Valentine's Day Dharma
by Zheng Dao (Fogueira)Yeah, I know this is a little after the big moment, but I was laid up with a ferocious cold, my husband’s present to me. They sure weren’t kidding about the sickness and health thing. But he made me turkey soup with ancho peppers. Sure beats candy and flowers and sentimental soothing words for clearing the sinuses.
After you walk a little bit on the Eightfold Path, certain pesky things become clear and explicable to the eternal student that were never before. The most important one I’ve encountered so far concerns the nature of love: what it is, what it is not, and what it can not be.
What it is is not what you think.
What it is not is what you expect.
What it can not be is confined.
The first thing I learned – or maybe it was the last – one of the first things to go in my practice was linear time – is that everything must go. No that is not only the title of the new Steely Dan album. Every myth they fill you up with from first grade on when you didn’t get any Valentines must go. Every preconception, every term, every label, even the thing itself. The love thing goes. Harder to throw away than it is to kill the Buddha, but it must be done. Only when the concept is abandoned can the reality of the thing itself manifest.
Then you will become aware that whatever they do in your direction, whatever move they make, whatever breath they take (thank you, Venerable Gordon Sumner) can be and most frequently is an expression of love for you.
Turkey soup, for one.
Saying what needs to be said and not what you might want to hear, for another.
Even not being present when you need them most, so you learn to stand up and play from your own soul.
And even their anger and pain directed at you, so you learn that it’s really not about you, but about their own suffering, and you hope that they find refuge, and your compassion deepens.
As love can be more than you think it is, so it also is less than you expect.
Most of the women I know expect romance most of all. Like I said, the romance thing goes. It was a myth dreamed up by someone wanting to make a lot of money, and that person did. I won’t even talk about the aching tummies from the candy, the allergies from the flowers, and the heartbreak from believing what they saw on all those DVDs. Buddhists never have any money, they’re more interested in alleviating suffering, which is what is caused when someone has a preconceived notion of love in their minds and runs smack into noncontrived reality.
Expectation of anything from anyone is psychological coercion. It is spitting in the face of their true essence. Especially love, which is their true essence. You want tenderness, they snarl, I’ll give you tenderness, and then they run from the room and are never heard from again.
The tenderest thing you can do for another human being is to not expect it from them and give them all the space in the world to respond in their own way and their own time.
As love can not be confined by thought or expectation, neither can it be confined to certain people or be manifested in a certain way.
As Buddhists, however, we are limited in the way we can express love. The Third Precept states, “I undertake to observe the precept to abstain from sexual misconduct.” If we are in a relationship, it would cause unbelievable suffering if we had an affair with someone else.
But poor Shakyamuni (or lucky Shakyamuni, depends on how you look at it) must have lived in a neighborhood where he wasn’t inundated with the phenomenon of life energy, what that Bergson guy referred to as élan vital, the Big Enchilada, the life force, the thing that meets your eye across the proverbial crowded room and nothing is ever the same again.
And worse for Buddhists, or anyone else in a meditative practice, one of the sequelae of same is a heightened ability to feel the energy of others. The Force is always with us, as it were. And even though we try to be Good and read our suttas and prostrate those prostrations, nevertheless a little hell still wants to break loose and Mister Mara Lustboy sings his siren song.
It is at this point, in the face of the greatest temptation, that we must face the force of life and love in all its glory. How to do it? By letting it shine forth, but with the knowledge that it must be deflected and diffused to literally all beings. They didn’t make up that Bodhisattva Vow for nothing. In saving all beings we literally save ourselves, and vice versa, from suffering.
The Precepts are the Middle Way between what would be repression of the sexual/life force and its full expression narrowly directed at one person. The moral boundaries they erect allow the passion which gives us life to flame out and bank down, warming all who come near without scorching, or leaving one too many out in the cold. They permit what we would express as art, as tenderness in one particular area to pervade the entire universe, so that there is literally no point at which a blade of grass ends and Charles Mingus begins, and our Mona Lisa smile goes on for miles and miles.
Every day is Valentine’s Day. VM Rodgers and Hart