Dhamma Talks - True Love :: Buddhapadipa Thai Temple

Indeed, we often hear people using the word ‘love’ to describe what they like. For example, a man says, “Oh yes, l love Thai food, and I also love Indian curry.” Another man says, “I love to hear the music of Mozart, Johan Strauss.” A woman says, “I love modern Chinese music, and Japanese classic Kabuki.”

A husband says, “I love my wife”, and his wife says, “I love him dearly.” We love our next-door neighbours, and they say they love us. This means people love each other. The question is, will that love nourish the flowering of the human mind, the human heart and the human quality so that there is no conflict and violence?

Surely you have observed people around you. They all use the word “Love”, a great deal. And yet many times they quarrel, there is competition between them and sometime they are willing to destroy each other. Is that love? And what do you think it is? Do you know the word hate, the meaning and the feeling of that word? You know what it means to hate people. And you can put it down in words very well. Antagonism, repugnance, anger, jealousy, competition and the like, all of which are part of hatred. Can you have both in your mind and in your heart – hate and love? Can you have such feelings, hate and love together, or not together? One is kept in one corner and the other in another corner: ‘I hate somebody and I love someone.’

Parents often say they love their children. But it is noticeable that many of them do not treat their children with the correct love. On the contrary, they spoil them with the hi-tech materials, such as computer, mobile phone, etc. However useful the hi-tech may be I am afraid the hi-tech can hardly help the children to grow properly. As the result many children are grown up mechanical not only in hand but also in head and in heart. Recently it is reported that without a pocket calculator some schoolchildren leavers cannot add numbers together. Today children are given too much freedom, so they can do what they like and many a time their behaviour goes out of hand. Parents should prepare the young children for adult life. Suppose if children were not grown well upright, you can imagine what would happen when they are adults. Please face the fact. This is not pessimistic.

If parents love their children they should see that the children are growing inwardly and also outwardly; they should grow up not just physically taller or stronger but psychologically maturing or flowering. The word flowering means nothing hinders them, nothing blocks or prevents them from actually growing deeply inwardly. If the children are spoilt, such spoilt conditions their mind so they could hardly ever grow, bloom and mature. That mental condition becomes hindrance to the growth-up of children. And that mental condition stultifies or deadens them so that they have no deep flourish and nourishment. Therefore if parents loved their children they would see that the children are properly educated-not technologically or merely to get a job-bit psychologically so that when the children are fully matured they will have no conflict. They will not let drugs control their lives.

All this implies when I say I love my daughter or my son. I do not want him to become a first class businessman, making a lot of money. What for if he may turn out to have a conflict and gets psychosomatic illness? Or I don’t want my son to be a marvellous specialist who helps a little bit here and there by building better bridges or becoming a better doctor and all the rest of it if he turns out to be a renegade.