LOVE

5th–4th c. BCE

They never wrote to each other. In China, in the Warring States, Mozi says care that stops at your own house turns into theft and war. A Buddhist chant, in another language, asks for a heart as fierce as a mother's for her only child.

Can you love everyone?

Preferential love meets a claim that care should not stop with our favorites.

兼愛

Ink. Inclusive care.

It is to regard the state of others as one’s own, the houses of others as one’s own, the persons of others as one’s self.

Mozi, Universal Love II, English after Mei Yi-Pao, 1929

Jian ai. Inclusive care. Partial love of what is mine is named as the cause of war.

Jian xiang ai, jiao xiang li: inclusively care for one another, mutually benefit one another. Heaven, in that school, wants this.

Palm-leaf folio of a Pali commentary manuscript from Sri Lanka, 1756. Not the Metta Sutta.

Mātā yathā niyaṃ puttaṃ āyusā ekaputtam anurakkhe

A Pali song. A practice. The leaf is later.

Even as a mother would protect with her life her child, her only child, so too for all creatures unfold a boundless heart.

Karaniya Metta Sutta, English after Bhikkhu Sujato, SuttaCentral, CC0 1.0

Metta is closer to goodwill than to a lover’s name. The mother is the measure of the wish.

Mozi is speaking in a time of war between Chinese states. Love only your own house, he says, and you will rob the next one. The Buddhist lines are a practice. You train a wish: that every creature be protected the way a mother protects her only child. The mother is the measure of the wish. She is not an order to mother the world. The two never met.

Not one addressee.Inclusive care. A boundless heart.Love without a single beloved.

Sources

Mozi's teaching is not a modern slogan dressed in old Chinese. The Buddhist song is a practice you train, not a feeling that arrives. They did not meet. Neither one cancels the particular beloved.

  1. Mozi. “Universal Love” II. English after Mei Yi-Pao, The Ethical and Political Works of Motse (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1929). Public domain. The sentence on the page is Mei’s. The later “who would raise his state to attack” formula in English is Burton Watson, 1963, and is not quoted. The formula in the later chapters is jian xiang ai, jiao xiang li: inclusively care for one another, mutually benefit one another. Jian ai appears rarely in the triad; later titles and Mencius’s charge of “love without distinctions” made it the slogan. Pair with fei gong and tian zhi. Not a letter to the Pali song.
  2. Bamboo slips exhibited as a lost chapter of Mozi. Western Han. Hunan Museum. Photograph, Huangdan2060, 2018, CC0 1.0. A later copy. Not the Warring States hand.
  3. Karaniya Metta Sutta (Sutta Nipāta 1.8). Pali on the page is the first line of the mother verse. English after Bhikkhu Sujato, SuttaCentral, CC0 1.0. A practice, not a mood. The mother simile measures the wish; it is not an instruction to cherish the world as a child. No historical contact with Mozi. Two river systems. The palm-leaf photograph is not this sutta.
  4. Palm-leaf folio from a bilingual Aṭṭhakathā. Sri Lanka, 1756. British Library Or 6603/258, f. 229v. CC0 1.0. Pali on palm. Not the Metta Sutta.
  5. Neighbor door: Civilizations. How do civilizations build knowledge? A sibling house. Not this question.