Good morning and happy Valentine's Day. So I'm going to speak this morning about love. Funny word. You know, the Eskimos have 50 words for snow, I think, in an emotionally sensitive or mature society, there'd be 50 words for what we call love. It can mean different things. So I'll talk about a little bit of that today. But I'll start with three words from four different aspects of love. From the Greek, and this is from a sermon from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

[01:01]

in 1957 at his church in Alabama called Loving Your Enemies. But he talks about three Greek words for love. So let's start there. So he says the Greek language has three words for love. First, it talks about love as eros. That's one word for love. Eros is sort of an aesthetic love. Plato talks about it a great deal in his dialogues, a sort of yearning of the soul for the realm of the gods. It has come to us to be a sort of romantic love, though it's a beautiful love. Everybody has experienced Eros in all of its beauty when you find some individual that is attractive to you and that you pour out all of your like and your love on that individual. That is Eros and it's a powerful, beautiful love. that is given to us through all of the beauty of literature. So that's usually the love that's referred to in Valentine's Day, eros or erotic love. We think of that in terms of sensual or sexual love.

[02:04]

I'll come back to that. But there's also this word filia, which Dr. King says is another type of love that's also beautiful. It's a sort of intimate, affection between personal friends. This is the type of love that you have for those persons that you're friendly with, your intimate friends or people that you call on the telephone and you go by to have dinner with, your roommate in college, that type of thing. It's sort of reciprocal love. On this level, you like a person because that person likes you. You love on this level because you are loved. you love on this level because there's something about the person you love that is likable to you. This, too, is a beautiful love. You can communicate with a person. You have certain things in common. You like to do things together. This is filial. So this is an important kind of love. I think it's probably the same root that we have for

[03:07]

as a suffix for phile, like bibliophile, or anglophile, or xenophile. Anyway, to like something. It's a kind of love, a kind of affection between friends. The third Greek word for love that Dr. King mentions is the word agape. Agape is more than eros. Agape is more than philia. Agape is something of the understanding creative, redemptive, goodwill for all beings. It's a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing of love. And then Dr. King speaks of it in terms of God, but I'll talk about it from our Buddhist perspective. You look at every person and you love them because you know that Buddha nature is there. Even in the worst person, there is some capacity that we, if we look closely, can see some piece of this quality of awareness and kindness that we talk about in terms of Buddha nature, this possibility or potentiality, even if it seems fairly dim.

[04:24]

So this agape is kind of, you could say it's a philosophical kind of love, but it's also powerful and emotional to really feel this overflowing of love for for all beings. We talk about freeing all beings. And it's not like the other two, where you seek something in return, or where you often seek something in return. So these three are three ways to talk about three aspects of what we can call love. In this sermon, Dr. King also talks about what we might call non-harming or non-hating. And this is related to something else that we might think of in terms of love that has to do with our precepts and our precept about anger.

[05:25]

In some early sets of precepts, don't get angry, but we say now a disciple of Buddha does not harbor ill will. So, how do we not hold on to anger and hatred? Dr. King said, in order to love your enemies, you must begin by analyzing self. Some people will not like you, not because of something you've done to them, but they just won't like you. I'm quite aware of that. In order to love your enemies, you must begin by analyzing self. So, this is the aspect of non-hatred, or not harboring a will, or a kind of love that has to do with what Dogen calls, studying the self, to study the ways to study the self. It's what we do, sitting on our cushions for a day or a period, to just be present with this person, this body and mind, not our idea of it. So he says, Dr. King says, seeking to love one's enemies, to discover the element of good in the enemy.

[06:35]

How can we see those who we dislike or that we think of as opposed to us, and see some possibility of good. Again, this is seeing Buddha nature in all beings. And we know that hatred and anger just leads to more hatred and anger, and that only our goodwill, our love, can conquer hatred. So again, this is maybe all three of those kinds. the way he talks about eros or erotic love as a kind of aesthetic love to appreciate aesthetically a situation or a person, to see the possibility of affection, but also this, what the Greeks call agape, this understanding, creative, redemptive wish, may all beings be happy, this goodwill for all people. And this is another reason why you should love your enemies, because hate is harmful to us.

[07:39]

Hate distorts the personality of the hater, Dr. King said. Hate at any point is a cancer that gnaws away at the very vital center of your life and your existence. It is like eroding acid that eats away the best and the objective center of your life. well to express love, to feel love in any of its forms. So I'm not going to try and pin down all the various names and types of love, but just to open up this possibility of considering the qualities and realms and diversity of love. So in Buddhism, we particularly talk about metta or loving-kindness. So we will chant this sutra, the metta sutra, at the end of our day-to-day, in which we ask, may all beings be happy, may they be joyous and live in safety. This maybe is like this greed agape, I don't know, but this quality of loving-kindness, also we can see this towards particular people.

[08:50]

We can wish May all beings be happy, and we can also wish happiness for particular beings, or particular groups of beings, or maybe one particular person, to really wish someone well as part of this loving-kindness. And this loving-kindness is also kind of foolish. And maybe in some ways all of love is foolish by worldly standards. But the exemplar of this loving-kindness is Maitreya, next future Buddha, who is now, we say, a Bodhisattva, and in China is associated with Budai or Hotei, who was a 10th century Chan monk, and you've all seen him, and there's a little Hotei sitting on the altar for today, the fat, jolly, laughing Buddha. He was a historical person in China. And, you know, he was kind of foolish, and walked around just, you know,

[09:55]

hanging out with children, giving candy and gifts, just enjoying the sun. Not so industrious, but just kind, loving kindness. So this is an aspect of love that we celebrate in Buddhism. How to just be kind to others. to wish others well, to really take on for ourselves, may all beings be happy. So one of the chants that we'll do in our midday service is the Harmony of Difference and Sameness, as Kathy mentioned. This has to do with love, too.

[10:56]

This seeing may all beings be happy, but then also, can we love particular beings in particular ways? One aspect of the sameness, I remember a Native American teacher I was studying with a while back said, everybody wants to love, and everybody wants to be loved. We are all alike in this. Maybe I could add everybody has been, I won't speak for everybody, but many of us have been wounded by love. This is also part of love. It can hurt when we want to give love to someone and we don't know how. So also there's a side of differences. We each have our own way of expressing love in all the different kinds of love. And maybe we all have our own way of wishing or recognizing love. And sometimes that doesn't match, even when we wish to give and receive love. So, there's not one of our paramitas or transcendent practices that's called love.

[12:04]

It's maybe part of all of them. Patience, generosity, ethical conduct, settling. vow or commitment, skillful means. How do we develop our love? I would say that's the point of our practice. How do we find our own way to love and to give love and to receive love? How do we respect that? How do we share that? How do we enjoy that? How do we enjoy the love that there is in this world? So going back to what Dr. King talked about as this aesthetic love, or eros, or erotic love, this is what's most commonly celebrated on Valentine's Day. So I wanted to look at the precepts about sexuality in Buddhism and Zen.

[13:09]

we say in our ten precepts, the disciple of Buddha does not misuse sexuality. And that's been translated in various ways. Of course, for the early monks and still for the monastics in the mainland, monks and nuns, this means celibacy. In Japan, this has changed, and the Japanese tradition is not necessarily celibate clergy. In terms of Japanese history, this goes way back, actually, to the earliest forms of Buddhism, back into the 9th and 10th, 11th century in the court. We love the court. And there were women hanging out, sometimes in the monasteries, unofficially. Shinran, the founder of, so a little historical footnote here, the founder of Jodo Shinshu, Pure Land Buddhism in Japan, had a dream.

[14:11]

He realized he couldn't do all the practices of the Tendai established for him. He realized his own humility and his own need for love. And so he went on a retreat, struggling with this, and he left the monastery and went to this temple in the middle of Kyoto. He had a dream about Guan Yin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, whose image is on the side walls. In China, at least, Guanyin is usually female. And so Xinran saw Guanyin as a woman who said that he would come and that she would come and they would be married. And so he started a, he was the first Japanese priest, monk, whatever you want to call it, no longer a monk in the traditional sense, who was officially married. And the Pure Land School that he founded has been carried on through fathers and sons or fathers and daughters and their son-in-laws since then.

[15:17]

In the mid-19th century, all of the Buddhist schools in Japan were, celibacy was taken away as a rule and marriage was encouraged, not required, but this was partly an attempt by the government to kind of control the temples. But more than that, there were people who were very good scholar monks and other monks from the different schools who said, well, this is actually what's been going on for a long time. Let's make it official. Let's not be hypocritical about it. So I want to talk about this part of Buddhism that's developed in Zen, and in Japan particularly, about appreciating the sensual and sensory things. as part of this. But first, I want to put in a word for celibacy. It's not been a practice that I've ever embraced.

[16:22]

All of my teachers have been married with children. And I was raised Jewish, so it's not been an issue for me. My model as a kid were rabbis who were married. But I seem to have many Catholic students and teach at Catholic institutions. So for some people, it's an issue. The best argument for celibacy I ever heard was from a wonderful man named Brother David Steindlrest, who is a friend of mine, and I haven't seen him in some years now, but he's a Benedictine monk, and he does Zen practice, and he's done practice periods at Tassajara, was on the Zen Center Board for a while. Really wonderful, sweet, smart man. And he calls himself a Zenedictine. And he's very funny and sweet, He said, explaining his own practice of celibacy, if you really love everybody, then either you have to be promiscuous, and that doesn't work, or you be celibate.

[17:25]

So that's what he does. And yet, Brother David is very loving, very affectionate with everyone, men and women. He's a very kind, sweet person. and he just knows he's celibate. So I've seen that that is one option that is a viable way to express love, actually. Going back to the Japanese tradition, this basic idea of the bodhisattva is to, well, in early Buddhism, there was this understanding of the world. Samsara. The rat race. The world of fame and gain and trying to get ahead and trying to manipulate the world to get what we thought we wanted and what we think would make us happy. This is what people do. And even to manipulate others to get what we want from them.

[18:31]

And sometimes to manipulate ourselves. So The Bodhisattva idea that developed and developed in India but then developed as it went through China and then through Japan was to see that, okay, we don't need to escape from the world. The early idea was to check out into nirvana. So tomorrow evening we'll celebrate Buddha's power nirvana. It's the day for celebrating Buddha's passing away into nirvana, which is what Buddhas and Arhats do. They don't get born again. They don't have to go through this anymore. They've purified themselves. The Bodhisattva idea, on the other hand, is, okay, we will find our wholeness. We will find nirvana right in the midst of this crazy, confusing, greedy world where we struggle and fail to love or be loved a lot of times.

[19:33]

how do we see, right in our uprightness, right in our effort, in the middle of the world, how do we see this wholeness, this deeper nirvana, when we commit to benefiting all beings, to wishing may all beings be happy. So part of the aesthetic that developed in Japanese Buddhism particularly is to really appreciate nature, to appreciate the senses, So one way of meditating is to kind of put aside all thoughts and sensation and just turn the light within. In our Zen practice, we turn the light within, but also we can appreciate the incense, appreciate sounds, appreciate sensations, breeze. physical sensations or just when there's some diminishing or ceasing of some painful physical sensation, when our legs stop hurting or whatever.

[20:42]

We appreciate this world. We live in this world. We love in this world. So everything fades. Those we love will die. Love sometimes changes, relationships end, or don't succeed, or whatever. And then sometimes they do, and sometimes good things happen, and that's wonderful also. A lot of Japanese poetry is about the cherry blossoms falling, or fading. so we can appreciate the beauty of the world, of each other, of some other. And so the precept is, how do we, so why we say our precept, to not misuse sexuality. So that all of these precepts imply a possible positive,

[21:50]

So how do we respect sexuality rather than misusing it? How do we engage in sexuality if there's an appropriate opportunity to do that? How do we do that responsibly? This is an attitude towards love. How do we respect some other? How do we respect that which we love? How do we see both the sameness of all of us together and the difference of men and women or men and men or women and women? How do we respect difference in the other and respect that other from their place too? So I think respect is key to be responsible in enjoying love in whatever form. platonic love as well as erotic love. How do we respect the other?

[22:52]

How do we not deceive the other? How do we be honest with ourselves and the other? Entering this realm of love, and maybe it's in all aspects of love, is complicated and sometimes it's hard to be honest with ourselves. We don't know what we feel. Part of the attraction of love sometimes is to be overwhelmed by feelings. So talking about this and bringing up all of these emotions in the middle of a day of sitting is maybe a little challenging. We're trying to sit and settle down. calm down and find stability in our bodies and minds. And I'm saying, oh, well, there's a way to appreciate our likes and loves and attractions and aversions and all of this in a way that is respectful and responsible to ourselves, first of all.

[23:54]

How do we respect our own approaches towards thinking of these topics? So again, I want to express the challenge of this, and also the joy and wonder of this. So I want to read some love poems. And first by a great Japanese Soto Zen monk, Ryokan. Ryokan was kind of like Hotai or Maitreya, very foolish. He lived in a little hut near his hometown after he finished his Zen training and wandered around doing, on his begging rounds. He was a master calligrapher and a great poet and had studied Buddhism very thoroughly and studied Dogen and loved playing with children and was a very sweet person.

[24:56]

and funny guy, and also very foolish, is the story of him playing hide-and-seek with the children and being, and then the children got called in for dinner while Rilkot was hiding in the barn, and the next morning the farmer came in and said, Rilkot, what are you doing in here? And he said, the children are here. So, you know, very foolish guy. Anyway, when he was about 69, he met and fell in love with a beautiful young nun named Taisheng, and she was about 29. And she was also interested in poetry, and people think it was a platonic relationship, but their poetry, they exchanged poems, and she had been married, was widowed, she'd married a doctor, was widowed after five years, and had become a nun in a Pure Land temple, I believe. But she had heard of Ryokan's poetry and wanted to study poetry with him and they had developed this very warm relationship.

[26:02]

She lived with him and he died several years later and she nursed him through his last illness. She reports that he died sitting up as if he were going to sleep. And then afterwards, so he died in 1831, she published a collection of his poems, Dew on the Lotus. Nice title, 1835, provocative title. And it included many of his poems, but also poems that they'd written to each other. Let's read a few of them. So after Teixin met Ryokan, she wrote this poem, Was It Really You? I saw, or is this joy I still feel? Only a dream." Ryokan wrote back. In this dream world, we doze and talk of dreams.

[27:03]

Dream, dream on, as much as you wish. She also wrote to him, here with you I could remain for countless days and years, silent as the bright moon we gazed at together. He wrote back, if your heart remains unchanged, we will be bound as tightly as an endless body for ages and ages. So one winter, Taishin was snowed in and was not able to visit Ryokan until the spring. And when he saw her, he said, in all of heaven and earth, there is nothing more precious than a visit from you on the first day of spring. He had a nickname, Crow, given by their friends, partly because of his black robe and because he had sunburn complexion.

[28:13]

But in East Asia, Crow was a symbol of eternal love. So he wrote, free as a bird to go wherever I please, from tomorrow, I will take the name Crow, given to me by my friends. And Taishin wrote, when a mountain crow flies to his home, shouldn't he take along his soft winged little darling? So clearly they had a very close intimate relationship. Ryokan replied, I'd love to take you anywhere I go, but won't people suspect us of being love birds? He also wrote to her, once the breeze is fresh, the moon so bright. Together, let's dance till dawn as a farewell to my old age. His last, his death poem, we were talking about death recently. What will remain as my legacy? Flowers in the spring, the cuckoo in the summer, and the crimson leaves of autumn. He didn't mention snow piled up in winter, anyway.

[29:18]

So all of these kinds of love, the love that's celebrated mostly on Valentine's Day, this romantic love, we can treat with respect for ourselves and the other. We can appreciate. And again, I want to acknowledge how difficult this is for us. This is the challenge of our practice. How do we learn to love? Maybe to love one other, but to love our friends, to love all beings, to love the people we work with, even the ones who are difficult. How do we find our way to express our love? And I confess that this topic for me, it brings back, you know, ancient history of my youth when we used to say saying all you need is love and you know so I was come from the flower child days and still you know feel that as part of what it is that

[30:36]

we are doing, how do we find a way to share our respect, our love, our like, our affection, our consideration, our willingness to see Buddha nature, even when it's difficult, or our efforts in that direction? How do we also, again, important part, how do we find our way to love ourselves? to forgive ourselves for our own struggles with loving and receiving love, to forgive ourselves for our own often inability to love. So we start by turning the light within, and then we dance together with all beings in this realm of love. So I'm going to close with One of my favorite poets of love, a contemporary of Dogen, not a Buddhist particularly, but his name was Rumi, talked about him here before.

[31:38]

He was a Sufi. Maybe they're shy. Now the night birds will be singing of the way we love each other. Why should they sing about flowers when they've seen us in the garden? Maybe they're shy. They can't look at the face, so they describe feet. If they keep dividing love into pieces, they'll disappear altogether. We must be gentle and explain it to them. Think of a mountain so huge the Caucasus range is a tiny speck. Normal mountains run toward her when she calls. They listen in their cave ears and echo back. They turn upside down when they get close. They're so excited. No more words. In the name of this place, we drink in with our breathing.

[32:41]

Stay quiet like a flower. So the night birds will start singing. So our practice today is maybe to sit quietly like flowers to allow whatever birds there be about here to sing. To allow all the old love songs to be part of the background of our lives. So I'll take Rumi's advice and be quiet now, but we will have time for discussion this afternoon for those of us who are sitting here all day, but we can take some time now if anyone has some comments or responses. Nathan.

[33:52]

So one thing I was thinking about as you were talking is another quality of love that a number of people have talked about over the centuries, and that's how love is a kind of precondition for our existence, for our being here. Yes. So, you know, our parents love for each other and our parents love for us. There's this very close connection between love and just being in existence. I mean, being alive. So, I was just thinking about that. A very close connection between life and love. Yes.

[34:54]

Love makes the world go round. Yes, Serena. I was thinking about how practice, for me, by creating a harmonious relationship and love for myself in a raw state, warts and all, has really, over the years, has really helped me just have love for all mankind. I didn't really think that that would be necessarily the outcome of spiritual practice. And it's really great that it has created that openness to be able to be one with

[36:01]

all of my fellows and be able to be accepting and respectful more so than before. So I'm just really grateful. Yes. So yeah, that's another good word to put into the discussion about love. Gratitude. So part of our love is when we're grateful. for others, for ourselves, for our situation, in whichever realm of love we want to talk, for another, to appreciate and be grateful. And yes, it's important that we learn to, in a responsible, respectful way, love ourselves, not in some... not narcissism, but just to appreciate ourselves, warts and all, as you said. There's also tough love to be responsible to ourselves to try and express and receive love as responsibly as we can.

[37:16]

Anyway, it's important to forgive yourself for being a human being, for being the wonderful human being who's sitting on your cushion right now. I was thinking about how our culture gives us so many messages about what love looks like and what is love and what isn't love and it can overly focus on eros and prescribe what that looks like and how hard it can be at times to trust that love is there when it doesn't appear to be that love actually can be very shy and it doesn't respond if we're kind of like, you know, grasping after it, but if we are just, you know, kind of sometimes kind of quiet and cultivated and give it, then it's, you know, then it's over there.

[38:23]

But it's like, sometimes you feel like, you know, it's such a, it's really such a reward when it's like, oh, okay, all right, I was right to be, you know, to trust and have faith. And how, you know, that sort of plays into it too, that it kind of meets your expectations. Or it doesn't act according to our ideals and expectations, but we can appreciate it when it does show up. So I think for many of us, receiving love is as much of a challenge as giving love. How do we accept when we're appreciated? by others. How do we appreciate that which should be appreciated? So there's an actual practice here, this practice of loving-kindness, this practice of deep respect and gratitude.

[39:26]

The practice of, in some way, nourishing others, as the Tenzin does by preparing our Any other last comment or question? Yes, please. I would just like to say that in my personal experience, learning to receive love has really been the ultimate healing. So love is also indefinitely related to healing. To be able to love, in all the different kinds of love, eros, but also the like love and the loving all beings love, it's healing.

[40:40]

It's helpful to ourselves when we can breathe into and allow ourselves to give loving kindness, to give love. And then when we receive love, when we appreciate, when we feel appreciated and seen and respected, how wonderful. And sometimes it seems like a long time, sometimes, when there's not love. And yet our sitting is about being, learning to, maybe learning to be shy, learning to learning to not take what's not given so that we can accept what is given. Yes, Serena? I had a funny experience.

[41:41]

I was sending some cupcakes to a friend in Washington from Chicago, and it looked like they were going to get there. probably five days old, and then I was thinking, like, I should have, should have just sent them to myself, because, you know, I would have appreciated them fresh. And then I was kind of thinking, like, afterwards, like, yeah, I should have included myself in that package, you know, like, you forget, you know, to do that thing for yourself. even though I'll walk by store windows and feel like the plushy hearts with weird arms and stuff, like, totally freak me out, but then, you know, well, I could probably handle a cupcake, you know, as far as what you were saying about accepting, you know, like, from others, but then having to remember myself in the package. Yeah, it's good to give love to oneself, to send each attempt to oneself.

[42:44]

gifts or to do something for yourself in the future so that later on, oh, I did that already. Anyway, yeah. Catherine. I don't know why, but these analogies comparing to nature keep going through my head about how these things grow in receiving love, I was thinking, I think of the warmth of love as similar to the warmth of the sun sometimes. And in my back room, the sun has been coming in lately, and I have plants back there, and they're beginning to thrive again. They kind of went through a wall. And so it kind of is like a way of visually seeing that, you know, the warmth of love allows us to thrive again and to open up.

[43:49]

Yeah, so it may seem like a long time before spring, but it's coming.

[43:55]

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