Love Encompasses All Human Beings

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

What we often care most for in life is the self, and the most important aspect of self is none other than destiny. During one's lifetime, destiny changes frequently because of circumstances that arise. Because of a person, an event, a word, a dollar, or even a thought, entire lives may be altered. Similarly, the development of a country may be changed and the history Read more
Prajna allows us to truly know how life comes and goes, and it is only with prajna that we can have the strength to face the realities of life. To survive in this world we need both wisdom and power to alleviate our hardships and overcome adverse situations.Patience gives us both wisdom and strength.Buddhism speaks of three levels of patience.The first is patience for life, Read more
If your mind is in balance, what need is there to work at morality? If your behavior is correct, what use is meditation to you? If you understand mercy, then you will naturally care for your parents. If you understand faithful conduct, then all of society will be in order.—Platform Sutra of the Sixth PatriarchA Balanced MindMental balance results from understanding that self-respect is a Read more
We sometimes see signs on the highway warning: “Keep a safe distance.” Actually, it is not only in driving that we need to keep a distance. For safety reasons, any person and anything in the world needs to keep a distance.Take, for instance, the human body. Our eyes, nose, and mouth all need to keep a distance from one another. Our internal organs all have Read more
If you keep your practice steady,morning and night, summer and winter,there is nothing you can not doand nothing that can harm you.— Upasakasila SutraThe Importance of Being SteadyLaziness and fear of work will get you into trouble no matter where they appear. Laziness is a basic animal tendency that must be confronted the moment it starts. Once you begin to allow yourself to be lazy, Read more
Trustworthy WordsIf you lie, you will not be trusted. If you cannot be trusted, you will be ineffective in your own life and useless to other people. Lies hurt others because they damage their trust and their sense of what is right and wrong. This is a very serious kind of damage; it wastes time, frightens people and causes them to doubt their basic intuitions Read more
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
Our emotions are a very important part of our everyday life, and they star in a leading role on the stage of relationships. The ability to feel and our freedom to act upon these feelings give us both joy and sorrow, and it is imperative that we maintain our emotional well-being to minimize the potential for suffering within relationships. Emotions are the glue that bind Read more
Control of the body means that we know when to act, and when not to act and that we know how to behave with moderation. Read more
Being patient is an art, and being persistent is a kind of hope. Influenced by today’s instant culture, modern people tend to expect instant results in anything they do. Practitioners want to have attainment in this life, scholars want to become instant laureates in their fields, and entrepreneurs want to gain a huge fortune overnight. As the saying goes, “A flower picked before its time Read more
Observing the precepts is the concrete manifestation of compassion and the bodhisattva path. Read more
Birth and death are realities of life. Regardless of who we are, we cannot escape either one. While birth is celebrated, death is feared by most. In order to cope with our fear, we often seek comfort in religion. Although each of the world's major religious traditions has its own teaching concerning death, Buddhism is the only one that promotes the doctrine of impermanence as one Read more