Love – the Basis of Hinduism

Love is the very basis of Hinduism. If you know how to love you are a great Hindu. All great people have become great because of their love for others. They gained greatness because they learnt to love.

Since love is the heart of Hinduism, we as children of this mighty culture, must also know what is love, and learn to love all others in this wide world. Lord is sheer Embodiment of Love. If we understand what love is, and teach ourselves to love all, we have served our Lord, Sri Parameswara. There is no pooja greater than it – no Tapas more effective. Therefore – Love! Love!! Love!!!

Love, no, doubt, is the only solution for man’s problem of existence.

Watch What is Love and Devotion – Swami Chinmayananda

What is Love?

Don’t you ever try to “fall into” other’s love, but as my children you must all learn to “walk out” of yourself to love others. It is active loving, when we give love. Generally we are passive: we cry to receive love.

To love others is an art and we must know its theory and practice, its methods and techniques, in order to master the art of giving love. In music or painting, in engineering or medicine we must learn the theory, and also for a long time practise them, in order to master any one of them – so too is the great art of giving love to others.

Watch Swami Chinmayananda on Love and Service

Problem in love

In love the problem is not whom to love but it is of how to love. Love is an ability, capacity in our minds, which is to be systematically cultivated. Once the faculty of love has developed, thereafter we have the total freedom to love, and any situation is a fertile field for the cultivation of our love.

Love, when it is true and full, unconditional and joyful, it is its own reward – “love is a fulfillment in itself”. Very few realize this; none dares to live it in life. Only those, the special few, who have a little grown up in their inward vision, and so evolved slightly in their spiritual growth, can feel this way, and readily discover the heroism to love – to give “love” to all creatures. All are but Narayana-in-manifestation. What else can then we give to the world but Love?

Unconditional Love

Some of us love, only if we are also loved in return! That is, we will give love, in payment for the love received!! This is commercial attitude: a mere shop-keeping temperament. Here the demand is subtly for “receiving” more love than the quantity given – “I will give only when I receive” is the expression of our mental weakness.

Watch the Difference between Love and Devotion by Swami Chinmayananda

The sun gives and demands nothing; the earth, the moon, the rains, the spring, the flowers, the rivers – everywhere in nature, among animals and plants – everywhere the Universal rhythm is to give lovingly and not to demand love from others.

The former, to give love, is true freedom: the latter, to demand love, is pure slavery.

To give love is to expand. Thereafter the lover functions from two centres – one from within himself, and another from the beloved, a centre outside himself.

Thus, in a true giver of love life quickens, happiness increases, the sense-of-loneliness departs all in a hurry.

Source: Excerpts from I Love You (Letters to Children) from Swami Chinmayananda