Love must be free and universal

Not to be a spiritual tourist, just looking at and reading elevating texts from a comfortable chair, but actually practising. One of the main practices in the yoga is the meditation, and the control of life so that these things gradually begin to die down and become calmer. Then it’s possible to look through them to some extent.

In the Far East, where they use these Chinese characters, sometimes the makeup of the Chinese character gives you an idea of what the Chinese think of this idea. This is the character for love. It consists of these elements: claws, a lid, the heart. The Chinese idea of love is claws holding a lid on the human heart. They say this is because it becomes possessive. It turns into claws, which try to hold the human heart, and love must be freed from that possessiveness. The one illustration is given. Sometimes in a temple, there are four, or five, or six Buddhas in a line. They represent different aspects of God: His mercy, His giving fearlessness, that with a hand out there, giving wisdom. There was a man who took to worshipping the Buddhas by lighting an incense stick. You light an incense stick, and it burns depending on the stick, but you can get one that burns for 20 minutes. It burns just in front of the Buddha, and you pray to that form which is illustrated by the Buddha, for instance, compassion. You pray, “Lord have mercy on me and make me merciful to others.” This man was very taken with one of the Buddha forms, so he always lit his incense stick under the face of the Buddha. He worshipped with great devotion this aspect of God, compassion. Then he began to notice that sometimes there’d be a slight draught. Normally, the incense smoke rises up, but with a draught smoke can wander off. He thought, ‘The smoke is going to other Buddhas, and that’s not what I want. This is not what I’m praying to and for.’ He made a little funnel like that. When he put his incense stick there, he put the little funnel over it, so that the incense smoke could only go straight up and come to the nostrils of the form of the Buddha. He did this for quite some time. Of course, the smoke stained the Buddha, so that Buddha was called the Black Nosed Buddha. The story is given as a humorous story, but it’s given as a warning against being possessive in love. Not to be possessive. To be able to worship one aspect, one attribute of God, but not to disregard others. It’s a warning about these claws. Not to let our love become held by claws, but for it to become free and universal. Welfare: one of the great phrases in the Gita is, “When enlightenment comes, he brings a delight in the welfare of other beings. He delights in their welfare.” Not as cold as charity, as the phrase is, but he delights in their welfare. But welfare has to be thought of. It’s not so easy.

Welfare, yes. This was told me privately by a great teacher in India, but it was told with a purpose like all the teaching is. It’s not just to watch as if you were sitting in the stalls and watching people going through various difficulties, and so on, and just watching. These stories are told to apply oneself. There was a young man of a good family, but the family was very strict in its idea of morality. He was not so strict, and he went to the red light district, and he contracted one of these sexually transmitted diseases. The teacher was also an expert, besides being a yogi, in one of the traditional systems of ancient Indian medicine. They had, in that, a cure for syphilis, and this young man begged. He said, “Teacher, please cure me of this. If my family, if my father were to find out that I’ve contracted this, he would cut me off without a penny. He’d drive me from the house. He’s terribly strict. Do help me.” The teacher, said, “I helped him, and I applied this. I knew this method, and at that time, there was no Western medical method. I applied this method and it cured him. He was enormously grateful.”

Some months later, the young man came back again, and he said, “I don’t know how it was, but I’ve caught it again.” The teacher told me, he said, “I refused to cure him. This is not for his welfare. It would simply be he’s got now to face the responsibility of his actions.”

© Trevor Leggett

The full talk is Getting beneath the mask