Ancient India’s 5 Words for Love (And Why Knowing Them Can Heighten Your Happiness)

1. Ancient India’s 5 Words for Love
(And Why Knowing Them Can
Heighten Your Happiness)
Hinduism has a beautiful myth about the origins of love. In the beginning, there
was a superbeing called Purusha. This being was without desire, craving, fear,
or indeed the impulse to do anything at all—since the universe was already
perfect and complete

2. “As humans, we too are seeking unity, and love is the word we use
for that search.”
Then the creator Brahma took out his divine sword and split Purusha into two.
Sky became separate from the earth, darkness from light, life from death, male
from female. Each of these set off passionately to reunite with its severed half.
As humans, we too are seeking unity, and love is the word we use for that
search.
These days we tend to focus on the romantic and sexual elements of the process.
The signs of this are everywhere: Millions of people use online dating sites each
month for romantic partners. Advertisers exploit our love affair with love to sell
everything from aftershave lotion to sports cars. And Hollywood jerks our
heartstrings with blockbuster romantic adventures.
A visitor from another planet might think that we earthlings—and Americans in
particular—were obsessed with chasing love. If you asked the sages of ancient
India, however, they’d probably say that love is not what we’re actually chasing.
Instead, we pursue the intense but fleeting emotional high of “falling in love,”
which generally doesn’t last very long.
So how do we keep the life-giving flame of love alive? The ancient thinkers of
India, who devoted a great deal of attention to this problem, recognized and

3. honored the power of sex and romance to jump-start our flagging emotions. But
the important question for them was, where do we go from there? How do we
harness the intoxicating power of falling in love to create a happiness that
endures even after the initial flame dies away?
These philosophers began pondering this topic during Vedic times in the
centuries before Christ and further developed their ideas during the great revival
of bhakti yoga, or the path of divine love, in the 15th century and beyond.
They taught that love consists of a series of stages through which an individual
can climb. The lower stages on love’s journey aren’t necessarily supposed to go
away as one gets more enlightened—however, remaining stuck at the lowest
rung can cause a lot of frustration and sadness.
The important thing is that we keep climbing love’s ladder. As the 19th century
Hindu apostle to America, Swami Vivekananda, put it, “If one would expand, he
must love, and when he ceases to love he dies.”
Here’s a look at the five stages of love as the Hindus see them:

4. 1. “Kama,” or sensory craving
At first, the desire to merge gets expressed through physical attraction or kama.
Technically speaking, kama means “craving for sense objects,” but it is usually
translated as sexual desire.
“Love consists of a series of stages through which an individual
can climb.”
In ancient India, sex was not associated with shame—as it is in many
interpretations of the Judeo-Christian myth of the “fall of man”—but a joyous
aspect of human existence and a topic worthy of serious investigation. The
Kama Sutra, which was written around the time of Christ, is not merely a
catalogue of kinky sexual positions and erotic techniques. The majority of the
text is a philosophy of love dealing with questions such as what sparks desire,
what maintains it, and how it can be wisely cultivated.

5. But while the sages honor kama as a legitimate goal of life, they insist that we’ll
never achieve wholeness through the act of sex alone.
2. “Shringara,” or rapturous intimacy
Sex without true intimacy and sharing can leave us feeling empty. That is why
the philosophers of India focused on the emotional content of the experience,
and they developed an especially rich vocabulary to express the myriad moods
and emotions associated with it.

6. Out of this bubbling stew of feelings is born shringara, or romance. Lovers stir
the pot of their erotic attraction by seeing one another as embodiments of all
their cravings. And they spice it up by sharing secrets, making up affectionate
names for one another, playing games, and giving inventive gifts. This
imaginative play of love is symbolized by the relationship of the divine couple,
Radha and Krishna, whose romantic adventures are celebrated in Indian dance,
music, theater, and poetry.
Yet the ancients were realistic about what a mixed-bag romance is. They did not
imagine that finding our “soul mate” would solve our problems, relieve our
sense of unworthiness and self-doubt, or satisfy all of our emotional needs.
Nevertheless, Indian philosophy teaches that romantic love, enjoyed in
moderation, provides a foretaste of something even greater.
3. “Maitri,” or generous compassion
To the millions of OK Cupid subscribers, India’s philosophers of love would
probably say, “Stop waiting for love—it is within your power right now to make
it happen!”
The way one does that, they would say, is by giving out love in little ways
whenever you can. That could mean a smile at the checkout counter, a gift of
food to the hungry, a soulful hug.…

7. “The simplest acts of kindness,” said Mahatma Gandhi, “are by far more
powerful than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.”
“The river that flows in you,” says the Indian mystical poet Kabir,
“also flows in me”
Compassion resembles the uncomplicated love that we naturally feel toward
children and pets. It is also associated with “matru-prema,” the Sanskrit term for
motherly love, which is said to be love’s most giving and least selfish form.
Maitri is like a mother’s tender love but expressed toward all living beings not
just for one’s own biological child.
Compassion for strangers, however, does not always come naturally. So in
Hindu and Buddhist practice, there are loving-kindness meditations in which
practitioners develop the ability to wish others well. The idea is that compassion
is like a muscle that can become stronger if we use it regularly.

8. 4. “Bhakti,” or impersonal devotion
While compassion is a wonderful quality, it is not quite the final word. Beyond
interpersonal love, the Indian tradition envisioned an impersonal form in which
our sympathies gradually expand to embrace the whole of creation.
As a bridge to this, the sages came up with a path called “bhakti yoga,” which
can be translated as the cultivation of the self through the love of God. Luckily
for those who aren’t conventionally religious, bhakti need not be focused on

9. God in the usual sense. It can be directed toward whatever higher ideal speaks
to us most powerfully, be that kindness, truth, or social justice.
Think of leaders like Nelson Mandela, Jane Goodall, the Dalai Lama, and
countless others whose love for the world was as passionate and powerful as
any romance.
Through bhakti one learns that one’s true family is the family of life itself.
5. “Atma-Prema,” or unconditional self-love
Up until this point, each stage of love has been directed outward into the world.
But at its apex it comes full circle back to the self. Atma-prema can be
translated as “self-love.” This is not the self as we usually think of it, but the
essential self, the self that exists at the center of all of us.

10. What this means in practice is that we see ourselves in others and see others in
ourselves. “The river that flows in you,” says the Indian mystical poet Kabir,
“also flows in me.”
When we achieve atma-prema, we recognize that—when stripped of the
accidents of our genetic heritage and upbringing—we are all expressions of the
one life, the life that the Indian creation myth represented as Purusha. The great
Sufi visionary Rumi gave voice to this paradoxical experience:
I, you, he, she, we—
in the garden of mystic lovers,
these are not true distinctions.
Atma-prema arises from the realization that beyond our personal faults and
foibles—beyond even our name and personal history—we are all children of the
most high. When we love ourselves and others in this profound yet impersonal
way, our love loses its boundaries and becomes unconditional.
Love itself will teach us
We don’t live on the summit of universal love. We climb the mountain, and then
we descend it in order to share what we’ve found with others.

11. The sages of ancient India did not view the five stages on love’s journey as
mutually exclusive. You do not need to renounce sex and romance in pursuit of
a “higher” love. All the forms coexist in the heart that is mature.
By fully developing each of the five stages in turn, we can free ourselves of the
addiction to romance as well as our narrow attachment to kith and kin, and
become transformed into genuinely full-hearted people