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Dear friends,

I found this booklet "On Love" by Ajahn Jayasaro and I thought that it might be helpful for members who are in relationships.

It begins as follows:

On Love

by Ajahn Jayasaro


I’ve always liked stories, and particularly stories that require the reader to suffer a little
bit and shed a few tears on the way before being resolved with a happy ending. Now the Eightfold Path is my favourite story; enlightenment is the ultimate happy ending. But in the stories that I cherished in my youth, happy endings almost always involved some kind of love, and I began to observe that in “real life” love is not always a guarantee of happiness and it rarely resolves anything for very long . One of the slogans of the
day which impressed me the most as a teenager was the one that asked whether you were part of the problem or part of the solution. I think that this is a question we might ask about love. Is it truly part of the solution to our suffering in life or does it merely compound it? My short answer to this question is that it depends.
On what? On the kind of love and how you care for it. Even the purest love needs to be constantly cleansed.

Why is it necessary to keep cleansing love? The easy answer is that it tends to get soiled. And the dirt that soils it is suffering and the cause of suffering: craving. Since we human
beings do not desire even a shred of suffering and gladly accept every little bit of happiness that comes our way, it makes sense for us to ensure that all the various aspects of our life, including love, be as conducive to happiness and as safe from suffering as possible.

Love is a part of life which we need to imbue with wisdom and understanding.Love tends to get intertwined with other emotions, making those who have never considered it closely mistake the emotions associated with love for a part of, or indeed expressions of, love itself. Usually, for example,rather than considering worries and jealousy to be impurities of love, we take them to be a proof of it, and thus gladly harbour such feelings. We tend to blind ourselves to love’s impurities. It is alarming how easily the defilements (kilesa, i.e., negative mental states such as greed, hatred and
delusion), which can destroy love, sneak inside a heart ignorant of the Buddha’s teachings (Dhamma).

CONTINUED:

http://www.thawsischool.com/uploads/...Love_Final.pdf