Metta, Pema, Raga: Love & Sex in Buddhist practice: Sangharakshita in Seminar Revisited

Led by Dharmapriya

Friendship - Communication - Metta - the Brahma Viharas: from the very beginning Sangharakshita and the Triratna have emphasized Positive Emotion. Bhante has always stressed the crucial importance of metta, and distinguished this from more sentimental, romantic, or sexual feelings - pema and raga. And indeed the whole Buddhist tradition declares pema to be the "near enemy" of true metta.

"The near enemy is a state of mind that is close to the brahma-vihara and is sometimes mistaken as the good emotion, but is actually “a near enemy” and not the correct mental state." (G.P. Malalasekara, Dictionary of Pāli Proper Names)

Can we use a "near enemy" as a stepping stone to the "real thing"? Without explicitly going so far, Bhante does praise pema quite highly in Living with Kindness:


“It is undoubtedly a positive emotion. … Expressing warmth and affection to your family members and close friends is a very good thing. Through your affection for them you learn to set aside your own narrow self-interest and get a sense of yourself as being involved with other people in a real and tangible sense.”



On the other hand, the "near enemies" of the other Brahma Viharas are unequivocally negative: sentimental pity or horrified anxiety; vicarious satisfaction or insincerity; and indifference. How different can pema really be? And in many other contexts Bhante has been highly critical of pema:

“Buddhism has quite sharply distinct words for these two different things. We tend to confuse the issue by lumping everything together and calling it all love, but in Buddhism it’s either pema or sneha, on the one hand, or metta/maitri on the other, and the two are very sharply distinguished - pema or sneha being an infatuated, deluded, attached, projected kind of "love", and metta being the calm, friendly, "impersonal" feeling that really does desire the other person’s genuine well-being and is not just trying to exploit and use. I think a great deal of harm is done by the fact that, in the English language, we’ve got this very ambiguous word love. A great deal of misunderstanding is created.” (The Everlasting Fascinating Cry, p.77)


Has Bhante contradicted himself or does this apparent confusion reflect real difficulties in positive emotions and human relationships? How do we respond to his utterances and our own experience?


We can re-orientate our emotional life so we are more fully living from loving-kindness and compassion – but how do we do it? And how do we do this without just trading the Dharma for respectability and conventional morality? Can these suttas help us examine our assumptions and behaviour in our relationships, both sexual and non-sexual? We will look at seminar material, sutras, and our own experience; and we will maintain a substantial supportive shrine-room practice for the duration of the seminar.

For: Order Members

Start date: 1st Aug 2016
End date: 8th Aug 2016
Event Type: Residential

Price: Waged/Supported £245  |  Unwaged/Unsupported £175
Non-refundable deposit: £70 (included in prices above)

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