We have talked about how it is best to try and develop compassion towards all living beings. It is easy to develop compassion towards people in our immediate circle (our family, our friends, etc.). But it is much harder to develop compassion towards someone we do not know. Ans harder still for someone in a faraway place. It’s like this when we hear about a natural disaster half a world away, we feel bad for sure but not enough to do something about it and help them. It happens in our region, we actually want to do something about it—maybe we send some money or consumables, etc. If that happens in our neighborhood, we roll up our sleeves and help as many people as we can. So how do we develop the same high level of compassion for all living beings?
Well, before we develop compassion toward everyone, we first need to have a love for them. If we have a love for someone in our hearts, developing compassion towards them becomes easy. So how do we develop love towards other random people and even people who do not care for us? Well, let’s start with types of love. There are three types of love. Affectionate love, cherishing love, and wishing love.
Here is from the book Universal Compassion: We can understand these by considering the following example. If a mother is reunited with one of her children after a long separation, she is very happy and feels great affection for her. This special feeling of affection is affectionate love. Out of affection, the mother considers her child to be very precious and wants to take special care of her. This special feeling of caring is cherishing love. Because she has affectionate love and cherishing love for her child, if she sees that she is unhappy she immediately wishes to restore her happiness. This wish for others to be happy and to help them to achieve happiness is wishing love.
So let’s break this down. In simplest terms, affectionate love is to like someone. If we are in a family and we have affection towards each other, life would be much smoother. Similarly, if we have affection towards our community, we will try to make sure that everyone in our community is free from suffering. This affectionate love brings harmony and peace to the community. The easiest way to develop affectionate love is to think about how no one wants to suffer. We know that we don’t want to have any suffering in life. Similarly, no one wishes to suffer for themselves. Once we understand that all beings want to be free from suffering, we will develop affectionate love toward them. A warm feeling in our hearts towards them. It is difficult to practice this by trying to show affectionate love towards everyone at once. So one should start by showing affectionate love towards a select few that would be easier – members of your family or close friends. Then expand the circle once you are comfortable.
Now, we need to be careful because a lot of times what people call love is more like attachment. For these people more the “love” increases, the more desirous attachment they develop. If the object of their “love” even talks to someone else, they get jealous or angry. This is not love. This is the attachment. Real love does not make one angry. So what is affectionate love? In the book How To Transform Your Life, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso outlines: when from the depths of our heart, without attachment, we feel very close, warm, and happy towards someone, this is affectionate love. It makes our mind peaceful and balanced, free from anger and attachment. Thus it is called “equanimity”.
Developing equanimity is like plowing a field—clearing our minds of the rocks and weeds of anger and attachment. That will make it possible for true love to grow. So how do learn to develop affectionate love? One way to develop this is to make an effort to be happy to see everyone. Whenever we see someone, we should be happy to meet them and try to generate a warm feeling towards them. If we are starting a meeting just before we get into the meeting room, we imagine all the people who are going to be in the meeting and try and generate a smile on our faces.
There are many benefits of meditating on affectionate love. Nagarjuna a great Indian scholar said that the biggest benefit of meditating on affectionate love for just one moment is that we accumulate greater merit than giving food three times to all the hungry people in this world! How wonderful!