The Four Immeasurables, also known as the four limitless qualities are 1. love or loving-kindness, 2. compassion, 3. joy and 4. equanimity. In Buddhism, we recite these regularly to connect with our basic nature of wisdom and compassion in order to bring peace and happiness to our lives and to others. Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche is a renowned Buddhist teacher who taught on the Four Immeasureables in Connecticut.
This article is about the first of the four immeasurables or limitless qualities, Love. In upcoming issues of the Suffield Observer, we will provide articles relating to the other three immeasurables or limitless qualities – compassion, joy, and equanimity. We hope these articles are helpful and provide insights into Buddhist views.
Love is the first of the Four Immeasurables. Rinpoche states that religions may disagree about many things but there is no disagreement when we talk about loving-kindness. This is not some diplomatic agreement between religions, but a heartfelt agreement about the importance of this practice of love and kindness. Here, this sense of love is not the idea of romantic love. The meaning conveys a sense of softness, kindness, gentleness or a feeling of goodness, a sense of brotherhood, sisterhood, and harmony. This noble heart of love and kindness gets mixed up, however, with our habitual tendency of attachment, grasping, and clinging. In that moment when we get attached to the object of our love, we lose our love. When we truly and genuinely feel our heart of loving-kindness there is a sense of genuine freedom and great comfort, satisfaction, contentment and joy. When there are many strings attached to this love, that is when we begin to feel a sense of dissatisfaction and discontentment, that nothing is enough, and then we feel a sense of lack of freedom.
The first important step in practicing loving-kindness is to practice it towards oneself, and reflect on our own nature, our own being, and then see what we desire to achieve and what we fear will happen if we don’t. We reflect on that with patience because impatience is the obstacle to love and kindness, so we practice reflecting on what we want to achieve and avoid, along with patience. This will help us see how deeply we are habituated to desire and aversion, and how our mind is consciously or unconsciously moving toward things we want and away from things we don’t want.
Rinpoche explains that the Mahayana Buddhist sense of love is based on the idea of selflessness, and the love that we are trying to connect with is love that shines from our Buddha-nature. This Buddha-nature, which is our real nature of mind, is full of wisdom and compassion in its own state, without effort or without adding anything to it. This Buddha-nature is our true state and has a sense of gentleness and kindness. Therefore, there is no reason to hate ourselves. It is a controversial idea, but the Buddha’s idea is that our original state is completely pure and good. The real heart of love is a gentle, soft, and vulnerable spot. This vulnerability makes us afraid to fully identify with our heart and blocks us from maintaining pure selfless, egoless love.
We have love but try to shield it with armor and protection. We don’t want people to look at us to see our vulnerability. We do this so much that we do it towards ourselves; we shield ourselves from our own vulnerable spot so we cannot love ourselves anymore. We perpetuate this habit based on our conditioning and conditions around us. Thus, we are unable to give genuine, egoless love even to ourselves sometimes. Rinpoche suggests that we be brave and feel it to transform our fear and transform our blockages. When we can feel this love–the egoless, selfless, genuine soft spot, and maintain it, then that is limitless love. We call this love without boundary. When we can experience it, this love is genuinely beautiful. When we can shine this love towards others, then we can bring the beauty of this love into our world.
Nalandabodhi, Connecticut’s Northern Branch, is located at 1380 Mountain Road, West Suffield. Our Bloomfield Meditation Center is located at 3 Barnard Lane, Suite 305. All are welcome to join our Sunday morning practices. In Suffield, we recite Prayers for Peace, including The Four Immeasurables, from 9-9:45 a.m. We meditate from 10-10:50 a.m. led by our Bloomfield center via zoom. From 11-11:30 a.m. we read and discuss short teachings from Pema Chodron’s book, Comfortable with Uncertainty. You can email us at nbct@nalandabodhi.org. Or check out our website at www.ct.nalandabodhi.org.