I attended this month for the sixth year at the kind invitation of Triratna, formerly known as the FWBO – Friends of the Western Buddhist Order – in its past life, the annual Buddhafield Festival, held near Taunton, 80 minutes up the railway line from Totnes in south Devon, England. Around 2500 adults and children attend the festival.
Amidst the changing skies, and occasional bouts of sun, wind and rain passing through the festival, three Order members and myself had a public debate in the Dharma Parlour marquis on Dharma and romantic love. Lokabandhu propose that romantic love acted a hindrance to Dharma practice. Two of us took the opposite views – that romantic love, the experience of the erotic, integrates into the passion of the Dharma.
We won overwhelmingly the debate of course. Not due to our debating skills but the depth of interest in the West in exploring the intimate relationship with Dharma practice rather than viewing such intimacy as a distraction.
It seems to me that we need to understand clearly the difference between desire and love in action. There is a general view that we cannot make love without the desire to make love. Since the Buddhist tradition regards desire as the core problem of our species then, at some point, we must overcome and dissolve desire as the primary aim of our practice. If that is the case, then we should advocate strongly the stopping of development of personal relationships and live a celibate life since it always involves desire. At least, that is what orthodox Buddhists would have us believe.
I take the view that WE CANNOT MAKE LOVE WITH DESIRE. We make love with love. We make love through the power of Eros. We make love with wise and respectful action. We make love with awareness, sensitivity and mutual knowledge. Desire interferes with making love. Owing to desire, we can lose sensitivity to the partner or potential partner. We can become goal orientated. Desire can put us out of touch with ourselves and with another. Let us make love with love, not with desire.
Part of the way through the debate, I flashed back 2500 years to the time of the Buddha. Hundreds gathered to listen to the debates between bhikkhus, gurus, swamis, achariyas and yogis. The Buddha participated in these debates. During these times, the debates had a real edge to them. If the spiritual teacher clearly won the debate, then the other teacher and all his or her followers joined the Sangha of the teacher winning the debate. That seems to me far more thrilling than television debates where the debaters carry on clinging to their views regardless.
The Buddha’s Sangha built up rapidly through his capacity to show clearly the way to liberation, the nature of liberation and pointed to the limits, if not the absurdity, of the argument of his opponents.
All credit to Triratna for initiating Dharma debates for exploration.