I’M A LITTLE IFFY about sharing my thoughts on emotions such as love. Not surprising, is it, considering I’m a student of literature? I’ve read too much fabulous stuff to foolishly rush in where angels fear to tread. So, before I go on, let me tell you what my trigger is – an unbelievably simple explanation of love by the Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh.
I remember during moral science lessons in school we were asked to define what we understood by the word. There were as many definitions as students. But the one that is frozen in my mind was given by our school principal: Love is forgiveness. When a classmate asked her how many times one should forgive another, she quoted a passage from the Bible:
Then Peter came and said to Him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him?
Up to seven times?”
Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.”
Scent or stink?
Thay – as disciples address the monk – has a definition of love that is compelling in its simplicity. In his book, At Home in the World, he shares a little story about a durian to explain what he means. He describes a durian as a ‘large thorny fruit’ with a very strong smell that is found in Southeast Asia. (On Google images, a durian looks somewhat like a jackfruit.)
Although many like the smell of a durian and are known to leave its skin under their beds to scent the air in their rooms, Thay detested it. Once it so happened that he was chanting the Lotus sutra in a temple, with a wooden drum and a bowl-shaped bell as accompaniments. But the smell of a durian offered to the Buddha kept distracting him. So, he went to the altar, inverted the bell over the fruit and trapped the smell. After his prayers, he walked back to the altar, bowed before the Buddha, took the bell and freed the fruit, as it were.
Eat some durian
The monk then draws an analogy to explain his point. He says someone may tell him that s/he loves him so much that s/he would like him to eat some durian. Such a request would make him suffer terribly, Thay says. The person would say s/he loved Thay and wanted him to be happy, but in the same breath ask him to eat durian.
“That is an example of love without understanding. Your intention is good but you don’t have the correct understanding,” he says in the book.
According to Thay, when someone loves another, s/he wants the other person to be happy. If the other person isn’t happy, one can’t be happy either. “True love requires deep understanding. In fact, love is another name for understanding. If you do not understand, you cannot love properly,” he adds.
Best gift
In a different context elsewhere, Thay says: “Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name.”
Compare what Japanese author Haruki Murakami writes in one of his novels: “But I didn’t understand it then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.”
Enjoy this lovely song by Andy Williams from the movie Love Story, based on Erich Segal’s novel by the same name: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jEaIDqHl74