I would disagree with that. Anytime we celebrate death of others, that feeds negativity in ourselves. It feeds the opposite of compassion. Since you seem to admire the Dali Lama, whom I do as well, can you imagine him going, "Hell yeah, that ******* is dead!!"?
Why not? Because that feeds those negative energies inside of us that gets juice from things like vengeance and violence. The Dali Lama is all about cultivating compassion in ourselves towards others, and schadenfreude works in the opposite direction of compassion.
But admittedly, I did feel tempted to celebrate his passing, as I recognize the damage he has done to the Christian faith and American culture, then I realized that that is not the right path to take, for the very reasons I stated. It feeds the wrong dog. So instead I simply just acknowledged that he is gone now, and leave it at that.
No. You are confusing loving others, with becoming their doormat. Loving your enemies does not mean you should not protect yourself from them! It doesn't mean be a fool. It does not mean have no boundaries for yourself. That's not love nor how love acts. That's wanting them to like you and not loving yourself. To let others take advantage of you is not loving action to them or to yourself.
This principle of loving your enemies has to do with what you hold and harbor towards others
within you own heart. How you hold your feelings towards them. It has to do with instead of harboring resentments, desiring retribution upon others, seeking vengeance, hoping for their demise, celebrating their misfortunes, all of which feed negative energies in your own body chemically, and psychologically, and ultimately spiritually, which is that balance of all these systems as a collective whole.
By not feeding that, by letting go of those, through attitudes of forgiveness, and compassion, even towards your worst enemies, you now take away all that power that they had over you by controlling your own emotions and thoughts and energies. You are now free of them, and not given over towards hate, which damages yourself.
So "love your enemy" while clearly counterintuitive, as you have shown that you think it makes no sense, that that means open the door to them, in reality, it is radically sage advice. Because it actually does the opposite of opening the door to them.
It closes the door to them! It takes away their power over your own interior landscape, and personality, and spiritual center and ground.
Take what Ghandi said in light of this. "I refuse to let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet". By hating your enemies, you let them into your mind to do their deeds of damage. By letting go of your hatred, by "pray for them instead", by holding attitudes of love instead, you take away all their power over you. By hating them, you give them all your power, and they win.
And. on to top of this, if there is any hope of actual relational
peace with your enemies, it is going to come by you not feeding violence in return to violence, which only escalates, and never desecallates. It will come by someone who "turns the other cheek" or does not render and eye for an eye, or a tooth for tooth, which only feeds the cycle of violence.
I want to be perfectly clear on this, "getting them out of your life" is not an inappropriate response. You should create boundaries and protect them to preserve your own well being. Absolutely. But hating them, is not doing that. That is in fact letting them inside your head! You're giving them free reign. But by choosing to love them instead of hate them, you in fact are protecting yourself! You are creating your boundaries and saying to them, I am not going to let you rule me and get inside my head and destroy my peace.
Authentic love has to protect itself by establishing boundaries to preserve itself. But hatred is not the path to that. Hatred and retributive thoughts and actions are the opposite of that.
And that is exactly the teaching of the Buddha himself, as well as the teaching of Jesus.
Jesus: "If anyone strike you on the cheek, turn to him the other also"
Buddha: "If anyone should give you a blow with his hand, with a stick, or with a knife, you should abandon any desires and utter no evil words".
You see my point here? While you say you admire the Buddha, as do I of course, you think Jesus is wrong when he says the same things. You have to understand from my perspective how this inconsistency appears not based on reason but simply prejudicial attitudes. "Hardly the words of an exemplary person", yet they are also to words of the Buddha.
So "love your enemy, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who despise you, turn the other cheek, give them your cloak also, do not render evil for evil, etc, all of this all the same underlying reason which I outline well above. To do otherwise, feeds the wrong eneries, which feeds the wrong thoughts, which feeds the wrong attitudes, which feeds the wrong actions.
Another quote from Ghandi fits here:
Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”
This is why you should "love your enemies", and forgive those who hate you. If you harbor otherwise, you've written your own destiny, and you chose it for yourself.
Peace. Overcoming the cycle of hate within yourself. Cultivating compassion in your life. All of these.
No. It has nothing to do with you trying to
control their actions.
Again, yes, love creates boundaries, but it lets go of resentments and hatreds and harboring of ill will towards others. Doing otherwise is
you doing that to yourself. End of story.
I did answer your question quite clearly. How did this not answer you?
"it's sort of common sense to assume that someone that inspired a movement which became so diverse and widespread and evolving as rapidly as it did, was an extraordinary individual. Think of MLK and the civil rights movement, for example."
And by the way, "love your enemies" is not like every other preacher. At the time he said it, it was a radical position that challenged the law of Moses, or the religious norm of the day! "You have heard it said an eye for an eye [quoting Leviticus], BUT I SAY UNTO YOU, turn the other cheek". That's radical for a preacher to challenge scripture that way for that time.
That you hear preachers mouth those words today, is what I said before about it becoming a cliche, that really doesn't have much meaning, just nice sounding platitudes. But do they really understand the radical nature of it? Do they actually practice it? Do they understand the reasons for why to practice it? You didn't seem to understand what it's really about, and I highly doubt they do either.
And yet, the teachings parallel each other. It's only 6 minutes, and I'll assume you didn't watch it before when I linked to it. But as you can see, the Buddhists themselves see Jesus's teaching fitting right into Buddha's teachings and how Buddhist can recognize the exact same truths in them with the sermon on the mount (which you reject as a cynical teaching). They clearly don't agree with you on this: