BUDDHIST LOVE

The training of Buddhist monks in the Theravada school includes sitting quietly in a concentrated effort to love all beings.  Yet is this all-encompassing love likely to be achieved by a cloistered monk?  How, in other words, can love issue from a person engrossed in his own salvation? 

What the Buddha evidently meant was that the love which his disciples should cultivate should be a love of everyone, but not the love of any one.  It is not like the love of one individual for another, which is a relation of dependence and passionate attachment and therefore fraught with potential miseries. 

Kept on a high, impersonal level, this broader love could bring no pain, the Buddha held.  Nothing could check it.  Bestowed on good and evil alike, it would not waver.  Nor was it affected by the response it met.  Through every rebuff, it remained inalienable.