I was browsing on YouTube the other day and as tends to happen, I ran into several old gems. I'm not really a big Queen fan, despite having "Another One Bites the Dust" hammered into my ears as a very young lad, but I did find Queen's song for the Highlander movie, "Who Wants to Live Forever".
Maybe because I found that Brian May is now Dr. May (he earned his doctorate degree in Astrophysics recently), I paid more attention to the song. For the first time, I actually listened to the words...and they struck me as being very buddhist.
If you never saw The Highlander movie (don't bother watching the sequels, though the TV series was pretty good actually), basically it's about a group of mysterious immortals that can only be killed by having their heads cut off. Imagine for a second being able to live forever, and yet watching those you love around you die.
You don't even really have to be immortal to understand that. I have a dog named Aiko, and she is very dear to me, and I always thought it a cruel irony that dogs live 1/5th as long as humans do, despite in my opinion, dogs being superior to humans in many ways. One day, I will have to watch her leave, and the thought always fills me with sadness despite the fact that I know that this is simply the way things are.
So I listened to the lyrics of the song, and basically the recurring theme is, who wants to live forever, if love has to die. I saw some comments on YouTube from some christians saying that they will live forever one day in a different place. But buddhists do not ascribe to these beliefs. For us, this is nothing more than wish-fulfillment, yet another desire that leads to suffering. Humans have been ingrained to not see things as they are, but as to how we expect them to be, conceive them to be or hope them to be. Our everyday experience tells us that things are not permanent, and yet we still try to fool ourselves into believing that there is more to life than meets our experiences.
One of the parts of the song says that "forever is our today". This is exactly what Zen means when it says that we must live now in the present. The past is gone, and the future is not yet here. All we truly have is this moment now. Sometimes, when I take Aiko for a walk, I drop as much baggage as I can, and I am always amazed by two things:
1) how peaceful it is
2) how hard it is to stay that way
Always, some thought or some sensation brings me back to the world of "inner mind", where I think about things past, present or future that have nothing to do with "right now". Our minds are always scattered and not experiencing what life is presenting to us. Instead, we think about how much work we have to do, or errands we have to run, or we reminisce about something, etc etc. But if we could only pay attention to "right now", we would be pretty amazed.
The song also struck me as buddhist in that it shows how pain comes from love. There is a story about buddhism that I have always liked, because it illustrates how suffering can come from anything...including love. Most people think that "love burns eternal", or that love saves the day....yadda yadda. Again, this is wishful thinking. The truth is that like all things, love changes. It grows, and it fades away or at least it changes. The only true lasting love is the kind that accepts the loved for whatever it is, not as you want it to be. But let me get back to the buddhist story.
King Pasenadi was a king of a neighboring country of the Buddha's own land (Sakya). He was a nominal Hindu, but his wife had heard of the Buddha's teaching and was enamored of them. One day, the Buddha was traveling in King Pasenadi's kingdom, and he met a man who was weeping in sorrow. The Buddha asked the man why he was filled with grief, and the man told the Buddha that his son had died. The Buddha said that "in love there is suffering", but before the Buddha could explain more, the man angrily retorted that love only brings happiness and joy and then he ran off.
The man soon talked with other people in town, and the other people agreed with the man, saying that it was wrong of the Buddha to claim that love was suffering. Eventually, word reached King Pasenadi's ears and he told his wife that "this monk called 'The Buddha' may not be as spiritual as you think". When his wife (Mallika) asked him why, King Pasenadi told her that the Buddha taught that love was suffering. Later Mallika asked an attendant to ask the Buddha what he had meant to say. When the attendant (a Brahman) had come back and explained what the Buddha had tried to say, Mallika understood the Buddha's intent.
When King Pasenadi was relaxing, Mallika came to him and asked, "My husband, do you love Princess Vajiri?". King Pasenadi was somewhat taken aback. He replied, "Of course I do". So Mallika continued, "And would you be distressed if something were to befall her?". The King seemed troubled, for he was wise enough to see where his wife was going with this, and the King resolved to meet the Buddha.
The King asked the Buddha that he could see how pain and suffering could stem from love, but that joy and happiness also sprang from love. The Buddha's answer is very important, and this answer also applies to meekness. The Buddha replied that the majority of people in the world conceived of love in terms of "me" or "mine". Because of this, love was mired in the world of separation and attachments. When most people think of love, they think only what they will get out of it. Love that thinks of self, or me, or mine is not true love. True love only thinks of others or of the whole...never the self. The Buddha said that there are only two kinds of love; karuna, which is the love that brings happiness to others and maitri which eases the sufferings of others (btw, the future Buddha is said to be Maitreya...the one who ends suffering). In both karuna and maitri, there is no thought of getting something in return.
I love this story because it points to the heart of our selfishness. True love is selfless. It seeks nothing in return except to share happiness, or to ease suffering. Nowhere does it say, "in return for loving you, I expect something in return". Nowhere does it say that love is eternal.
We must love everything. We must have loving kindness to all things, not just things that we find agreeable to us. For me, this is one of the hardest aspects to follow in Buddhism. There are many things in this world that I don't like. And yet I need to understand how we are all connected, and how we are all under delusion. It is never a matter of forcing yourself into a belief or practice. If you force yourself to be celibate while having lustful thoughts, or force yourself to be charitable when giving to others, or give only when expecting to be rewarded...these are false attainments).
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