Love Is Compassion; Love Requires Cherishing Blessings

Hong Yi's wife: Master, tell me, what is love?

Master Hong Yi: Love is compassion.

— Lines from the film One Round of Bright Moon

A Christian friend invited my whole family to his wedding, my first time at a Christian ceremony. In the sacred setting, the pastor read slowly and solemnly:

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."

This is from 1 Corinthians 13 in the New Testament, one of the blessings pastors invariably read at Christian weddings. Sitting in the pew, I felt an electric shock. I am a Buddhist and had rarely encountered Christian doctrine before; but hearing it read so solemnly, I was filled with respect and even encouraged my wife, who had come with me and understood little of Buddhism, to consider Christianity.

I am an open person; being a Buddhist does not blind me to Christianity's beauty. True Buddhist doctrine is not easy to grasp; to reach a level of practice that actually transforms the self may require long study. To master logic (yinming), deeply understand the two truths and the doctrine of dependent origination and emptiness, and build rooted conviction requires philosophical and logical grounding, a considerable reading list, and even deep life experience. Once understood, however, such faith is as firm as a rock, and the inner peace and joy it brings are equally reliable.

To ordinary people, Christian doctrine seems simpler and easier to accept. As guides for worldly living, Christianity and Buddhism are hard to separate. The greatest benefit of religious upbringing is that believers can live with equanimity, less tossed by a restless world; this is my firsthand understanding of religion's role.

In the film One Round of Bright Moon, starring Pu Cunxin as Master Hong Yi, after the master left the laity, his wife in the secular world asked him what love is. He answered: love is compassion. This is a Buddhist's definition of love—far more compressed than the biblical passage, and these two refined words capture its true essence. Only one who understands compassion understands true love.

Then what is compassion?

The Mahāratnakūta Sutra says: "The Buddha said to Maitreya Bodhisattva, a bodhisattva gives rise to ten minds: first, toward sentient beings, great loving-kindness, with a mind free of harm; second, toward sentient beings, great compassion, with a mind free of coercion or annoyance." Loving-kindness is not harming; compassion is not coercing. Together, they resemble the Confucian "Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you." Buddhist compassion goes a step further: it grieves the suffering of sentient beings, the pain deep in others' hearts; it sympathizes, comforts and helps, yet never rubs salt into others' wounds, never provokes or angers them. This is very close to the Daoist "benefit without harm."

Zhang Zhongxing once said that the most important emotion in the world is between man and woman; I agree. Emotional entanglement reaches nearly every corner of human life. Of all worldly pains, the human heart is the most painful. The most dreadful thing is to fall into economic or health hardship and then into emotional entanglement on top of it. Yet reality rarely fulfills our wishes; it often brings all of it at once. This stems from our lack of wisdom in handling relationships between the sexes.

Buddhist scriptures therefore treat relations between men and women as something to shun. They say: "From love arises worry; from love arises fear. One apart from love has neither worry nor fear"; again: "What makes people dull and obstructed is love and desire"; "When love and desire intermingle, turbidity rises in the mind, and the Way is not seen"; "One who severs love and desire is like a severed hand or foot that cannot be reattached."

The fondness between man and woman is hardest in hard times. Ordinary folk know that a poor couple's every affair is sorrowful; when suffering comes, mutual blame grows, and as blame swells the five skandhas blaze, past sweetness turns to tangled love-hate and even to separation.

Yet we ordinary beings, fallen into the world, inevitably must deal with love. How to avoid being wounded by love and avoid wounding others through love is the most important question we face every day. I think compassion and cherishing blessings may be the highest art of love.

Master Hong Yi once took Master Yinguang as his teacher. During their time together, Yinguang told him: one must cherish one's blessings. If a grain of rice lay on the table, Yinguang would pick it up and eat it. When donors gave him snow fungus, he felt he was unworthy of such blessings and passed it on to an older nun. This strict self-discipline, this cherishing of even the smallest "blessing," deeply moved Hong Yi—and deeply moved me.

There is a classic Buddhist couplet. The upper line: "Stand on high, sit on level ground, act with breadth." The lower: "Aspire to the highest, form middling karmic conditions, enjoy the lowest blessings." This couplet compresses a Buddhist's way of life: farsighted, low-key and tolerant, compassionate and joyful in giving, content in poverty.

To be happy, to have inner peace, to avoid causing others pain, to keep the mind calm as still water amid the dust of the world, one must be broad-minded and hold an attitude of enjoying "the lowest blessings." Do not demand too much of life; give up expectations of perfection.

Laozi says: "When the world calls beauty beautiful, there is ugliness; when it calls goodness good, there is evil." Is a lifestyle everyone envies really worth longing for? If everyone rushes after something, beauty ceases to be beauty and goodness becomes hypocrisy. Once something becomes an object of scramble, it entails life-and-death plunder and competition; pursuing it requires abandoning the self and paying a heavy price—and that is actually the most painful thing. If a mind is not pure, it is hard to cherish blessings, hard to be truly compassionate.

Therefore, to a Buddhist like me, life's greatest happiness is "the sudden stilling of the wild mind," letting go of all impractical desires and treasuring every thread before our eyes. Be grateful for and cherish every small thing others do for us. In word and deed, fully consider how it will feel to others. Only thus can love turn into loving-kindness—harming no one and wounded by no one. This is the "compassion" and "cherishing blessings" of our love.

Below is an excerpt from an old essay of mine, "Loving and Enslaving," included here to examine love from another angle.

The existentialist Sartre famously said: Hell is other people.

Whether that person loves you or hates you, once he appears in your life, your life changes more or less because of him.

I love you, therefore I have the right to ask something of you. This thinking is widespread in Chinese society.

In daily life, enslaving others in the name of love is everywhere. Parents, in the name of love, demand that children obey their will; wives, in the name of love, demand material security from husbands; husbands, in the name of love, demand wives follow their arrangements; children, in the name of love, force parents to accept their advice.

Even between two unrelated people, when one criticizes another, he often adds: "I'm only criticizing you because I think highly of you." Too many people in the world love to enslave others in the name of love. Revolutionary leaders tell the crowd: "I love you; I fight for your future"—and thereby win the right to enslave believers. Parents, teachers, even government leaders, and those who preach to us, always complain that their charges do not listen, and even berate them; in their subconscious, they believe they act out of love and that their wishes are noble, so they never question whether what they do is justified.

Because a lofty moral sense has overcome reason, "loving and enslaving" becomes utterly self-righteous, no matter how crude the love or how absurd the will. Even when a great wrong is done, one can console oneself that good intentions went astray. It never occurs to them that their own good intentions are precisely what makes others' lives unbearable.