About Zen — Buddha’s Fire Sermon
Through the fire in our lives comes bliss
In the Adittapariyaya Sutra, sometimes called the Fire Sermon, Buddha stated that all is burning. Our bodily functions and the contact we make through our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind are burning. They burn with the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion, with rebirth, old age, and death, with sorrow, pain, sadness, and distress.
When we see this — when we become aware it — we become disillusioned about our contact with, and consciousness through, our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind and the conditioning that leads to painful, pleasant, or neutral feelings.
When we become disillusioned, our desires fade, Buddha said. Once they fade, we are free. When we are free, we know we are liberated.
His final words about this matter were, “[We] understand: ‘Rebirth is ended, the spiritual journey has been completed, what had to be done to end suffering has been done, there is nothing more to do in order to attain nirvana.”
We know from our sitting practice that “attaining nirvana” means that we realize (make real in our lives) something that is already there, something we possess, a state we occupy.
In his book, The Trauma of Everyday Life, psychiatrist Mark Epstein says that in addition to the word, nirvana, Buddha used another word that means bliss. He quotes a Buddhist scholar, “When the fires of passion, hatred, and delusion die out within ourselves, we experience bliss.”
“Everything is burning, then,” Epstein says, “not only with impermanence and pain but also with bliss. The vision of one leads to the knowledge of the other.”
Epstein says further, “The incessant movement of the world does not have to intimidate us, Buddha proclaimed in his Fire Sermon. We are all part of it, even if our notions of self-help suggest that we should be able to rise above it. Shinnying up the masts of our selves in order to escape from the pain all around us, we succeed only in reinforcing our not-so-secret feelings of dread. Alone at the top of the mast, we remain entangled in our tangles, burning with the three fires of greed, hatred, and delusion. Buddha had something else in mind for us, something that Western therapists have also begun to figure out. Look closely at this world, he suggested. Examine it carefully. Probe your experience deeply, with attunement and responsiveness, and you may come to agree with me. …[T]his world is already broken. And yet when you drop your fear and open your heart, its preciousness is there too.”
