essays

On Gilgamesh

January 27, 2021

Dragonflies drift downstream on a river,
Their faces staring at the sun,
Then, suddenly, there is nothing.

Tablet X 312-314, Foster 2001

Read this book if: mortality is on your mind, you’re curious about the dawn of human written storytelling, or you’ve read Gilgamesh before and are interested in a fresh, universalist interpretation.

Avoid this book if: are bored by ancient epics or are expecting a smooth narrative. Gilgamesh is cobbled together from fragmentary source material. Disjointed plot arcs abound.

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My friend Tree has long argued that most art is motivated by the artist’s fear of death. For many years I scoffed at this idea, in part because Tree is infamous for his flamboyantly sweeping opinions (“PM Dawn was the greatest hip-hop band of the 1990s”).

But as the years pass, I wonder if he’s right. It’s not that death feels near: at the time of this writing, I’m 43 years old, and hopefully half my lifetime lies ahead. But with every passing year, the once-abstract notion of death becomes more concrete.

This change feels both gradual and sudden, like the progression of thoughts during a daylong hike. For the first few hours, the thought of trail’s end doesn’t pass through one’s mind; and if it does, it’s a logistical question easily chased away by a flurry of sensations—the curve of the landscape, the feeling of boots on soil, conversation with friends. And then, suddenly, one realizes that the hike will indeed end. The feeling of suddenness is an illusion. The mind was subconsciously considering the end all the while, tracking the distance traveled. The thought finally breaches awareness, and that’s the instant when the end feels real.

I will die: how completely the meaning of the verb in that little sentence has changed over the years.

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The story

The protagonist of Gilgamesh is the king of Uruk, an ancient Sumerian city that lay near the banks of the Euphrates River, within the borders of modern-day Iraq.

As the story begins, Gilgamesh is drunk with power, terrorizing the people of Uruk. He thrashes young warriors in fights; he exercises his royal prerogative to rape brides on their wedding night. The gods of Sumer hear the people’s prayers to save them from this tyrant and create a mighty warrior from clay, Enkidu, to challenge Gilgamesh. The king wins the ensuing wrestling match, ^[1]In some versions, they fight to a draw., but Enkidu earns Gilgamesh’s respect and friendship. The king, a bit besotted by his new friend,^[2]Or lover: it’s never clear whether Enkidu and Gilgamesh are romantically entangled. Gilgamesh’s mother: “Like a wife you’ll love him, caress and embrace him, he will be … Continue reading ceases his brutalization of the city’s people and instead embarks on heroic adventures with Enkidu.

Together they journey to the ends of the known world, defeating humans and monsters in combat. But then they kill two beings beloved of the gods—Humbaba, guardian of the cedars of Lebanon, and the Bull of Heaven—and divine vengeance catches up to the adventurers. The gods cast a deadly illness on Enkidu, and the giant warrior slowly wastes away before the eyes of Gilgamesh.

The king is inconsolable, weeping for twelve days and nights over the body of his friend, desperately trying to bring Enkidu back to life through the force of his grief. At dawn on the thirteen day, Gilgamesh cries to the rising sun of his loss: “What now is this sleep that has seized you? Come back to me! You hear me not…He touched his heart but it was not beating” (Tablet VIII 55-58, Foster 2001). The king, who had eagerly rushed towards death with Enkidu at his side many times before, thinking only of glory, now shivered before the truth: “Shall I not die too? Am I not like Enkidu?” (Tablet IX 97, Foster 2001).

Gilgamesh is overwhelmed by grief and fear—throughout the narrative, these two emotions are entangled, indistinguishable—and grows obsessed with the immortality enjoyed by the gods. The king finally leaves Uruk, journeying over plains and mountains to where the Euphrates empties into the sea, a place at the border of earth and heaven where humans with everlasting life are rumored to live.

He doesn’t find answers there. The many beings he meets—the scorpion guardsman at the gates of the between-world, the sympathetic sun god, the ghostly ferryman to the other shore—warn him to turn back. The gentlest wisdom comes from the alewife goddess Siduri:

Gilgamesh, wherefore do you wander? 
The eternal life you are seeking you shall not find. 
When the gods created mankind, 
They established death for mankind, 
And withheld eternal life for themselves. 
As for you, Gilgamesh, let your stomach be full. 
Always be happy, night and day. 
Make every day a delight...
Look proudly on the little one holding your hand. 
Let your mate be always blissful in your loins,
This, then, is the work of mankind.

Tablet X, 77-84, 89-91, Foster 2001

But Gilgamesh will not listen. The gods realize the king won’t be convinced until he comes face to face with his own weakness. They offer Gilgamesh immortality if he can pass either of two tests. In the first, he must stay awake for a week. In the second, he must dive to the ocean’s depths, recover a magic herb, and guard it well.

He fails both challenges. The king finally understands that death cannot be conquered. The alewife’s words take on genuine meaning; we can imagine that the truth of death breaches Gilgamesh’s consciousness and this time does not depart. Evanescence is the deep heart of life—the life of dragonflies and human beings—but in our short sojourn on the planet we have a chance of finding friendship, enjoying the love of others, taking satisfaction in work well done. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk and his people, and gazes upon his city and his life with pride.

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The historical context

Gilgamesh is still read today because it deals with universal human themes—death, friendship, the war against destiny—but it was told, written, and revised in a specific historical context. Knowing that context not only clarifies the intentions of those who wrote the story, but also reveals how we, the readers of the present, selectively interpret the narrative for our own purposes.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is often described as the oldest of written human stories. The earliest copies appear in the Sumerian cuneiform—a script of wedge-shaped marks etched into clay tablets—of the third millennium BCE, the first written language in human history. The descriptor “epic,” though, is misleading. Gilgamesh was not originally a single coherent story. Instead, the various parts of the narrative we read today—the wrestling match between the king and Enkidu, the battle with Humbaba, Gilgamesh’s journey to the land of the gods—were separate stories first written down sometime around 2100 BCE. Centuries later, perhaps around 1700 BCE, the stories were compiled into a single poem by an unknown author. Only in this carefully sequenced epic does the dominant theme—the raging against mortality brought about by the loss of a dear friend—emerge. This text is what we now call the “Old Babylonian Version.” The compilation typically used by modern translators (the “Standard Version”), however, dates from around 1200 BCE and is the work of the Babylonian scholar-priest Sîn-lēqi-unninni.^[3]Knowledge of the epic as a whole was lost to the world (barring, perhaps, localities in the modern Tigris/Euphrates region) under the onslaught of Greek, Roman, and Persian invasions in subsequent … Continue reading

The myths were built on the life of a real person. The historical Gilgamesh ruled over the city of Uruk around 2750 BCE. Stories of his life must have been told orally for many generations before the written stories appeared more than five centuries after his death. Around the time of Gilgamesh’s rule, Uruk was the largest city in the world, with close to one hundred thousand people living in its environs.^[4]The question of the world’s largest city at different times in antiquity is somewhat speculative. For the background to Uruk’s claim, see Nissen, Hans J (2003). “Uruk and the … Continue reading

The epic reflects not only personal distress but also great cultural anxiety. Gilgamesh’s world—from the time of historical king himself to the centuries in which the epic was compiled—was one of tribal conflict, droughts, and floods. The borders of Sumer were constantly challenged by invaders. By the time the epic was first compiled, the Sumerian cities had fallen to outsiders; the compilers were in fact Assyrian, centered in the mighty city of Babylon, upstream of Uruk on the Euphrates River.

In assembling the fragments of a thousand year-old Sumerian story, the Assyrians were subtly writing a preface to their own creation myths, especially the other great ancient Mesopotamian epic, the Enūma Eliš, written sometime in the middle of the second millennium BCE. The Enūma Eliš tells of how Marduk, the patron deity of Babylon, defeats the Sumerian gods of the Gilgamesh tales through a combination of trickery, cajoling, and force.^[5]If you’re interested in an accessible academic text about the evolution of Mesopotamian religion between the fourth and second millennium BCE, check out Jacobsen, Thorkild (1976). Treasures of … Continue reading Marduk brings order to the chaos of the heavens, a theme that would have been appealing to a Mesopotamia riven by war and natural disaster.

This plotline, order out of chaos, appears in myths across the world. Indeed, order seems to be a primary function of storytelling, a way of understanding cultural history that makes sense of struggle and loss. With the appearance of gods powerful enough to establish order by fiat, though, the distance between gods and people grows. Something is lost. The earlier gods of Gilgamesh, like the Greek gods that would appear in the first millennium BCE, are fickle, blown about by their passions, at times foolish and unreasonable. The Assyrian gods of the Enūma Eliš are still all of these things, but a bit less so. Certainly the Abrahamic deity that would later dominate the region, and eventually much of the world, is far more remote, terrible, and incomprehensible.

The rise of Marduk, first among the divine cohort of Assyrian gods, prefigured the arrival of this One God in the cultures of the Fertile Crescent. The transition from polytheism to monotheism was gradual, the consequence of a storytelling war between tribes seeking to establish the preeminence of their divine patron—recall that Marduk was Babylon’s special god—and thus their own supremacy. Hence the condemnation of polytheistic and pagan religions in the holy books of the Abrahamic religions.

Yahweh, and then Jehovah and Allah, would eventually win the Mesopotamian battle of stories, but the victory was less about erasing than absorbing other narratives. Gilgamesh contains episodes of a woman that lures Enkidu away from a state of nature; of a great flood that destroys nearly all of humanity; of magic plants that confer god-like powers to mortals. Like all books, the Bible is a remix of older stories, and Gilgamesh in particular was clearly a strong influence.

One other observation about the historical context: the city of Uruk itself is one of the central characters of Gilgamesh. The Standard Version of Sîn-lēqi-unninni begins with the narrator’s ode to the ruins of the city:

He built the walls of ramparted Uruk,
The lustrous treasury of hallowed Eanna!
See its upper wall, whose facing gleams like copper,
Gaze at the lower course, which nothing will equal,
Mount the stone stairway, there from days of old,
Approach Eanna, the dwelling of Ishtar,
Go up, pace out the walls of Uruk,
Study the foundation terrace and examine the brickwork.
Is not its masonry of kiln-fired brick?
And did not seven masters lay its foundations?

Tablet I 11-21, Foster 2001

And the book ends with similar words, this time voiced by Gilgamesh himself—a signal of his acceptance that home, his family and his city, is all the meaning that exists and all the meaning he needs. The original readers of the Standard Version in 1200 BCE were recalling an Uruk that had existed fifteen hundred years before. The epic must have signified to them the inevitable passing of grandeur, not in the sense of warning against hubris (as in Shelley’s Ozymandias^[6]I met a traveller from an antique land,Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled … Continue reading) but rather as a reminder, in a time of turmoil, to treasure one’s home. Or maybe this is the nostalgic lens through which we modern humans, living in a world of blindingly fast change, tend to view the story.

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Death & self-consciousness

Many translations of Gilgamesh exist—the most commonly referenced are Benjamin Foster’s (2001) and Andrew George’s (2003)—but Stephen Mitchell’s version is different from any of these. First, it’s not a translation at all: Mitchell didn’t go back to the original Sumerian cuneiform to produce fresh text, but rather pored through various translations to assemble his own version—a bit like Sîn-lēqi-unninni himself assembling the epic from a collection of stories. Mitchell even admits to adding material here and there to fill in gaps in the story.

Scholarly rigor is not the goal here. The goal is to fit squarely within Mitchell’s project of presenting the thematic unity of religious classics from around the world. He thus highlights the themes of death and friendship while de-emphasizing Sumerian cultural mores, and shows how primordial human urges, not simply personal idiosyncrasies, drive Gilgamesh. The universality of feeling in Mitchell’s version comes through most of all in how easily the reader identifies with Gilgamesh’s quest. Knowing that people long ago desperately wanted to understand why they could not live forever somehow makes our own desperation a little bit easier to stomach. Gilgamesh learns, and maybe we can too.

The king learns, foremost, about the futility of mortal resistance to the destiny decreed by the gods. The Greek tragic playwrights would later explore this same tension between what the gods demand of humans, out of a sense of propriety or simply for entertainment, and what humans want for themselves. Most deeply, we want to be like the gods themselves, to bring to life what exists at the utmost extent of our imagination. That desire will never be acceptable to any self-respecting god. Power shared is power ceded, and so the drama begins.

That people were absorbed by the finality of death even at the beginning of recorded literature is not surprising. What is surprising is how familiar the quality of that absorption feels despite a gap of thousands of years and a very different cultural milieu. Gilgamesh the king is not dispassionately contemplating the evanescence of life; he’s crying in the dark. We’re all still crying in the dark. Some people and some cultures may be more accepting of death than others—may be: acceptance is hard to identify in any objective sense—but we all feel lost over the passing of a loved one, grow despondent at our own aging, are terrified at the idea of the final exit.

Why do we fear death? The answer is simple if we pose the question with respect to unexpected, premature death—the threat of violence, disease, accident. In the gravelly words of Tom Waits, “It’s the same with men as with horses and dogs/Nothing wants to die.” Life is defined by its striving to live, at least until the job of replication—of sending our genetic and cultural information into the future—is done. But the question is more puzzling if we ask about the banal process of aging and its equally banal culmination in death. Why should our minds, crafted by natural selection, rebel against something so…normal? Why not go gentle into that good night?

Here’s one possible explanation. Only with the awareness that one has a self can the fear of losing that self arise, and humans are one of the few species on Earth that appear to be self-conscious. The strongest evidence for self-consciousness in other organisms comes from chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas, with more controversial data from elephants, dolphins, and magpies . We haven’t yet figured out whether these other species feel anxiety around aging and mortality, though, or even how to pursue the question. For now, investigations of the links between self-consciousness and the fear of death must focus on our own species.

When do the first signs of self-awareness in humans appear, and how does this timeline relate to the birth of literature? Around 40,000 years ago, we begin to see hints of a nascent self-concept in the archeological record: cave drawings showing individuals in a cooperative hunt; shards of jewelry whose purpose must have been to beautify the self; evidence of funerals that mourned the loss of a loved one. But only in stories, and especially in the written record, do undeniable signs of our preoccupation with the outcomes of individual life appear.

Julian Jaynes advanced this thesis in his influential 1976 work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.^[7]It’s worth noting that Jaynes’s book—which may be the most unlikely bestseller of all time, not least for its editor-defying title—is very controversial. The evolutionary biologist … Continue reading His preferred date for the literary emergence of self-consciousness is between the writing of the two Homeric epics, the Iliad and Odyssey. Jaynes argues that the personal self is rarely mentioned in the Iliad, but it’s the central theme of the Odyssey. Aside from the Bible, the Odyssey is the most influential story in all of European cultural history, and it’s certainly the foundation for the continent’s literary and philosophical explorations of personal heroism. The Iliad, in contrast, feels more like a chronicling of events: a good yarn not entirely bereft of psychological inquiry but mostly concerned with myth-making. Jaynes is not saying, of course, that a single author named Homer attained self-consciousness between writing the Iliad and Odyssey; like the Epic of Gilgamesh, both stories are likely the work of many anonymous bards, their composite form emerging over centuries. Rather, Jaynes’s idea is that Mediterranean culture itself became increasingly self-aware between the creation of the two epics.

This thesis has major holes. We don’t actually know when the two epics were written—most scholars assume sometime between 900 BCE and 600 BCE—or even if the Iliad was written first. The purported absence of the personal self in the Iliad is debatable. Jaynes’s focus on a Mediterranean origin of self-consciousness is blatantly Eurocentric. Overall, there’s really no way to convincingly confirm or refute his argument, which thus does not make for a good scientific hypothesis.

But if we accept Jaynes’s notion that literature is a good place to look for evidence of incipient self-awareness, then the Epic of Gilgamesh is a better (and earlier) choice than the Homeric epics. Its themes of power, glory, and death clearly imply a goal-driven individuality, and especially an obsession with the annihilation of the self. “I alone rule,” the king says near the beginning of the story, “supreme among mankind.” And then, later: “Must I die too? Must I be as lifeless as Enkidu?”

This is not to say that Gilgamesh, compiled gradually between approximately 2500 and 1200 BCE, is contemporaneous with the emergence of self-consciousness. Sumerian cuneiform, as noted above, was the first written language of which we know. It’s likely that the appearance of Gilgamesh is not a benchmark in the emergence of human self-consciousness but rather the first story about the self that could be preserved. It is assuredly not the first human epic ever told, and probably not even the first ever written; many others must have been lost to time and war.

But it seems more than coincidental that the earliest evidence of written literature, unambiguous self-awareness, and the fear of death all occur in the same story. Maybe our gradually intensifying self-consciousness, driven by urbanization and changing notions of the individual’s role in society, catalyzed the invention of writing—the communication of ideas from self to self. Or perhaps the invention of writing, through its effects on cultural memory and the clear transmission of ideas, increased our capacity for self-awareness. In either case, death immediately became the philosophical question for societies who attained the prerequisites for philosophizing: self-awareness and efficient written communication.

Gilgamesh not only bluntly poses the question—why we must die?—but also provides guidance on how to deal with the answer: that there is no answer. A subplot in the epic involves the seduction of Enkidu by the temple priestess Shamhat. When we first meet him, Enkidu is “uncivilized,” purely of nature, lacking self-awareness:

All his body is matted with hair,
he bears long tresses like those of a woman:
the hair of his head grows thickly as barley,
he knows not a people, nor even a country.
Coated in hair like the god of the animals,
with the gazelles he grazes on grasses,
joining the throng with the game at the water-hole,
his heart delighting with the beasts in the water.

Tablet I, 105-112, George (2003)

Shamhat civilizes Enkidu by having sex with him. He learns to clothe himself; animals now fear him, and he comes to love sumptuous food and drink. There are clear parallels here with Chapter 3 of Genesis, the story of Eve and the forbidden fruit, though whether Enkidu has fallen or risen remains in doubt. Still, after meeting Shamhat, Enkidu “knew that his mind had somehow grown larger, he knew things now that an animal can’t know” (79, Mitchell 2014). He recognizes what’s missing in his life—that is, he recognizes that he has a life, a self.

As Mitchell points out in his introduction, Enkidu is sent by the gods on a similar civilizing mission, though his target, Gilgamesh, is at the other extreme: he’s too obsessed with the self. At the beginning of the story, Gilgamesh is a monster:

The city is his possession, he struts
through it, arrogant, his head raised high,
trampling its citizens like a wild bull.
He is king, he does whatever he wants,
takes the son from his father and crushes him,
takes the girl from her mother and uses her,
the warrior’s daughter, the young man’s bride,
he uses her, no one dares to oppose him…

72, Mitchell (2014)

Even his adventures with Enkidu are driven by a thirst for glory. When viewed as part of the entire epic, these earlier episodes serve to set up the affliction that drives the plot: the king’s addiction to the self, rooted in loneliness, lack of the knowledge of love, and a preoccupation with glory.

Enkidu and Gilgamesh eventually balance their polar positions. On his deathbed Enkidu initially curses Shamhat for tempting him away from his life in nature, reasoning that his grievous suffering was a consequence of that first mistake. He changes heart, though, when Gilgamesh convinces him to appreciate what he has gained—above all, deep friendship.^[8]Enkidu’s rapid change of heart upon hearing Gilgamesh’s words is admittedly unconvincing, reminiscent of the too-quick dissipation of Job’s anger in the Bible. The question of edits … Continue reading Meanwhile, Gilgamesh’s grief over Enkidu’s death leads him to the quest that will eventually bring him acceptance of life’s transience. The love of brother, wife, children, and city becomes Gilgamesh’s medicine.

In all of this, the ancient compilers of Gilgamesh were grappling with questions around self-consciousness and suffering. Why are we different from other beings in how we perceive the distinction between the self and the world? Does all psychological suffering come from this perception? Can we balance the notion of the separate self, and all the advantages it brings, with an appreciation of our humble place in the cosmos?

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Even the earliest readers (and, before then, listeners) of Gilgamesh knew the ending: the hero will fail in his quest for immortality. Gilgamesh was a historical king, not an undying god. Sometimes characters in stories do get to live forever, or at least they don’t die in the pages of the book. If we love the character enough, we yearn for such an ending. But we also know that such endings don’t happen in the real world, and Gilgamesh the king lived in the real world. The poignancy of the king’s quest depends on the reader keeping in mind the inevitability of failure.

This is also what makes the epic feel remarkably modern despite its antiquity, unfamiliar cultural tropes, and pantheon of strange gods. We’ve known since we were children that we will die, just like we know that every long hike will eventually end. And yet despite the obvious personal import of this fact, the knowledge feels impersonal for a long time, like a sad and strange plot twist in a movie. As we gradually age and lose family and friends, we come to understand why a good fraction of human religion and art is fixated on mortality. Many of us join Gilgamesh’s rebellion for some time, his angry and desperate questioning of the gods and nature. If we’re lucky, we eventually accept that the rebellion can’t be won and return to our lives with a hard-won gratitude and grace. As the scholar Thorkild Jacobsen wrote, the “Gilgamesh Epic is a story about growing up,” about coming to terms with the richness of our hours and days, and then letting go when it’s time.

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What is love?

Twenty-two years ago, on an early autumn day at Green Gulch Farm, Norman Fischer gave a talk about pain.”All suffering,” he said, “s a reflection of mind.” It was a sunny morning, the air filled with the hum of dragonflies and the smell of fresh bread, and Norman’s words were easy to believe. Surely pain could not originate from a world this lovely; surely our own heads were to blame.

But I challenged Norman. I’d arrived at Green Gulch for the farm apprenticeship a few months earlier, soon after returning from India, my first trip to my birthplace since I was a child. The reunion with family was sweet, but the scenes of poverty stunned me —flimsy straw houses exposed to monsoons and mosquitoes; desperately ill people sleeping on sidewalks, clothed in rags; the hunger. Most of all, the hunger. Families living on two meals a day of watery rice and lentils. Children far too short and light for their age, continually ravaged by gastrointestinal infections. Zen teaches of a perfect universe, sullied only by the delusions of mind, but I didn’t see how the physical pain of children fit into the grand design.

‘Love is to see the self in all the world.’

So I asked Norman: “All suffering? What about hunger? What about disease?” I remember him looking at me for a few moments, then closing his eyes and sighing. It seemed—or maybe I imagined—that a little bit of grief passed across his face, perhaps sparked by a memory. He looked at me again and said, quietly but firmly, “Yes. Even hunger, even disease.” He waited for my reply, but I was confused and had nothing to say. I trusted Norman’s wisdom deeply; he’d shown his caring and insightful heart many times before. He’d considered my question and given the truest answer he could muster—but I didn’t understand it.

I’ve thought about that exchange many times over the years. I’m still not sure I fully understand what he meant, but two notions keep floating to the surface. The first is the core Zen teaching that all suffering literally does arise in the brain. Hunger is a bodily sensation that comes from nutritional deficit, but the feeling of hunger—and thus the suffering attached to it—is the mind’s interpretation of that sensation. The same is true for all other kinds of physical pain.

The second idea took longer for me to grasp. The physical suffering of children is preventable. It persists only because adults are so mired in their own mental suffering—their desires for wealth, power, sex, and everything else—that they fail to notice. They fail to love. Norman was right. Even the raw bodily pain of a child’s hunger originates in someone‘s mind, and that someone is us, the voters, the consumers, the neighbors.

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‘Love is being met with a dustpan when you’re holding a broom.’

I recently completed the winter ango at Tassajara, my first practice period since leaving Green Gulch over two decades ago. I’ve spent much of the intervening time in academia studying how good social change happens—specifically, researching the political and cultural forces that improve children’s lives. In India, Ethiopia, Brazil, and other countries, I’ve felt again the shock of seeing poverty manifest, especially among children.

But I’ve also seen remarkable things: vaccination and prenatal care programs that save millions of lives, staffed by tireless health workers receiving almost no pay; political movements led by women that push child well-being to the top of the policy agenda; villages taking care of families whose lives have been ravaged by natural disaster.

These stories differ in the details of who’s involved, the solutions employed, the obstacles overcome. In nearly every situation, though, trusting relationships are at the heart of good change. I’ve watched cash-strapped communities overcome forbiddingly complex problems by simply thinking together, working together, trying together, day after day. Conversely, I’ve seen well-funded, technically sophisticated projects fail because small cracks of misunderstanding—poor communication here, a difference in values thereâ—grew into massive fractures, with no trust to fall back on.

A better world comes from committed cooperation, and cooperation is sustained by trust. But how do we build that trust, especially in an age of deep divisions of identity and ideology?

Many human spiritual traditions converge on a simple answer: we tell stories of love. We acknowledge Norman’s answer. We notice how our mental narratives cause pain to ourselves and others. We try to understand the conditions under which love emerges—the kind of love that opens our eyes to the suffering of children—and then we tell stories of how human beings created love in the past and how we can build it in the future.

I went to Tassajara to ask my fellow monks about their stories of love, and to sit with my own experience of love. As part of this journey, a small group of us asked each member of the sangha for their personal definition of love. Some of the forty answers we received are interspersed throughout this essay (and you can read all of the answers here.)

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‘Love is the canyon wren; love is a heartfelt apology; love is a shared umbrella in the rain.’

What is love in the time of coronavirus?

The ancient image of Indra’s net—each of us a jeweled node in a net, reflecting every other jewel—becomes less metaphorical as science gradually reveals the shape of reality. Cooperative networks are everywhere inside our bodies: trillions of cells working in exquisite harmony; a parliament of genes encoding a common structure; molecules dancing in catalytic cycles; and, at the heart of it all, mysterious attractive forces binding the fundamental particles of the universe together.

Networks extend outward from our bodies as well. We are deeply dependent on other living beings—partners, family, neighbors, microbes, plants, animals—as well as beings whose sentience we have yet to appreciate: the mountains, rivers, atmosphere. Our true body is vast. Love would seem to be the appropriate response to all this: love for a self that contains marvelous worlds, love for the web of interbeing.

Hard as it is to accept, Covid-19 is part of this web. Viruses are strange beings, occupying a liminal space between life and non-life. Like life forms, they metabolize energy and replicate; but unlike other life forms, they do so by hijacking the cellular machinery of other organisms. “Hijacking,” of course, is a word laden with human disdain. One could also say that viruses are masterpieces of genetic parsimony, a high-water mark of elegance among natural selection’s creations. However you label Covid-19, though, this at least is clear: it wants to exist as much as any being on the planet.

And the virus also teaches us about the darker side of interdependence. Covid-19 is a zoonotic disease, a pathogen originally resident in another animal species. Human activity triggered the major zoonotic epidemics of the recent past—HIV-AIDS, the Ebola virus, various strains of influenza. Ebola outbreaks, for example, are linked to deforestation. Many of the devastating flu epidemics of the 20th century originated in domestic livestock and poultry. We don’t yet know the history of Covid-19, but human disturbance of animal (probably bat) habitat likely enabled the virus to spill over into our bodies.

Break a jewel in Indra’s net, and our bodies reflect the shattering. The question now is: will our fear lead us to double down on the illusion of separateness—razing ecosystems with even greater urgency, closing borders to the brown and poor? Or will we rededicate ourselves to the recognition of interbeing, transforming our political and economic institutions accordingly?

The hard truth is that pandemics will keep coming, some with far greater ferocity than Covid-19. Evolution is one thing viruses and bacteria do better than anything else on Earth. We can limit the damage by building an equitable global public health system, designing safer, more humane livestock and agricultural systems, and protecting the natural world. This is what responding to Covid-19 with love would look like. But is that the story we’ll tell?

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‘Love is accepting yourself in the dark.’

Love of other beings in Indra’s net is hard; self-love is even harder.

When I was eleven years old, my father, brother, and I moved from a working-class, multi-ethnic neighborhood of Chicago to an extremely rich, almost totally white school district in the San Fernando Valley of California. We lived in a small apartment tucked in the corner of a town filled with mansions; my dad slept on the living room floor for seven years to give my brother and I a room of our own. Meanwhile, other parents at my school celebrated their children’s birthdays by giving gifts of new BMWs, full-size trucks, and, in the case of at least four girls, plastic surgery.

On top of typical teenage insecurities, I felt desperately poor and ugly, unable to participate in the status displays, unwilling for fear of rejection to look for friends within the white culture. I did my share of excluding as well, participating in the homophobic and weight-shaming culture of the school, trying to divert the hurt I felt to others.

Self-love was long in coming, a story to be told elsewhere. But memories of my own struggles helped me think in later years about social change, cooperation, and trust. Love for others, and thus our ability to alleviate suffering in the world, is very difficult to sustain without genuine self-love. Fear is always waiting to rule us, to write our thoughts. When it does, relationships start to fall apart; we hurt ourselves and we hurt the people we need.

My own definition of love is born of a teenage memory. I played a lot of basketball growing up; it was a refuge from all the other parts of my life I didn’t like. During the summers, I’d play all day, and when night fell most of the other kids went home—the park where we played didn’t have lights near the court. But I usually stayed, shooting hoops by myself for hours in the dark. I stayed for many reasons: to work on my game; because I didn’t have much to go back to, with a father who was always either working or consumed by anger; because seeing a shot go in made me feel like I could control at least one thing in my life.

Those reasons are all true, but most of all I stayed because I felt like I belonged there. I felt like my body was doing what it should be doing. I was at home, and that’s the best way I can put the feeling of love into words—a child shooting jumpers in the dark, finding steadiness inside a world that always seemed to be shaking.

‘Love is showing up, over and over again, until it’s clear: it’s okay, I’m here, you’re safe, I’m with you.’

The asking is part of the answer, perhaps. I felt deeply loved during the winter ango at Tassajara, and I found it easy to give love.

Perhaps more than any other moment, the practice period opening ceremony embodied this feeling. That January morning was bitterly cold. Our procession stumbled from altar to altar, shivering. I remember watching my breath rise as Paul stepped forward to offer incense in the lower garden. My gaze lifted to the sky and I gasped in delight at the stars—it was a stunningly clear night, and the Milky Way was everywhere.

I thought: the cosmos is unimaginably vast, and somehow I ended up on a living planet, maybe the only one anywhere. I thought: of all the bodies across four billion years of evolution, somehow I find myself in a human body, capable of self-consciousness and wonder. And finally I thought: I am healthy, safe, and loved. I am loved. ↑ 

‘Love is the state of rest.’

(This post was originally published on June 1, 2020 at https://blogs.sfzc.org/blog/2020/06/01/what-is-love/)