Prayer for Love and Mercy

 Are love and mercy the same? Last time, I thought that love is the desire to love someone so deeply that you feel their happiness as your own and their sadness as your own, and that it aims to unite you with others. But what about mercy? Japanese "慈(Ji)" in "mercy(慈悲)" refers to the desire and action of caring for others and wanting to bring them joy, while the "悲(Hi)" refers to the desire and action of wanting to relieve their sadness. In other words, the other person's joy is your joy, and the other person's sadness is your sadness. That's right. It aims to unite you with others. The love preached in Christianity and the mercy preached in Buddhism have the same goal. To unite us. I've always thought that words like God, Buddha, love, and mercy(compassion) are so troublesome. I wrote about this in an earlier post, but we are really going to keep denying each other, saying this is different or that is different, until we die. And we intend...

 Since last time, I've been thinking about the fact that the Japanese words "ai" (love) and "koi" (romantic love) are both expressed using the same word, "LOVE." What exactly is love?  To love means to love someone so much that you can't help it. If that person is of the opposite sex, it's simply love. But it can also be the same sex, a friend, parent, sibling, son, daughter, or any other human or non-human entity, even a thing or even God. At that moment, the other person's joy feels like your own joy, their sadness feels like your own sadness, your happiness becomes my happiness, and your unhappiness becomes my unhappiness. You and I are one. You are a part of me, and I am a part of you. You and I are inseparable. Bound as one by the bond of fate, forever one. The desire to be inseparable and one with oneself. The most obvious example of this is love, so perhaps in English, both love and romance are simply referred to as LOVE. In love, th...

 I've been serious about this in the last two posts, saying that I shouldn't be distracted by (romantic) love, but there's more to the story. I can't talk about love without writing this. The love I'm talking about here is the love preached in Christianity, But that's completely different from romantic love! You're right. I thought so too. I first wrote this blog in my native Japanese, and then translated it into English using AI (Google Translate). When I read the English translations of my previous posts, I found that both the Japanese words "恋" (koi, meaning romantic love) and "愛 (ai, meaning love)" are translated as "LOVE." Isn't there an English equivalent to the Japanese word "恋(romantic love)"? Are "恋(romantic love)" and "愛(love)" the same? Even in an English-Japanese dictionary, "love" has both meanings: love and romantic love. Even in Japanese, when you say "愛(love),...

Last time, I said, "Evil must not be used for a good cause," but what about in times of crisis when survival is threatened? "When it comes to survival, all is permitted." In an extreme, life-or-death situation, morality, law, and concepts of right and wrong are all invalid. When a city is surrounded by war and food runs out, people turn to cannibalism, with children being the first to be eaten. You might think such a horrific act cannot happen, but it seems to have been common in Chinese history. Even in the 20th century, Toyoko Yamazaki's novel "Children of the Earth" depicts the phenomenon of cannibalism among residents of a Kuomintang city surrounded by Chinese Communist forces during the Chinese Civil War and falling into starvation. The protagonist, as a young boy, was targeted as "food" and, just as he was about to be eaten, the siege was partially lifted, narrowly escaping . Apparently, when people are starving, they begin to see other...