Buddhism, Hate, Politics and Love

By Khaled Alkhawaja. Khaled, 28, is a writer and translator. He lives in A'ali, Bahrain. Please read his article and leave your thoughts and comments below.

It’s interesting to think about love. Love is one of the most widely thought of and discussed words in today’s age and time. Many people say, God is love, and many other things of the sort. However, it’s interesting to go about it and discuss it in an analytical way, does love truly govern reality? Does love negate all other constructs, and does this negation necessarily and palpably negate the constructs of hate on the other side? Hate cannot be discussed without its opposite, love.

First of all, we should ask, are hate and love two sides of the same coin? Does love inevitably lead to hate, and does all hate eventually lead to love, just like in the Tai Chi Diagram with Yin and Yang?

To discuss the above question, we can take examples from so many areas of life, politics, religious disputes, or even personal relationships, and I feel it would be even better if we can weave through the argument throughout all of these areas to come up to a conclusion about the matter.

To begin with and to take an arbitrary point of beginning, we shall take Jesus of Nazareth, known often as Jesus Christ. If we say that hate brings hate, then we would like to ask, why was he crucified and hated on? People think that he has associated with nothing but love and the highest good, so how could hate bring hate if the person associated with divine love received nothing but the most despicable way of dying which itself is associated with the most hated people? This makes us question if hate brings hate, what did Jesus hate in order for him to become so hated?

The scriptures tell us nothing about Jesus hating on people, but we can tell that Jesus hated the condition of the world, the world which is apart from the Kingdom of God, he hated the status quo, so eventually, the status quo hated him with all its might. But again we could say, is the status quo an actual entity for it to be hated?, or was that just something we say for someone who loves the world as Spirit and hates the world as Material? That is to say, he has a love for the Other World, the world where the Prophets and the Buddhas come from, but a contempt for the structure of this world, because this is all the difference there is, a difference in structures.

No one hates another person for any non-structural reason, just like no two molecules have an affinity or an aversion that’s not structurally-caused. Sometimes the structures of hatred and love and deeper than others, and sometimes they’re more apparent.

Here the question which arises again is, is all affinity equivalent to love, and all non-affinity equivalent to hatred? Could we have affinity and aversion but still hold love to be sacred? And is it possible to have a love so strong that it negates all aversions and keeps only affinity, an infinite affinity?

Actually, if we examine the structural reasons of hatred they’re all because of skin-color association, religious morals judgment, unequal money distribution, and I can’t think of a fourth reason! So if we espouse the ethic of Jesus, and base our actions from the perspective of the study of Judaeo-Islamic Jurisprudence then we can reach a level where we embrace love, and then rather than hate, and we can regulate our relationship to things of affinity and aversion in a manner where we can attract the subject of the matter and preclude involvement between subject (Person) and object [Of hatred and love].

Although the previous paragraph may seem lightly off-subject, I do think that it’s important to my argument that we establish the Buddhist idea of mutual arising, and to sound fancy and add the Sanskrit term: “Pratītyasamutpāda”. And to weaken my argument by quoting Wikipedia it means: key principle in Buddhist teachings,[note 1] which states that all dharmas(“phenomena”) arise in dependence upon other dharmas: “if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist”.

One key happening – which I want to relate this matter to – is the Islamic revolution in Iran. Before the revolution, the disputes that were going on were between communism and capitalism, and there was no significance to the dispute between the Shia and Sunnis in the middle east, at least not in the significant way it is right now. So while there was a rise of the Khomeini and Shia Islam, at the same time there arose the Sunni Alqaeda organization, both in 1979, so if we look at a country like mine right now, Bahrain, we see that it is politically divided between Shia and Sunnis in a very major way. The government and the people both suffered in trying to deal with the so many factions trying to take control of power and draw the people to their side.

In general, we can say that having a limited personal or group identity necessarily draws a line of what’s good and what’s bad, what belongs to the in-group, and what doesn’t, and this definitely goes against the definition of love. So I think, based on the above, and the analysis thereof, that we can say that hate, indeed breeds hate.

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