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IV, 4, 16.
LOVE.
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to be in the habit of love) are virtues not attached to the personality of the one who loves, but to the actual presence of the love that he has called up in his heart? And when Prince Sâma was upsetting the water-pot, that moment he lapsed from the actual feeling of love. At the moment, О king, in which an individual has realised the sense of love, that moment neither fire, nor poison, nor sword can do him harm. If any men bent on doing him an injury come up, they will not see him, neither will they have a chance of hurting him. But these virtues, O king, are not inherent in the individual, they are in the actual felt presence of the love that he is calling up in his heart.'
Suppose, O king, a man were to take into his hand a Vanishing Root of supernatural power; and that, so long as it was actually in his hand, no other ordinary person would be able to see him. The virtue, then, would not be in the man. It would be in the root that such virtue would reside that an object in the very line of sight of ordinary mortals could, nevertheless, not be seen. Just so, O king, is it with the virtue inherent in the felt presence of love that a man has called up in his heart.'
Or it is like the case of a man [200]who has entered into a well-formed mighty cave. No storm of rain, however mightily it might pour down, would be able to wet him. But that would be by no virtue inherent
--- ---- * Bhânanâ is really more than 'cultivation. It is the actual, present, felt sense of the particular moral state that is being cultivated (in this case, of love). I have elsewhere rendered it 'meditation': but as the ethical doctrine, and practice, are alike unknown to us, we have no word that exactly reproduces the connotation of the Pali phrase.
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