on love, art and boddhisatvah

on love:

the biblical poet who wrote the song of songs delights in love and in making love to the beloved. it is a poem about the art of loving. the poet knows that we learn love in our meeting with the world, and we learn the world in her meeting with love. the poet wrote: "eat friends, and drink. drink your fill of love. how beautiful you are, my beloved! oh, how charming! and our bed is verdant." there are no teachings in this most sensual of all biblical poems. no teachings other the primordial teaching of love for the beloved. the poet speaks of love because the poet is in love. that simple and that wonderful. no mystical pretensions. no misguided escapes into illusory realms of transcendence. only the true poetry of right here and right now. after all, no one can teach us to love, nor can we pray for love, for only love can teach us, and love is itself the prayer.

in love-making, who is the one giving and who is the one receiving? in the deeds of love making giving and receiving are one and the same deed, and one and the same feeling. we give by receiving and we receive by giving. there is no distinction. it is the between of i and thou.

love making is the in-between of a beautiful passion. in contrast, the choice of celibacy as a spiritual practice is a complex idea. the decision to discard sexual relations under the premise that sexual intensity hinders spiritual attainment, is, to an extent, understandable. but i believe this idea to be rooted in a fundamental error. for it is not sex we need to consider in this context, but the poetry of making-love. 

making-love is not the same existential reality as having-sex. let us for a moment not discuss the issue that love is not akin to an object one uses, and therefore it is both intellectually and emotionally lacking to use the words "making" and "having" in connection with love. but nonetheless, we ought to make this essential distinction: we know that both deeds, having-sex and making-love, share with each other common aspects of beauty and pleasure, but the two are not the same. 

only in love-making we invoke the presence of our whole-being: that is to say, love-making is the true sexual relationship that rejoices the heart, that speaks to the mind, and that delights the body. sex is a deed we "have", love is a deed we do in the between of i and thou. 

in love making we give love to our beloved and we receive love from our beloved not as two separate and distinct deeds, but as one and the same. therefore it is an error to argue that celibacy is a preferable practice for a deep and authentic spiritual life. quite the contrary: a true spiritual life cherishes the grace that is making love to a true beloved. and it is through this love that nature gives life to the children of life. 

life and love are two different terms, but both are one and the same poem.

on art:

art can be understood as either invention or dis-covery. we either introduce a new object or sound or word into the world, or we find the images, sounds, words and movements that already exist in nature, and gather them unto us. 

in other words, we either invent new things, or we remove the different covers that hide those things that already exist in the world. 

the answer is that there is no strict discovery nor there is complete invention, there is the creation that emerges in the in-between of i and the world. the biblical poet said that there is nothing new under the sun. (notice he did not mention the moon). if this is true, all images that will ever be painted, all words that will ever be put into verses and the verses themselves, all sounds that will ever be composed into music, all art we have been given and will give to others, all of it, in its entirety and in all its details, has already been created by nature. 

our task therefore is to pay attention to the world, find the art it gives birth to, gather it unto us, and make a note of it. but how do we pay attention and gather to us the art that is in nature? by meeting the world and each other as "thou" rather than "it". for art emerges in the creative between of i and thou. 

take chagall for instance: he never invented anything, he just showed us the world as it truly is. if you pay attention you will too see a herring playing the fiddle for naked lovers in the gardens of your village. my father and mother could clearly see it.

on the boddhisatvah:

buddha-nature is i-thou relationship, as the bodhisattva's mission is to help his neighbors manifest buddhahood in their own lives. 

slavoj zižek said that the concept of bodhisattva is anti-buddhist, as it implies that nirvana is a different realm we must go to rather than a present state of being. but a bodhisattva is not one who voluntarily delays his entry into the alterity of nirvana in order to stay behind and help others on their paths to liberation. the buddhist insight is that there is no distinction between nirvana and our deeds of liberation in the here and now. for the bodhisattva nirvana is nothing other than the deeds of compassion and solidarity he performs for the sake of his neighbors. 

the bodhisattva's life is the nirvana the poets speaks of, not a prelude to it. there is no enlightenment except for the deeds of embracing a being. just as old rabbi hillel used to say: there is no torah outside of the compassion we enact for one another. 

the bodhisattva relationship is not a means to enter a separate realm of nirvana, but is the actualization of nirvana in the present realm of here and now. the thou-saying to any being is itself the liberation we seek. in the genuine embrace of the neighbor, no aspect of human liberation gets postponed for a future time, as every liberation we are called to attain becomes manifest as the immediacy of presence.