee! Never shalt thou build again

                                                Thee walls of Pain,

            Nor Raise the Roof-Tree of deceits, nor lay

                                                Fresh rafters on the clay;

            Broken thy house is, and the rideg-pole split!

                                                Delusion Fashioned it!

            Safe Pass I thence—deliverance to obtain.”

                                                            (X 247)