Thich Nhat Hanh on True Love and the Five Rivers of Self-Knowledge

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to his young correspondent.

The great difficulty of loving arises from the great difficulty of bridging the abyss between one consciousness and another in order to understand each other, to map the inner landscape of another’s territory of trust and vulnerability, to teach each other how what we need of love.

“Understanding and loving are...