My understanding of the Buddhist conception of love is that it is a kind of delusion, an attachment with attendant negative connotations.
If this is the case, how could we characterize the emotion motivation which impels a bodhisattva to be reborn?
Well, love is not delusion.
And again, back to the Abhidhamma, love is a word and is ambiguous because most often in the West we're referring to eros, right?
Eros which is lustful love or not even lustful but just desire for something.
I love apples or I love my wife or my girlfriend or my boyfriend or I love my children.
adoration and so on, is often unwholesome, not delusion, based on delusion, but is craving or greed-based, desire-based.
And so that's unwholesome.
But love that is desire for beings to be happy, wishing for them to be happy, or acting, the impulsion that impuls...
that moves us to act for the benefit of others.
This is metta and this is a positive state.
It's wholesome, it's worldly, it won't get you to nibbana but it's wholesome and if cultivated can eventually lead to limitless love for the whole universe and which can lead you to be born as a Brahma and can give great states of concentration which are also beneficial to the practice of insight meditation.
So, depends what you mean by love, but the emotion motivation that impels a bodhisattva to be reborn.
Okay, the reason a bodhisattva in the Theravada tradition is reborn, and I'm assuming you're talking about the Theravada bodhisattva without the V, because with the V in there it gets kind of weird and the Mahayana conception gets pretty radical.
But what impels a bodhisattva to be reborn again is delusion and defilement.
The only reason we're reborn is because of some kind of attachment.
Now, all that a bodhisatta has done is refused to listen or to accept an enlightenment that is devoid of omniscience.
So, given the opportunity to become enlightened in this life without being omniscient, they discard it.
There's that.
Now, what moves them to do it?
So now we have to distinguish between bodhisattvas.
Some bodhisattvas are not going to become Buddhas and they make a determination to become a Buddha and are unsuccessful.
And often these determinations that they make are based on ego or desire or whatever.
In the case of our Buddha, he made a vow out of, I guess you could say, wisdom and confidence.
and faith because he was a highly developed ascetic who had magical powers and insight and he knew with certainty with confidence that if he listened to the Buddha's teaching he would become an arahant very quickly right away and so he made the determination to go one step further to go the next step which was a huge step out of wisdom and understanding
It's interesting, curious to note that as soon as he became a Buddha, one of the first things he thought of was not taking advantage of his omniscience, was to pass away into parinibbana, which
He would have saved himself a lot of time had he just done that back in the time of Dipankara Buddha.
But the result of his omniscience was such that he wasn't able to do it because immediately he was asked to teach.
Brahma came down and asked him to teach.
because he was omniscient no one would come down and ask Brahma would not come down and ask me to teach for example because I'm not omniscient but he came down and asked the Buddha to teach and so it was based on this quality what motivated it and so again this is it differs from person to person but the real bodhisattvas
It would seem they do it out of confidence and wisdom.
On that occasion, where they are recognized and when another Buddha says, see that guy's lying in the mud, he's going to become a Buddha in a future life.