moralobjectivity.net: copyright Robert M. Ellis 2008

The division of love

The idealisation of love and the continuation of the ascetic tradition in Buddhism causes one kind of constraint to the development of love. Another, however, arises from a more fundamental conceptual problem, which I will call “the division of love”. The division of love arises from the distinction I have already mentioned in chapter 1, between greed (or craving) on the one hand, and dharma-chanda or desire for enlightenment on the other.

On the face of it, love is just greed. “I love her” can mean “I want to have sex with her”, and “I love chocolate biscuits” means “I want to eat chocolate biscuits”. Love in one common sense is just a desire to possess, to bolster one’s ego by making the loved thing or person part of oneself. However, the Buddhist loving-kindness, or metta is conceived as qualitatively different from this. The kind of love Buddhism wants us to cultivate is universal, open, expects nothing back, and flows regardless of the attractive or unattractive aspects of the loved object. So, love in Buddhism is qualitatively divided into two types, good love and bad love.

The problem with this is that it does not fully accord with our experience. There may be a few examples of obviously crude greed and a few examples of obviously pure universal love, but the vast majority of the feelings we have are mixed. For example, my motives for writing this book are mixed: I would genuinely like to do good for other human beings by helping them to understand the pros and cons of Buddhism, so in some ways this book is an expression of metta. On the other hand, I would also like the book to be a success and for people to admire it and even pay me money for it (greed), and I would like the egoistic satisfaction of people whom I disagree with realising the error of their views (hatred, or inverted greed). Nearly everything we do is similarly mixed.

Of course, in practice Buddhists often recognise this, and apply the ideal of metta to their experience with care and discrimination. However, my impression is that the division in the concept of love that they are using frequently undermines this. One example of this would be the rejection of romantic love and the love of children, both of which have very mixed motives. Whilst the Buddha himself gave advice to lay people about duties in the lay life[1], at the same time this was in a context that clearly made this kind of love second-class compared to the monastic practice of leaving the family. Traditional Buddhism helps people to make the best of worldly love, but does not recognise worldly love as on a continuum with properly disinterested metta.

This is not just a point about the tradition of monasticism: rather monasticism itself depends on the division of love for its justification. The division of love continues even in those forms of Buddhism (such as the FWBO or Triratna Buddhist Community) that have abandoned monasticism, as evidenced, for example, by Sangharakshita’s attacks on romantic love. As Sangharakshita writes, “The ‘couple’ is the enemy of the spiritual community. By the couple, in this context, one means two people, usually of the opposite sex, who are neurotically dependent on each other and whose relationship, therefore, is one of mutual exploitation and mutual addiction….Their ‘presence’ within the spiritual community can only have a disruptive effect.”[2] In drawing attention to the neurotic elements in Romantic love, Sangharakshita typically overstates his case and perpetuates the idea that Romantic love is of a discontinuously different type to real spiritual love.

A different conceptual model is needed, not just a change in practices still appealing to the old model, because in that way the contradictions between practice and the old model will continue to assert themselves. The new model, I would suggest, should be to see the difference between metta and greed as a matter of degree rather than a single clear-cut distinction. Love can be more or less disinterested and more or less universal. In other words, love can be more or less wise and more or less attuned to conditions. The most narrow and possessive forms of romantic love, for example, are not different from metta in any essential way, but only in the extent of the conditions they take into account. They are less attuned to conditions because they prevent the psychological and spiritual needs of both partners from being addressed.

The language used makes a big difference here. If you talk about “metta” and “love” as two different things, people will tend to assume that they are two different things. If, on the other hand, you use a single word, “love”, to cover the entire spectrum, people are much more likely to recognise the continuity between one kind of love and another.

A more useful model of love, I would suggest, would also see the distinctions between more helpful and less helpful forms of love as quantitative rather than qualitative. The same love is involved in each case, but the more helpful forms are more integrated. This means that the emotional energies which love consists in are working together more harmoniously towards longer-term goals. To take a simple example, the possessive love of a jealous husband is not bad or different in quality from universal goodwill, it is just badly directed because it is in conflict with the real goodwill he also feels towards his wife. He wants her to be happy, but at the same time he wants to restrict her life in a way which will interfere with her happiness. The two things that he wants are in conflict, and he could integrate his love better by applying wisdom to see that his love is better served in the longer term by letting go of his jealousy. If he succeeds in doing this, it is not that the nature of his love has changed, only that more of the energy of which it consists is now working together.

In the course of Buddhist meditation (particularly meditation that cultivates positive emotion), one is often advised to recognise and accept one’s feelings. It is a basic psychological insight that one can only transform a feeling positively after having fully recognised it as it is. However, we cease to do this if we carry round a model that labels those feelings as in any way bad, second-class, or inferior. If the management of a factory were to instruct two different sets of workers to make different parts which are ultimately intended to fit together into a single device, and the workers followed their instructions, but due to bad design the two parts did not fit together to fulfil the intended purpose, then it is not the worker’s fault, but the management’s. We should not blame our feelings, which are like the workers, for doing their job. Feelings are just energy. However, we may well need to manage them better.