What Exactly Is the "Great Love" Spoken of in the World?

Bai Xuexiang expressed her view: People's love has direction. No matter how great the love is, it has direction. The expanded version of an ordinary person's love is great love. For instance, the love of political leaders is an expanded version of ordinary people's love; otherwise, wars would not occur. "This is my homeland, you cannot invade it"—thus wars break out between nations. "This is my religion"—thus religious massacres occur. "This is my belief"—thus persecution between beliefs arises, and so on. All these stem from great love.

True compassion involves no conflict whatsoever and recognizes no scale of magnitude. All problems arise precisely because true compassion has not been generated. Even humanistic love, while conflict-free among humans, inevitably involves slaughtering animals and harming living beings because it is based on the concept of "human." As long as it is based on "human," no matter how loving one is, even while advocating animal protection, when seeing others kill animals, one will become furious—this is not love.

Bai Xuexiang spoke very well! Only those who have truly experienced that emptiness can speak this way; without genuine experience, one cannot fabricate it even if they tried. Worldly people love affection and emotional attachments; they feel they cannot live without emotions and love. Emotions and love are like the spiritual sustenance for ordinary beings, not easily relinquished. All these psychological emotions arise from the premise of having a self, others, and sentient beings. Some people, having gained some insight, feel their small self and petty love are insignificant, so they advocate for a greater self and great love, as if they have transcended. Yet, it is still the self—without a small self, how could a greater self emerge?

For example, taking the group one belongs to—including one's country and the Earth—as the greater self, dedicating everything to this greater self while disregarding all else. One might even attack other groups for the sake of one's own, appearing selfless, yet it is still selfishness because one's own interests lie within this group. Without such interests, one might not go to great lengths to defend that group. And what is attacking other groups? It is, of course, an act of creating evil—this is the manifestation of the greater self and great love.

Within the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination, love, grasping, becoming, birth, aging, and death—all causes of birth and death—stem precisely from this love. With love comes grasping, and thus birth and death arise. Buddhas and bodhisattvas do not speak of love; they speak of compassion, loving-kindness, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. They speak of the Four Methods of Guidance for bodhisattvas, using these to guide sentient beings without emotional attachment, for emotional attachment itself is the cause of birth and death. The great love spoken of by worldly people all involves birth and death; it is not empty. Acting with an empty mind, compassionately caring for others, brings no faults. Otherwise, even great love becomes a fault, for where there is grasping, this is inevitable.

For instance, doctors treating patients need only do their utmost to heal them. If they invest emotions and share the same sorrow as the patients or their families, then the doctor's body and mind will constantly be affected by the patients. Before long, they themselves will fall ill, and over time, may even die from illness. How then can they continue to treat patients? Handle matters as they are, without love or emotional involvement, separating body and mind—then both body and mind remain healthy. Buddhas and bodhisattvas are the same. If they invest love in sentient beings, their body, mind, and world become identical to those of sentient beings—how can they speak of delivering sentient beings? In such a case, it would be as if the love of sentient beings infected the Buddhas and bodhisattvas, pulling them back into the mundane realm. Then there would be no Buddhas or bodhisattvas, only loving ordinary beings.

The essence of love is greed, known as greedy love. Regardless of what kind of love it is or what it is directed toward, it is a defiled emotion within the desire realm, unable to ascend even to the form realm. Even the dharmas of the form realm and formless realm remain within the cycle of birth and death in the three realms. Eradicating love is the fundamental duty of practitioners. Replacing it with compassion and empathy expands the capacity of the heart, freeing it from the faults of birth and death.