“If you have tears, prepare to shed them now,” he said. We did and we did. The actor playing Marc Antony is 34 years old. He has spent the last 17 of those years in prison, which is where Nancy and I were watching this production of Julius Caesar. After the performance, the actors talked to the audience about how much they love each other, and tried to express how much that means to them “in a place like this.”
I didn’t direct this production, but in 2008 I directed a production of Hamlet at Two Rivers prison in Umatilla, Oregon, and have directed a number of plays in prison since then—mostly by William Shakespeare. For the past thirteen years I’ve been going to prison more-or-less every week and facilitating what might be called “meaning-of-life dialogues” with men who have committed every crime you can imagine and some crimes that you don’t even want to imagine. After doing this for a number of months, one day I mentioned the word “love.” It’s a word you are not supposed to say in prison. It is taboo outside of prison as well. But that’s another story.
Inviting men in prison to talk about love had a strange effect. We all began to love each other. Over the years this love has deepened to the point where when you walk into the room you can feel it. It’s palpable.
I’m not the first person to notice this, but I’ve come to understand in a deep way that everyone needs to love and be loved. Like a puppy at the Humane Society, we are all waiting for someone to take us home.
What the men in prison taught me about living in love got me to thinking about how in philosophical traditions and in many spiritual traditions knowing is privileged over loving. I looked again at the noble eightfold path and it wasn’t there. There was no mention of love!
I’m not a Buddhist and certainly not a scholar of Buddhism, but I realized something had to be done about this and so, with an utter lack of humility, I would like to suggest a revision to one of the Buddha’s most fundamental teachings and propose to all and sundry the adoption of:
The Noble Ninefold Path
right understanding
right thinking
right speech
right action
right living
right effort
right mindfulness
right meditation
right loving
This may sound like a joke, but it’s not. I’m not suggesting that all the books on Buddhism be revised. What I’m suggesting is that if you use the noble eightfold path as a guide to your practice you could add one more thing to the list. And that it would be helpful to do so. It’s not a trivial addition.
One could argue that the Mahayana tradition has already done something like this with the bodhisattva ideal of compassion for all beings. Fair enough. Many modern Buddhist teachers—I’m thinking at the moment of Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chödrön and Jack Kornfield—put a big emphasis on love. This idea of adding one more item to the eightfold path is done, I hope, in that same spirit.
Peace, love and happiness—the hippie virtues—all tend to be scoffed at by “smart people”—maybe because these are arts which are not taught in school.
One meaning of nirvana is a kind of floating away from this world of cares—the world of samsara. But in later Buddhism, the duality is abolished: samsara and nirvana are not two.
For “intellectuals” and intellectual traditions the head is more important than the heart. This is not surprising. That’s kind of what “intellectual” means. But it seems to me that being a whole human being is preferable to performing the role of Mr. Know-It-All. Love and understanding need each other.
Head without heart leads to tragedy. In my lifetime, a bunch of geniuses had all kinds of reasons why it was a good idea to drop jellied gasoline on families planting rice in paddies. Had they listened to their hearts, the whole thing could never have happened.
What is “right loving”? I don’t know. Like all the other “rights” of the noble ninefold path, you do your best to figure it out as you go along. Love, of course, includes compassion. But love is much more than that. I love to see a beautiful flower. I don’t feel compassion for it. I love it because it’s beautiful. I love it without even knowing why I love it. Thich Nhat Hanh—that sweet man!—reminds us that we are all flowers.
My own aspiration is to love the heck out of everyone and every thing. “Unconditional love” means loving no matter what and for no reason.
In the Bible it says:
“Who loves not, knows not God; for God is Love.”
William Blake says:
Love to faults is always blind,
Always is to joy inclin’d,
Lawless, wing’d & unconfin’d,
And breaks all chains from every mind.
A good way to end this little essay might be with the Meta Prayer:
May all beings be happy!
May we be peaceful and at ease!
May we be well in body and mind!
May we live in love!