Love of This World

And then he says: the fountainhead of all misdeeds is love of this world. In Buddhism there are the four noble truths. The first truth: the world is suffering. The second truth: suffering is a result of attachment. The more we love the world, the greater our suffering. There is an Islamic tradition that Jesus said that the degree of your attachment to this world is the degree of your suffering when tribulation befalls you. The idea, then, is that if one can relinquish one's love of the world — and this again is love, as discussed in an earlier chapter in connection with the absence of the divine in the world — because when the world is imbued with the divine presence, then the love that one shows is because of the divine presence. It is not for the thing itself. It is not for stuff. It is not: the more there is, the happier one is going to be. This is not what it is about. It is about relinquishing one's attachment so that one becomes free, and then one can be in the world in a way that is beauty-making. One can truly contribute to the human condition and the process of living in the world.

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said that smiling in the face of another person is charity. Just to give a person a smile is charity. And there is that idea of becoming aware that that is something one will be rewarded for in the next world. So: making beauty.

And then he says: the fountainhead of all misdeeds is love of this world; there is no cure but to turn to God out of absolute necessity. So this is, in the Buddhist tradition, the idea that there is a way out of suffering, which is the noble path. Well, the Muslims would say the same thing. The way out of suffering would be the sacred law. And the sacred law in Arabic means the path to water; that is literally what it means. The sacred law is the path to water: to being nourished spiritually, to having one's thirst truly quenched — not the mirages in the desert, the false water.