The Love of a Buddha | Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh | #mindfulness

Without true love, life has no meaning.

There is no happiness. There is no joy.

So you have to learn how to feed our love

so that our love will continue to grow.

In the teaching of the Buddha,
love has no boundaries.

True love is a kind of love
that grows, always.

When love stops to grow,
it begins to die.

It is like a tree.

If the tree stops growing,
it begins to die.

Our love is the same.

The first element of true love
is a maitrī - loving kindness,

that capacity to offer happiness.

If you are a true lover,
you should be able to offer happiness.

Without the capacity to offer happiness,
that's not true love.

For true love,
you offer yourself happiness,

and you offer the other person happiness.

The willingness, the desire
to make another person happy,

is not enough.

And if you do not know how
to make yourself happy,

it's hard to make another person happy.

That is the teaching of the Buddha
on maitrī,

cultivating maitrī,
cultivating loving kindness.

And a true lover is capable
of making happiness,

offering happiness to himself, to herself,
and to the other person.

And you cannot impose your idea
of happiness on the other person.

You have to understand that person
before you can make him or her happy.

Understand the difficulties,
the need, the suffering.

You have to understand him or her.

And that kind of understanding
is the foundation of love.

The second element of true love is karuna.

Karuna means compassion.

That is the capacity
to help remove the pain,

the sorrow, the fear from a person.

The intention is not enough.

You have to be able to help that person

remove the pain, the suffering,
the fear in him or her.

And if you know
how to do that for yourself,

you will know how to help
that person to do the same.

You have to understand your suffering,

and then you can understand
the suffering of the other person,

and help her to suffer less, and transform.

That is karuna.

The second element of true love.

If you do not have that element
in our love, it's not true love.

The third element of true love
is joy, muditā.

If you cry every day and you make
the other person cry every day,

that's not true love.

So, the mark of true love is joy.

And you can recognize true love
by this aspect, joy.

You are able to offer joy
for him, to her, to yourself.

And the last element of true love
is inclusiveness,

no discrimination.

When you are in love, in true love,
your suffering is her suffering.

Her happiness is your happiness.

There is no longer
individual happiness or suffering.

There is no frontier
between the lover and the beloved.

Non-discrimination is telling us that

true love is the kind of love
that always grows.

There is no limit to true love.

You may begin with one person,

but if your true love continues to grow,

and then you include all of us
into your true love,

that is the love of a Buddha.

You not only love him or her,

you love the whole humanity,

you love all species,

and you love the environment,

and your love continues to grow
until it embraces everything.

That is equanimity, that is upeksha,
no discrimination,

inclusiveness.

So the teaching of true love,

offered by the Buddha,
is very deep, very practical.

So the practitioner should be a lover,
a true lover.