Loving Oneself
Loving Oneself
To love oneself is not contradictory to what Mahayana Buddhism teaches. The Mahayana teachings are not saying one should not love oneself. Renouncing oneself and cherishing others is not contradictory to loving yourself. In fact, practicing the Mahayana teaching, bodhichitta, is the best way to love yourself, to take care of yourself.
Whatever we do with our body, speech, and mind is for happiness. Even the activities of the tiniest insects, like the ants we see running around and keeping so busy, are also to achieve happiness. By looking at ourselves and at other living beings, we can see that it is the same: whatever we do is to achieve happiness.
A “problem” is what we do not want to experience and “happiness” is what we want to achieve. With this mind we can stop the problems, stop all the undesirable experiences, and with this mind we can achieve every happiness. Why is this? Because problems and happiness do not come from outside. The creator of problems and happiness is oneself in past lives. Therefore, with this mind all our problems can be stopped and we can achieve temporal day-to-day happiness and ultimate happiness, full enlightenment.
The problems of both non-religious people, those who do not have any faith, who do not meditate, and of the religious people who externally take the form of the teachings, doing prayers and so forth, even meditating, come from not understanding the meaning of loving oneself. One should give freedom to oneself, love oneself, but what does it mean? If we have a wrong understanding of this, we will always be followed by problems. In Buddhism, particularly in Mahayana Buddhism, the best way of loving oneself is to pull out the root of all problems, which is right in one’s own heart: the ego, the self-centered mind. So if one lets go of cherishing the I, then it doesn’t matter what situation one is experiencing, the problem becomes non-existent.
This article can be read in its entirety in Mandala
