Wishing Love - Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

Even if someone I have helped
And of whom I had great hopes
Nevertheless harms me without any reason,
May I see him as my holy Spiritual Guide.

The main purpose of this verse is to teach us how to develop and improve our experience of wishing love. There are three types of love: Affectionate love, cherishing love, and wishing love. Affectionate love is a mind unmixed with desirous attachment that sees another person as pleasant, likeable, or beautiful. For example, when a mother looks at her children she feels great affection for them and perceives them to be beautiful, no matter how they appear to other people. Because of her affectionate love she naturally feels them to be precious and important; this feeling is cherishing love. Because she cherishes her children she sincerely wishes for them to be happy; this wish is wishing love. Wishing love arises from cherishing love, which in turn arises from affectionate love. We need to develop these three types of love towards all living beings without exception.

How to Develop Wishing Love

The way to develop and enhance our cherishing love has already been explained. Now we need to develop wishing love by contemplating how these living beings whom we cherish so dearly lack true happiness. Everyone wants to be happy, but no one in samsara experiences true happiness. In comparison with the amount of suffering they endure, the happiness of living beings is rare and fleeting, and even this is only a contaminated happiness that is in reality the nature of suffering. Buddha called the pleasurable feelings that result from worldly enjoyments ‘changing suffering’ because they are simply the experience of a temporary reduction of manifest suffering. In other words, we experience pleasure due to the relief of our previous pain. For example, the pleasure we derive from eating is really just a temporary reduction of our hunger, the pleasure we derive from drinking is merely a temporary reduction of our thirst, and the pleasure we derive from ordinary relationships is for the most part merely a temporary reduction of our underlying loneliness.

© "Eight Steps to Happiness" by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, published by New Age Books, A-44, Naraina Phase I, New Delhi 110 028. Website: www.newagebooksindia.com. Reprinted with permission.

<< Back