Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with the Buddha’s declaration that love as “liberation of heart and mind” surpasses all other religious deeds in softening the ego, Ven Jampa Gendun uses this 24-minute talk to explore the third stage of the seven cause-and-effect instructions for developing bodhicitta: what he calls appealing love. He describes it as a magnetic captivation by others — like a mother wholly drawn to her child — that deepens through sustained attention into genuine understanding and care. The session’s central argument is that love is not merely a feeling but a conscious decision and a form of labor, drawing on Mother Teresa (“love has to hurt”) and Thich Nhat Hanh (“to understand is to love”) to push back against sentimental and ego-driven romantic notions. He closes with the Buddha’s statement that the entire path is training in love and compassion. Suited to practitioners already working through this meditation series.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 14 HMA 1997 06 04.mp3
UUID: a2be145c-5d8e-4367-bd49-d420d021aacd
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening 1996-1997 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1997-06-04
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 24.3 minutes
Words: ~3,261
Out of this, we’re then going to move we move on to be going to develop a feeling love. The Buddha extolled love as that fact that far more than all lofty and loftiest religious and ethical deeds is capable of softening the hardened ego structure or the ego delusion. And so open the way to liberation and enlightenment. He said, therefore, monks and nuns and lay people, We should learn thus that love that is the liberation of the heart and the mind, will produce in ourselves, increase it further, make it wholly ours. Practice it, perfect it it more and more, and employ it to perfection.
So, you know, we are working through these seven cause and effect instructions. We are we are on the basis of equanimity, recognition of our mothers, remembering our mothers great kindnesses, and wishing to repay our kindnesses are the necessary basis for developing this aspiration to awaken. Now while appealing love, great compassion, and intense resolve are the means to actually develop such an aspiration. So in other words, not only must we learn to appreciate the significance of all others in our lives, trying to develop a sense of relatedness and appreciation for their part that they play in our life, but we also have to develop a commitment to benefit them. Not just simply to appreciate the nature of our relationship, but to actively participate in the lives of others in a beneficial fashion.
A commitment to attain Buddhahood for them to become these these happy, healthy, sane, loving human beings who who has optimum abilities and skills in working with the problems that everyone experiences and how how best to assist them in solving their problems. So, you know, if we meditate well on equanimity and recognition of our mothers, remembering their great kindness and developing a gratitude which we should repay that kindness. We will feel we we will begin to feel obviously a deep sense of connectedness with all others and a valuing of them of others, as well as a gratitude which wishes to repay their many kindnesses others have shown us. So these feelings will naturally lead us to appealing love. And we’re we’re others.
You know, the the idea behind appealing love is that others, they appear very beautiful in our eyes. They’re very attractive, very alluring. It’s almost like we’re captivated by them. You know, they they appear appeal to our caring instincts, our tenderness, our our our affection. You know, we we are we are attracted to them.
You know, we aren’t indifferent to the mass to this great majority of people any longer. That there’s something about them which which which is like some kind of magnetic attraction to them that we have developed around them. We pay attention to them. You know? Like, the the model that’s used is like the attention a mother pays to her little child.
You know? When the little baby is playing, you know, is doing all these terribly fascinating things, all these cute little things, you know, all the goo goos and gagas and, oh, isn’t that one? You know, the mother’s heart just goes out just completely captivated by this little creature that she feels so connected to, totally fascinated by her child. So we begin to so in this regard, we begin to to take notice of others. And in noticing others, we begin to more and more understand them because we we become more aware of their situation, their dilemma, and their problems.
And again, this comes back to the notion, to understand is to love. So if you pay attention to people, you’ll begin to understand them and what they’re what’s going on for them, and you’ll begin to love them. Yeah. But but but as of yet, in talking about it in in this way, we haven’t we haven’t chosen to love. For, you know so love is not just a feeling.
It’s it’s it’s it’s nested in feelings. It’s not just an emotion, though it has an emotional element. But it is a conscious decision, a a choosing to love, supported by these these caring feelings and with these emotional elements. But still, there is a a a point in which there is necessary a decision to love. Love is a wish, a will, and finally, a resolve to extend ourselves for the purpose of nourishing our own or another’s well-being.
You know, a a choice that we make to extend ourselves, you know, to do something. To extend oneself is to do some kind of work. To extend, you know, to to extend oneself is simp is just that. You go beyond the the normal bounds, the usual limits that you’ve that you’ve set for yourself in one way or another in terms of your way of relating, that you you walk that extra mile, you take that extra step, you go out of your way for somebody. That’s the way we express our love.
That’s a decision we make at some point. You know, in the beginning, love simply wishes that others be happy, which, you know, we we’ve been practicing with working with, accustomed our mind to that notion, that feeling, that quality, that state. I would be wonderful if you were happy. And it comes but eventually, ultimately, it comes to commit itself, you know, this this resolve to the practical task of bringing this about. So that obviously in terms of compassion and love, there are are varying degrees and levels of intensity.
It it’s it’s a choosing and commitment to another’s true happiness and doing whatever needs to be done to promote that happiness. So, you know, it supposes a willingness to to to to struggle and to work for their benefit, you know, to to involve ourselves in their life in some way, you know, to even to to experience to go through legitimate suffering for their welfare, for the sake of nourishing them, for providing for them, to bring about their well-being, to make them happy. The essence of love is to labor. For something to make something grow, that love and labor are inseparable. One loves that for which one labors, and one labors for that which one loves.
One labors for that which one loves. And when we love someone, and then and then how do we how can what are the ways what are the cues that we that we cite, that we that we see for ourselves when we determine if we’re being loved or not. You know, words can often oftentimes are cheap, aren’t they? Some people will become quite clever with words. Words can become used simply as a means of manipulation.
Now when when we love someone, our love becomes demonstratable or real through our exertion for them. That that’s a a real sign of love, I think, when when we extend ourselves for someone. So, you know, through the fact that we are willing to put ourselves out for someone, that we were willing as an as, you know, to take that extra step or to walk that extra mile. The love that we are speaking of here is not a feel good kind of love, an intellectual abstraction. It’s not a sentimental love where everything is light and beauty.
It anyway, it is it is not enough. I think this is a quote by mother Teresa. Something of an expert on love, I think. It is not enough to say, I love God, but I do not love my neighbor. Saint John says, you are a liar if you say you love God and you don’t love your neighbor.
How can you love God whom you do not see if you do not love your neighbor whom you see, whom you touch, whom you whom with whom you live? And so it is very important for us to realize that love to be true has to hurt. It hurt Jesus to love us. It hurt him. And they may have some reservations around that, but I don’t think love necessarily feels that great all the time.
It may involve some kind of uncomfortable something uncomfortable for ourselves. You know, if you know, if we’re waiting to receive our Bodhisattva certificates assuring that we are fully qualified to love and therefore we are not going to experience any hardships or hurts in in the in the course of our loving of others, then we are never really going to love at all. This is a there is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another. That is work, day labor, day labor. God knows there is no other word for it.
For one human being to love another, that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, that last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation and talking about love and our usual notions and popularized versions of love. And the the love potion of romantic love of which we can drink and we can expect all our fantasies will somehow be magically fulfilled by the beloved. So this is, you know, this is the popular version of love. And it’s such a popular version. People do not actually love each other.
They use each other as vehicles to have intense, passionate experiences they long for. In such in such people, the egotism, the use of each other to create passions for its own sake is so blatant, so naive, and so childlike that it is unmistakable. But our version of this are scarcely scarcely more subtle. It simply never enters our romantic heads that there is something strange about a so called love for the sake of my fulfillment, my thrills, my dreams coming true, my fantasy, my need to be loved, my idea of the perfect love, my security, my entertainment. When we genuinely love another person, it is a spontaneous act of being, an identification with the other person that causes us to affirm value and honor him or her, to desire that person’s happiness and well-being.
In those rare moments when we are loving rather than focused on our own egos, we stop asking what dreams this person is going to fulfill for us, what intense extraordinary experiences he or she is going to provide. But instead, we begin to to ask what what it is that I can do for you. How can I you know, what are your dreams and how can I help you fulfill them? You know, what are your needs? What are your wants?
So I think love begins by asking the question, what can I do for you? How can I promote your happiness? Bring about your security, your your well-being, and ends with a dedication to providing just that when you do get the answer. Love alters our sense of importance. Through love, we see that the other individual has as great a value in the cosmos as our own.
It becomes just as important to us that he or she should be whole, should live fully, should find the joy of life as that our own needs be met. This is quite difficult, isn’t it, to meet this kind of criteria, what is meant by love. In the world of the unconscious, love is one of those great psychological forces that has the power to transform the ego. Love is the one power that awakens the ego to the existence of something outside of itself, outside its plans, outside its empire, outside its security. Love relates the ego not only to the rest of the human race, but to the soul and to all the gods of the inner world.
Thus, love is, by its very nature, the opposite of egocentricity. We use the word love loosely. We use it to dignify any number of demands for attention, power, security, or entertainment from other people. But when we are looking out for our own self-styled needs, our own desires, our own dreams, and our own power over people, this is not love. Love is utterly distinct from ego’s desires and power plays.
It leads in a different direction toward the goodness, the value, and the needs of the people around us. In its very essence, love is an appreciation and recognition of another’s value. It moves a man to honor a woman rather than use her to ask himself how he might serve her. And if this woman is relating to him through love, she will take the same attitude toward him. So, you know, we’re being idealistic, but maybe it only sounds idealistic because most of our love or what has passed for love has been so much bound by our own egos, has been has not been loved at all.
And this this quality that we’re talking about, this state of mind that we’ve we’ve all experienced from time to time for sure that we’re trying to develop and extend. You know, this quality where reaching out and taking another by the hand and saying, I want to understand you and what you need and what it is that you want and what I can do for you because you are important to me. I care about you and your happiness, and I’m willing to work for that. That’s quite something, isn’t it? To actually feel that.
We really have to understand the person that we love, the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we only if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love. We must look deeply in order to see and understand the needs, aspirations, and sufferings of the person we love. This is the real ground of love.
You cannot resist loving another person when you really understand him or her. And it seems to me this is a reoccurring note in many teachers, this idea of the intimate relationship between love and understanding to as Thich Nhat Hanh says, you know, to understand is to love. To love is to understand. Understand. And and a great deal of of all of what we’ve been doing, our discussions together, in developing this will to awaken is where we actually begin to love ourselves.
Now through understanding the nature of the human dilemma and where we’re all at and understanding the situation which we find ourselves in and understanding the nature of each of our minds is we can begin to love ourselves. You know, we can sincerely begin to wish ourselves well, and we can do the same for others. You know, in in this appealing love, we begin to to pay attention to other people and to understand them. And I I I I think some people, I think, appreciate Buddhism because it seems to have described very deeply their experience their actual experience of life. It is able to express in concepts and words what they have only vaguely felt that’s going on in their life.
And then to say, it helps us to understand what is actually going on for ourselves. And in that, it helps us to love and to grow in compassion, which is the fundamental goal of Buddhism, effective love, to actually be able to help both ourselves and others in real and practical ways. In appealing love, we begin to, you know, to pay attention to others because they feel we understand them. They begin to fascinate us. They’re attractive to us.
We we begin to look to what is actually happening to them. We begin to look beyond our own self centeredness, you know, our own self serving world vision. This myopic vision of our usual self centered approach in relating with the world. And we begin to look deeply at others like a mother looks at their child. And we begin to see that that they, in turn, are looking to ourselves.
You know, like a child looks to its parent, to its mother. And when the when their eyes meet, the mother is looking to the child and the child is looking to the mother. And and in the meeting of of our eyes comes love. Love comes into view. And and out of this, we take up this difficult task of loving them, of actually extending ourselves for them.
But if our love is only a kind of imagination, then it is not likely to have any real effect. It is in the midst of our daily life and in our actual contact with others that we can know whether our mind of love is really present and how stable it is. If love is real, it will be evident in our daily life, in the way we relate with people in the world. The source of love is deep in us, and we can help others realize a lot of happiness. One word, one action, one thought can reduce another person’s suffering and bring him joy.
One word can give comfort and confidence, destroy doubt, help someone avoid a mistake, reconcile a conflict, or open the door to liberation. One action can save a person’s life or help him take advantage of a rare opportunity. One thought can do the same because thoughts always lead to words and actions. If love is in our hearts, every thought, word, deed can bring about a miracle because understanding is the foundation of love. Words and actions that emerge from our love are always helpful.
And this is why I think Buddhism says over and over and over and over and over again, it is a matter of motivation. If our motivation is love and compassion, then only goodness and help will follow. We can be assured of that. Compassion is like another type of wisdom, a wisdom of the heart. And this is we are to if our actions are expressed out of that wisdom of the heart, then they can only be beneficial.
So just Just one last quote. The Buddha was asked by a leading disciple, would it be true to say that it is part of our training that is for the development of love and compassion? The the Buddha replied, no, it would not be true to say this. It would be true to say that the whole of our training is for the development of love and compassion. So next week we’ll continue on with development of great compassion.
She’s being very kind to us. She’s making us tea. So I dedicate the the And all of this creative potential that we’ve accumulated together in this way. We’re very blessed to be able to talk about these things and think about them. It’s a very powerful, and we can direct that great potency of the mind. In the land encircled by snow mountains, you are the source of our happiness and well-being.
Powerful, remain until the end of cyclic existence. May I quickly become an awakened spiritual master and lead each and every living being to that awakened realm through these skillful actions. May the supreme jewel of the awakened heart that has not arisen arise and grow, and may that which has arisen never diminish but increase more and more.