Thich Nhat Hanh and infidelity?

For the past few weeks, my UU Sangha has been slowly reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s For a Future to be Possible, in which he explicates the Five Precepts at some length. Strictly speaking he talks about the Five Mindfulness Trainings, but those are really just his expanded version of the Buddha’s Five Precepts:

• Not to kill
• Not to steal
• Not to commit sexual impropriety
• Not to lie
• Not to consume alcohol or other intoxicating substances

Tuesday we were reading the chapter on sexual responsibility. Unsurprisingly, Thich Nhat Hanh comes out against casual sex, impersonal sex, or any form of sex that doesn’t express deep, long-term, committed love.

But then he writes a paragraph that started me wondering. On the surface it is utterly unexceptional, because it condemns the kind of love that becomes a deranging, obsessive madness. Nobody expects a Buddhist to write in favor of obsessive madness: clinging, anger, and confusion are three things to be concretely avoided, and obsessive madness includes them all. But I was struck by the words he chose. Here is the paragraph in full. All italics are mine, not his.

Love can be a kind of sickness. In the West and in Asia, we have the word “lovesick”. What makes us sick is attachment. Although it is a sweet internal formation, this kind of love with attachment is like a drug. It makes us feel wonderful; but once we are addicted, we cannot have peace. We cannot study, do our daily work, or sleep. We only think of the object of our love. This kind of love is linked to our willingness to possess and monopolize. We want the object of our love to be entirely ours and only for us. It is totalitarian. We do not want anyone to prevent us from being with him [her]. This kind of love can be described as a prison, where we lock up our beloved and create only suffering for her [him]. The one who is loved is deprived of freedom – of the right to be herself and enjoy life. This kind of love cannot be described as maitri or karuna. It is only the willingness to make use of the other person in order to satisfy our own needs.

It sounds awful, of course. But read slowly with me for a minute. Don’t most people assume that a “committed, long-term relationship made known to friends and family” (the only kind in which he says sex is acceptable) implies sexual exclusivity? And can’t we describe sexual exclusivity precisely by using all those phrases I italicized above?

Suppose I had been a Buddhist back when Wife started sleeping around. Suppose I had been a student of Thich Nhat Hanh and had objected to her multiple infidelities. Couldn’t she have plausibly answered that I was trying to monopolize her affection -- that I was depriving her of the right to be herself, express herself, and enjoy life? And how could I have answered?

It is not clear to me whether Thich Nhat Hanh ever contemplated such a reading of his words, but I think I see the outlines of an answer to these questions.

In the first place, his description is pretty general; and there are many different kinds of relationships. If it just so happens that you are involved in a ployamorous relationship where there are long-term commitments on all sides, I see nothing in this chapter to condemn you.

On the other hand, he also says that husband and wife must respect each other like guests. So if you and your partner have given each other vows of exclusivity, then presumably he would call infidelity disrespectful.

Most importantly, though, I think he would insist that infidelity is a poor choice because it harms the unfaithful partner. He gives a lot of reasons why casual, uncommitted sex increases your overall levels of suffering. So surely the conclusion is that it is the unfaithful partner who gets the short end of this trade, by creating more suffering for him/herself.

By the same token, I think he would advise against anger on the part of the betrayed partner. I think the sense of the advice would be something like:

Just because your wife [for example] is sleeping with the milkman and the gardner, what does that have to do with you? It’s her problem, and she’s creating plenty of trouble for herself by doing it. But it doesn’t have to have anything to do with you. Yes, you might feel difficult at first. But you don’t have to. Breathe mindfully. Walk mindfully. And reflect that she’s not hurting anybody but herself. On the other hand she sure is hurting herself … quite a lot! So in the end, maybe you can even have compassion for how much pain she is causing herself through misunderstanding what truly brings happiness.

I think that’s how it would go. But I think it would be a hard sell. I’m not sure I ever quite got to the point of having pure compassion for Wife’s sleeping around, but I did figure out that it wasn’t really about me and that I could disengage emotionally from it. Took me a long time, though.

Maybe if I had been a student of Thich Nhat Hanh’s back then I would have learned it faster. Or maybe not.