If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. He illustrates this mismatch of scales with an apt metaphor: (“Suffering” sounds rather dramatic, but in Buddhism it refers to any source of profound dissatisfaction - be it physical or psychoemotional or spiritual.) Understanding, after all, is what everybody needs - but even if we grasp this on a theoretical level, we habitually get too caught in the smallness of our fixations to be able to offer such expansive understanding. Thich Nhat HanhĪt the heart of Nhat Hanh’s teachings is the idea that “understanding is love’s other name” - that to love another means to fully understand his or her suffering. To receive his teachings one must make an active commitment not to succumb to the Western pathology of cynicism, our flawed self-protection mechanism that readily dismisses anything sincere and true as simplistic or naïve - even if, or precisely because, we know that all real truth and sincerity are simple by virtue of being true and sincere. Indeed, in accordance with the general praxis of Buddhist teachings, Nhat Hanh delivers distilled infusions of clarity, using elementary language and metaphor to address the most elemental concerns of the soul.

That’s what legendary Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926–January 22, 2022) explores in How to Love ( public library) - a slim, simply worded collection of his immeasurably wise insights on the most complex and most rewarding human potentiality. Learning to meet this mystery with the full realness of our being - to show up for it with absolute clarity of intention - is the dance of life. And yet anyone who has ever taken this wholehearted leap of faith knows that love remains a mystery - perhaps the mystery of the human experience.

What does love mean, exactly? We have applied to it our finest definitions we have examined its psychology and outlined it in philosophical frameworks we have even devised a mathematical formula for attaining it.

Thich nhat hanh true love