VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 9, SECTION 2
Great Love Makes No Distinction, and Does Not Throw Over Near and Far
The last section made plain that great love rises as the self is set down. But great love, unqualified, can be mistaken two ways. One takes it for a cold, level sameness that loves no one in particular because it loves all equally. The other takes any love of one's own for a failure of great love, as if to love your mother more than a stranger were a smallness to be ashamed of. This section sets both right. Great love makes no distinction, and yet it does not throw over near and far. To love the world begins with loving one's own, and reaches outward from there. And it weighs the heart of the thing, not its outward form.
First, what makes no distinction means, and what it does not. It means the great love shuts no one out. It draws no line that says these are worth loving and those are not, does not love the near and scorn the far, love the like and cast out the unlike, love the useful and discard the useless. In its reach, no living thing is outside. This is the no-distinction of great love: none excluded, none written off, the love open, at the root, to all. But no distinction does not mean a flat, equal sameness, the same measure of love poured out on every creature alike, one's own child no dearer than a stranger's, one's own parent no closer than a passerby. That is not great love. That is a love so spread it has no warmth anywhere, a haze, not a fire. Great love is not the erasing of near and far. It is the refusal to wall anyone out.
The ancestors laid the true shape of it long ago: treat the aged of your own house as the aged should be treated, and reach from there to the aged of others. Treat the young of your own house as the young should be treated, and reach from there to the young of others. The love begins at home, with those nearest, one's own old and young, and does not stop there but reaches out, ring by ring, to the old and young of others, and outward to all. Near first, then far. Own first, then others. Not because the far are worth less, but because the love that does not first burn warm at home has no fire to carry outward. A love that skips its own to embrace the distant is not great love. It is a show of love with no root, and a love with no root soon gutters out. The great love roots in the near and grows toward the far. It keeps the warmth of near and far both: warmest at the center, and reaching, truly reaching, to the edge.
So the two are held together, not against each other. Great love makes no distinction, no one is walled out. And great love keeps near and far, it burns warmest at home and reaches outward from there. The one who loves greatly does not love his own less. He loves his own fully, and from that full love reaches out to love others too, and others beyond them, the rings widening, the warmth carried outward, none shut out at the edge. To love your mother more than a stranger is not a failure of great love. It is where great love begins. The failure would be to love your mother and wall out the stranger, to let the love stop at your own door. Great love loves its own and does not stop there. That is the whole of it: begin near, reach far, wall out none.
And here the deepest measure of great love shows: it weighs the heart, not the form. What matters in a thing to be loved is not its outward shape, its usefulness, its station, its likeness to oneself, but the living heart in it, the share it holds, its being a living thing at all. Great love does not sort creatures by their form, this one grand and that one lowly, this one like me and that one strange, and love by the sorting. It looks past the form to the living heart, and loves the life there. So it can love the low as the high, the strange as the familiar, the far as the near, because what it loves is not the form but the life. This weighing of the heart and not the form is why great love makes no distinction: form differs endlessly, and by form one could wall out half the world, but the living heart is in all that lives, and to love the heart is to be able to love all. It is the same measure the whole book has used: read the intent, not the letter. Weigh the living person, not the outward mark. Here that measure reaches its widest: weigh the living heart in all things, not their form, and love by that.
This weighing of the heart and not the form will return, in the next section, as the very way this book understands itself. For the book, too, is to be weighed by its heart, the great love it carries, and not by its form, the paper and the words that carry it. A thing that weighs the heart and not the form must, in the end, be willing to let its own form go, once the heart is passed on. That is where the next section leads: this book is one shape of the great love, a small oil lamp, caring for the heart of the thing and not its form, and willing to be forgotten once the love it carries has been handed on.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.