moralobjectivity.net: copyright Robert M. Ellis 2008

The constraint of the ideal

Most of us, in our better moments, would like to love more than we do. Yet we are beset with conditionings that work against love. We are competitive creatures apparently programmed by evolution to take advantage of the weaknesses of others rather than to support them. Our love grows most easily from a conscious or unconscious calculation of advantage, not from a pure goodwill. It is much easier to love a pretty girl than a drunken football hooligan. Not just greed and hatred, but also physical conditions, hold us back from loving ourselves and loving others.

In balancing compassion with wisdom, also, we must limit the expression of our love to the small field that is feasible. Even if in some sense we are able to love all, we cannot aid all, and can often do very little for others without substantially encroaching on things that we value for ourselves, such as time or money. Our love would be fruitless if it was not focused on a few specific people, or specific actions, in our experience.

The love that springs from the Middle Way then, would be a realistic love which advances step-by-step to allow us to gradually loosen the narrowness of our sympathies. The metta-bhavana meditation works in exactly this way, beginning with reflection on those that we find it easier to love, such as a good friend, and working outwards to broaden that love to an enemy. Yet one of the major faults in Buddhism is that the ideals presented rarely accord with this model of love. The figures that represent love, and are the objects of worship or the models intended to inspire us to love, are not figures that inspire us to move forward from where we are, but are absolute idealisations of a love which has almost no relationship to our experience.

The Bodhisattva of compassion in Mahayana Buddhism, Avalokiteshvara, is frequently represented as having a thousand arms and ten heads, so as to be able to help more people through his limitless compassion. I only have 998 arms and nine heads to go to be like him! One of the Jataka stories describes the great compassion of the Buddha in one of his previous births, where he fed himself to a starving tigress[1]. The Bodhisattva Ideal in the Mahayana requires a vow, taken seriously by many practitioners, to save all sentient beings from all suffering.

Many Buddhists will protest here that these are symbols that represent compassion in its extreme or pure form: they are not intended to be “taken literally”. However, the problem lies not in using symbolic or poetic forms of expression, but in misrepresentation of the object through that symbolic or poetic form of expression. It is not human love, and certainly not compassion balanced with wisdom, that is being symbolically or poetically represented, but a grotesque caricature of love. Such caricatures are presented so frequently in Buddhism that people are very likely to think that they represent what love really is, and that what they do is just a pale copy of it. This gets everything the wrong way round: what they do is real love, and it is the grotesque caricatures sanctioned by tradition that are not just pale copies but major distortions of it. In Buddhist scriptures, real convincing stories of people making little shifts forward from the narrowness of ego do exist (the story of Kisagotami in the Pali Canon is one example), but it is not these kinds of stories that get the major emphasis in representing the values of Buddhism, even though it is these that might actually inspire people towards a love which they could actually practice.

This absolutist distortion is closely associated with the continuing ascetic streak in Buddhism, which often makes nonsense of the idea that Buddhist practice begins with loving yourself. The Tibetan yogi Milarepa retires to a freezing cave and lives only on nettle soup[2]. Bodhidharma, the legendary founder of Zen in China, cuts off his eyelids to avoid falling asleep in meditation[3]. Chinese monks and nuns burn candles on the top of their heads to be initiated into bodhisattvahood[4]. Even today, the Tendai monks of Mount Hiei in Japan put themselves through months of gruelling marathon walks, followed by a fast that brings them close to death[5]. Buddhists generally do not go out of their way to distance themselves from such practices, but are apparently happy to see them represent Buddhist teachings despite their complete incompatibility with the Middle Way.

A natural response when confronted with constant idealisation is alienation. Because the ideals being constantly presented do not match one’s own experience, and yet are also being presented as an important part of the values of the Buddhist group, one disassociates from them. Either one switches off and resigns oneself to not relating much to these ideals, although one accepts them “in principle”, or one actually experiences emotional reactions against them. For many Buddhists, however, such reactions are simply part of practice, to be ridden through in the faith that one’s mind will eventually become more tractable. When the culture of Buddhist practice is set up so that one is led to constantly blame oneself and one’s unenlightened mind for all difficulties, it does not occur to anyone to realise that there may be something wrong with the ideals being presented. Thus dogmatic metaphysics exerts its stranglehold.

Of course there are some people who manage to work successfully with these absolute ideals and find them inspiring, but only because they manage to associate them with aspects of their own experience. For every Western Buddhist who manages this, there are several who are either put off at an early stage, or continue to accept alienated idealisations as the price of group membership.

At other times, real work is going on, and Buddhists are cultivating love through patient and systematic meditation, but thus is this real love constrained by ideals.