True Love Is a Cultivation of Priceless Value

Zhang Zhongxing said that the most important relationship in life is that between man and woman. Love between the sexes is the most stirring love in this world. For one person to enter deeply into another's inner world, to love him or her and be loved by him or her—such an emotional experience is an extreme experience.

A true love is etched into the bones and never forgotten. In such a love, one forgets oneself for the other, gives wholly of oneself, and thinks of nothing but the other. True love is giving without asking return, the most selfless love. It ignores being hurt again and again; as long as a glimmer of hope remains, one is willing, though covered in wounds, to love still without hesitation.

True love is like a mirror, letting one see one's strengths and weaknesses. To gain true love gives a person a confidence never known before; to lose it, the whole world suddenly feels as if it has collapsed. Love is never all joy without pain. In the course of love, the two lovers, for all kinds of reasons, have many fierce conflicts, and the bond is torn again and again; so every true love has the feeling of dying and coming back to life. Only through such deep pain do we know there is such deep love.

In the struggle between joy and pain, one gradually comes to know one's own strengths and shortcomings. To love someone, one always wants to show him or her one's best side, to make up for all one's shortcomings, to give the other a perfect self. So love is one of the fastest growing experiences of life. Losing love makes us examine ourselves thoroughly and reexamine our outlook on life, values, and world. Gaining love, our whole life suddenly has boundless vitality.

True love teaches one loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. Toward the one we love, however willful, childish, or ignorant he or she may be, we are willing to forgive, bear with, and protect him or her. We are willing to give for his or her happiness and to wait patiently for his or her growth. When he or she is happy, we are happy. Before the one we truly love, our heart is always soft, however hard it may appear on the surface. We do everything only so that he or she may live better. In a true love, our emotions grow richer and finer, and our loving heart is refined.

True love is the source of a person's drive to live. In this world, having him or her to care for, we know we are not alone. Because of his or her existence, we can bear every worldly suffering, willing to strive, willing to wait, willing to endure. True love can make a person's endurance grow without limit.

Love is a composite ability; no one is born knowing it. Only in a true love can we learn how to love better. Because he or she is the one we are willing to love and love wholeheartedly, we are willing, like a devout believer, to tend our love—willing to correct every one of our own faults, willing to amend every shortcoming for the other. Without real love present, a person could not patiently wait for and remake himself for another.

True love teaches us to yield. The one we love, in others' eyes, has all manner of defects, but in ours he or she is perfect; we accept his or her flaws, forgive his or her mistakes, and pardon the hurt he or she has done us. A true love makes us infinitely tolerant.

True love also gives us the deepest understanding of the good and evil of human nature. Only in a true love can we see the supremely good side of human nature, for true love is truly selfless. And only in a true love can we see the supremely evil side, for true love gives us the thought of possessing another, and arouses in us all manner of bad emotions—greed, anger, delusion, pride, and doubt.

When, in a true love, we have known the suffering of parting from the beloved, of seeking and not obtaining, of the burning of the skandhas; when we have lived through the agony of gain-and-loss that love brings; when we strive at any cost to win the heart of the one we love—the evil in our human nature begins to surface, and the suffering in our hearts begins to arise.

And once love is lost, we suddenly feel life destroyed in an instant. Our confidence collapses, our self shatters, and the virtues we cultivated long run wild and disordered for a long time after the breakup. Love can make us live, and it can make us die. Love can draw from us laughter of a joy never known, and make us taste a pain never known.

True love is so extreme an experience that, once experienced, the heart grows strong—either ever more compassionate, or ever more resentful. Whichever way it grows, it makes us sigh from the depths: tell me, in this world, what is love, that it should bind life and death together?