Last night, we talked about what the word "love" even meant. The Buddhists texts don't seem to use it very much. They're full of references to compassion and kindness and even to loving kindness, but they don't mention love itself very much. The Christian Bible seems to talk about love all the time - "God is love," "for God so loved the world," "the greatest of all these is love," and so on, but not the sutras. The sutras talk about desire and longing and attachment, but not romance, not affection, not love.

What's up with that? And what, then, is this "love" that's not otherwise mentioned? Is love nothing more than another form of attachment? Is love just clinging to that which is impermanent, wishing that it weren't so?

The Buddha's most basic teaching is that suffering is caused by attachment, and that by letting go of our attachments, we can lose our suffering. To put it another way, the Buddha's great counter-intuitive realization was that getting what we wanted wasn't what makes us happy, it's the losing of desire that brings happiness. If we just let go of all desire in the first place, it would be as if we had everything.

Now love seems to be the greatest cause of human unhappiness that I know. Just turn on the radio - every song, be it country, rock, pop, or hip-hop, seem to be about nothing else but love, love lost, unrequited love, or love so deep and so strong and so maddening that it threatens to destroy the one in love. Don't even get me started about the blues, but the same also goes for literature, for theater, for cinema, and most certainly for poetry. Almost every artist in every medium seems to constantly be expressing the pains of love in one way or another.

So if love causes so much suffering, then according to the Buddha's teaching, love must be a form of attachment. That may well explain why for most of it's history, Buddhism was practiced by celibates in monasteries, far from the engulfing passions of love and romance and all the suffering that it entails.

But then we read the words of the Zen hermit Ryokan, who wrote, "Have you forgotten the way to my hut? Every evening I wait for the sound of your footsteps but you do not appear."

Yes, love is a form of attachment, and yes, that attachment leads to suffering. But it also leads to joy, to intimacy, to contentment, and to satisfaction. That's the way the universe is, and a fearless Zen Buddhist can stop picking and choosing between the good and the bad, between pleasure and pain, and just open one's heart and experience all that there is in life.

And in so doing, we love and love deeply, celebrating and cherishing the presence of our loved ones as well as suffering the loneliness of their absence. That's the way it seems to be, so we might as well just accept it.