What is Love?

At the end of my first meditation retreat in Suan Mokkh, Thailand, in the nice library of the monastery, I found this little booklet called Love and Marriage – A Buddhist Perspective by The Friends of Buddhism of Malaysia. Apart from all the points it made about what relationships are supposed to be like and the dangers today’s life styles bring into them, it made a few nice points about what we shall be looking for in a love relationship. We always find ourselves talking about what love means for you and for me, when you said it was love did you mean this love or that love, is love one or are there different types of love. This little booklet has it’s humble answers from a Buddhist point of view.

The six types of love (least wholesome to wholesome)

• Mania or dependent love (or neurotic love)
• Ludus or self-centered love (sometimes called narcissism)
• Eros or romantic love (or erotic love)
• Storge or friendly love (or platonic love)
• Pragma or practical love (or logical-sensible love)
• Agape or other-centered love (close to loving-kindness)

We all can remember some time in our lives when we felt each of these different types of love (although sometimes we didn’t acknowledge it as love) and it goes to show that it is useless to have discussions like “this is love and that is not love”. I’ve had this with few people who didn’t feel so at home expressing themselves sexually, that they tend to think sexual love (Eros) is not love at all. Although it is a ‘lesser’ form of love it is still love. Even self-love or addicted love is still love. Of course, we must not fool ourselves by thinking that this is it and we need not reach out for something more wholesome. I believe we all are, consciously or unconsciously, on the way to find greater love, the Love of God if you like, but on the way we get our inspiration by feeling other forms of love. The sufi Hakim Jami said “ordinary human love is capable of raising man to the experience of real love” and I believe this. There are moments I feel the love I feel expands to cover all existence and there are times I feel love in a seemingly selfish way. I love to love (“but my baby she loves to dance” :o) )

Alan Watts, who is to some extend responsible for the popularity of Zen Buddhism in the West, the writer of The Way of Zen, has this to say about love in his book Wisdom of Insecurity:

Everyone has love, but it can only come out when convinced of the impossibility and frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self-love all the bad names in the universe. It comes only through the awareness that one has no self to love.