On Love and Templating

Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“The Buddhist virtue of Loving-Kindness is interesting. It’s a composite structure, joining together what could be conceived of as two distinct values: Love and Kindness.

We could think of it as expressing Kindness in terms of Love. Or, metaphorically, viewing Kindness through the lens of Love.

This has practical application.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Viewed as a template [<link; medium length], the structure looks like this:

Loving-x

Using the template, we can expand its application, obtaining similar meaningful structures:

Loving-Play
Loving-Gratitude
Loving-Joy
…

Further deconstructing it, we get a structure of the form:

Value1(adjective)-Value2(noun)

This opens up yet more possibilities.”