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Love.
A concept uniquely Western.
I speak of the love that we all have the idea of in our heads.
Where we read the great stories,
we are reminded of this idea of love.
Three types of love:
Agape, love for everyone.
Something Jesus says.
Eros,
***, we call it nowadays.
And then there is the final: Love. That we are familiar with.
The soulmate.
All of these stories, are completely without Love - in the Western notion.
Love is in fact, so absent from them,
they are almost a little disturbing to read.
The interactions between people.
Even today in Japan, the idea of Love is not fully understood.
When you speak with someone, they'll speak of having "soulmates",
or being "in-love" with many people.
The idea of one person on this Earth being your other half
is Western, and fairly new.
It arises in actually around 1200, around 1200 C.E. I would say,
with the Grail Romances.
Wolfram Von Eschenbach, actually,
begins to mention it more frequently.
This is the idea that Love is a sacrifice
where you and your beloved
will go through anything together.
And sacrifices are not made to each other, as they are to the union.
To the marriage.
The idea of that other person being just a person.
Now in the Japanese folklores we just read,
that is all absent.
That is because in Japan,
the idea is, Woman is the embodiment of the cosmos.
She is something more than she is.
Her "shell" or her appearance is a mere physical illusion.
What the Buddhists would call Moshka, burnt string.
There you have a little burnt string, [blowing]
you blow on it, it's not there.
That's the idea of women in traditional Japan.
Even in modern Japan.
So, these two types of teachings
spring out of different philosophies,
and ultimately the absence of love
is just one of the many ways
that the Oriental system is completely incompatible.