Glints & Glimmers

What Love Requires

A Practical Philosophy of Intimacy, Built from Six Eastern Traditions

This book lays out an alternative to the unexamined Western assumptions about love, built from six traditions that spent twenty-five centuries thinking about what love is, what it costs, and what it's for.

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There's no store, no price, and no preorder for What Love Requires. The newsletter is the only honest way to hear when that changes.

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The argument

The book draws on Thai Buddhist thought, Vietnamese literature, the Chinese triad, and Japanese material to build a practical account of what intimacy asks of a person — where the traditions converge is close to settled ground, and where they split is a real fault line. Its central instrument, the four near enemies of the divine abidings, only works because the author went back and checked it against the primary text, and found he'd had it wrong.

What's inside

55,776

Words

5

Parts

14

Chapters

Every chapter closes on Where the claims stop.

★ The honest section

Chapter 2: The near enemies, which are the useful part

I had all four of these wrong until I read Chapter IX in Ñāṇamoli's translation, and the shape of the error is worth printing, so both versions are below. **Metta.** I had the near enemy as possessive affection. Buddhaghosa has greed, and gives his reason: "The divine abiding of loving-kindness has greed as its near enemy, since both share in seeing virtues." That is a harder claim than mine and a better one. Greed and goodwill both begin by looking at a person and finding them worth having in the world. The looking is the same operation. “The near enemies were the part of this chapter I told earlier readers to check first. Somebody should have, and in the end it was me. What I would say now is that the framework survived the checking and got sharper doing it, which is the outcome I would have bet against.”

Who it's for

This is for you if

You want to test your own relationship against the four near-enemy questions rather than the softer, more comfortable version of them.
You're trying to work out whether steadiness in public is the same as steadiness at home.
You want a framework built from traditions that disagree with each other rather than one that flatters a single view.

This isn't for you if

You need the book to treat the body as a source of knowledge — it admits this is a gap it doesn't close.
Your relationship isn't a married couple inside a single culture — the book names this as one of the eight things its own framework doesn't cover.

An excerpt

“I had all four of these wrong until I read Chapter IX in Ñāṇamoli's translation, and the shape of the error is worth printing, so both versions are below. **Metta.** I had the near enemy as possessive affection. Buddhaghosa has greed, and gives his reason: "The divine abiding of loving-kindness has greed as its near enemy, since both share in seeing virtues." That is a harder claim than mine and a better one. Greed and goodwill both begin by looking at a person and finding them worth having in the world. The looking is the same operation.”

Chapter 2: The Buddhist Material — A Job Description and Four Abidings

If this was worth reading this far

You've read the argument, the structure, and the part What Love Requires admits about itself. This list will tell you if it ever becomes something you can hold.

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