The world is ablaze. Wildfires rage. People are fleeing Los Angeles in their thousands, leaving behind their life-long homes and abandoning their neighbourhoods to the flames of destruction. Last year was the hottest year on record. And the year before that. And the year before that …
Fire is a powerful image and a familiar metaphor in Buddhist teachings. One of the Buddha’s most famous discourses is his ‘great fire sermon’ (Ādittapariyāya Sutta) in which he likened the rampaging heat of a forest conflagration to the red-hot flames of destructive thoughts and impulses.
All is burning, Monks. And what is the all that is burning? The eye is burning … The ear is burning … The nose is burning … The tongue is burning … The body is burning. The mind is burning, ideas are burning, stimulation of the mind is burning; and whatever … feeling that comes about conditioned by stimulation of the mind, that, too, is burning. Burning by what? I say it is burning with the fire of greed, the fire of hatred, the fire of delusion; burning with birth, with old age, with death, with grief, with lamentation, with pain, with sorrow, with despair.
By extending the fire metaphor into the psychological realm the Buddha was seeking to shift the focus from events manifesting in the external world to their underlying causes in private intention and personal responsibility – in other words, the human impulses that drive destructive thinking and behaviour with such dramatic environmental consequences. Fire is a thing; combustion is a process.
There is a clear and unequivocal relationship between the raging fires outside and the internal fires we fuel even as we witness their disastrous outcomes. Economies built on consumerism and exploitation. Politics based on hatred and division. Contempt for biodiversity and soil quality. Air conditioning used to cool the atmosphere that has been over-heated by the greenhouse gases produced by … air conditioning.
This is no homily on the evils of modern technology. It’s far more serious. We ALL have to work out a way to get to a cooler place – because the flames are getting closer.