Thich Nhat Hanh on true love and the five rivers of self-knowledge – The Marginalian

“For one to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult task of all… a task for which every other task is a mere preparation,” Rilke wrote to his young correspondent.

The great difficulty of love comes from the great difficulty of bridging the gap between the consciousness of the other and the other in order to understand each other, to draw the inner state of the other's place of trust and vulnerability, to teach each other what we need in love.

“Understanding and love are inseparable,” the anthropological philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his wonderful guide to the six rules of obedience. Indeed, there is one preparation for the work of love: deep listening — the best tool we have for teaching each other the skill and endurance needed to maintain true and lasting love, a work of both passionate interest in the inner world of the other and deep self-awareness.

That's a great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926–January 22, 2022) examines a thin, lightly written, poignant classic. True Love: The Practice of Awakening the Heart (public library).

He looks at the first of the four Buddhist aspects of true love – matriwhich is most closely translated as loving kindness:

Loving kindness is not just a desire to make someone happy, to bring happiness to a loved one; is ability to bring joy and happiness to the person you love, because even if your intention is to love this person, your love may make him suffer.

Training is required to love properly; and to be able to give happiness and joy, you must practice a deep look directed at someone you love. Because if you don't understand this person, you can't love properly. Understanding is the essence of love. If you don't understand, you can't love. That is the message of the Buddha.

But while mutual understanding is the source of love, the strange confusion of our own understanding often stands in its way. “It is a mistake to wish to be understood before we have clarified ourselves,” urged Simone Weil in her wonderful meditation on the paradoxes of friendship. “If you don't understand yourself, you don't understand someone else,” a young Nikki Giovanni told James Baldwin in their forgotten conversation about the language of love. There is nothing that does more damage to love than lack of self-awareness. (“To love without knowing how to love hurts the person we love,” Thich Hhat Hanh would later warn.) Without self-awareness, much of what we mistake for desire, surrender, because understanding is just a guess, a chimera of our patterned past keeps us out of the presence of reality and the reality of the other.

In Buddhist practice, nothing removes the veil of confusion and captivates the mind more effectively than meditation – the ultimate tool for self-understanding, from which comes the self-sacrifice necessary for true love. Thich Hhat Hanh writes:

Meditation is the practice of looking deeply into the nature of your suffering and happiness. Through the power of thinking, through concentration, looking deeply into the nature of our suffering enables us to see the deep causes of that suffering. If you can't keep mindfulness and focus alive, then looking deeply will reveal the true nature of your pain. And freedom will arise because of your support of a deeper perspective in the context of your pain. Strength, freedom, calmness, and happiness are the fruits of meditation.

Twenty-five centuries before the Western self-help system undermined and degraded this idea, the Buddha taught that “your love for another, your ability to love another person, depends on your ability to love yourself”—which in turn depends on your level of self-understanding. Thich Nhat Hanh points to five skandasor dimensions, which form selfishness in Buddhist philosophy, defined as five rivers: the body (“which we do not know well,” uyarasa); emotions (“Each sensation is a drop of water in a river,” he writes, and meditation is the practice of sitting on the banks of a river, observing the passing emotions); ideas (“You have to look closely at their nature to understand.”); the structure of the mind, where Buddhism identifies fifty-two – states of feeling and ability such as joy, hatred, anxiety, distraction, appreciation, and faith; and knowing, the last and deepest of the five rivers. (“Time is a river that washes me away, but I am a river,” wrote Borges in his timeless account of time and the nature of consciousness, which inspired the title of one of Oliver Sacks' best stories, later the title of a collection of his posthumous writings: River of Consciousness.)

Without full immersion and awareness in the mystery of the river within us, there can be no true love – that great miracle of transformation that changes the amazing nature of the self and tilts the very axis of truth, prone to surprise. Thich Nhat Hanh puts it simply, sadly:

It is necessary to return to yourself in order to be able to achieve change.

Fill up on David Whyte's epic poem “The Truelove” and philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how you know if you really love someone, then revisit Thich Nhat Hanh on the art of deep listening and the four Buddhist sayings to transform fear into love.