given by Nomon Tim Burnett
Red Cedar Dharma Hall
November 11, 2009
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Good evening, tonight I'm thinking about fire. About burning. Sometimes things happen to remind us that the world is burning.
This evening we learned about the ending of a the life of a young woman and we grieve for that loss. And the thoughts may come into our mind about what happened at Fort Hood in Texas when Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire on his fellow soldiers. I was able to find a list of the names of those who died: John Gaffaney, Jason D. Hunt, Amy Krueger, Aaron Nemelka, Michael Pearson, Russell Seager, Francheska Velez, Kham Xiong, Michael Cahill, Juanita Warman, L. Eduardo Caraveo, Justin DeCrow, and Frederick Greene. The New York Times website has a beautiful feature where you can see a picture and read a little about the lives of each of these thirteen people and of course each has an interesting and impressive story and has worked hard to get to where they were and had children and sisters and brothers and parents and friends. And now all gone.
And yesterday the government of Virginia killed John Muhammed who lived for a time at the Mission downtown with his young protégé Lee Malvo who will live the rest of his life in prison. As I'm sure you remember spent their time in shopping mall parking lots picking out people to shoot with a rifle. The news article said that the jury chose to recommend the death penalty because John Muhammed showed no apparent remorse.
And every day in the paper there is another bombing in Pakistan or Iraq or Afghanistan and we don't find out the names or stories of those 10 or 20 or 30 or 80 people who died. Who were there brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters?
And every day not in the paper are so many deaths from disease and war and violence and malnutrition and poverty. The AIDS pandemic as one example continues to ravage Africa. Nearly 7000 deaths a day in Africa. 2.3 million deaths per year which even against a total population of 950 million is an awful lot. We have about a third that number of people in the US but only a tenth that number of AIDS deaths. And swine flu as scary as it is for us and now touching our families and families of people we know is very small numbers yet. Under 5000 deaths reported world wide. So the entire swine flu epidemic so far is less horrible than one day of the AIDS pandemic in Africa.
And yet Hillary McKenna is not a number or a statistic. She is a young woman who worked hard to become who she was, Jeff was telling me that his sister adopted Hillary who suffered some serious abuse as a child. She really had a lot to overcome and his sister must be a very remarkable person to have been steady and loving and there for her all of this years. In her twenties she was really coming at last to some stability and happiness in life. Just now getting to that point. And now she's gone. What a thing.
And a few days ago after I dropped my son off at the bus last Thursday I walked over to Whatcom Middle School and watched it burn up and be ruined. This was horrible and engrossing and there was also some sense of wonder and awe among the bystanders too. All of that old wood from the turn of the century building. Old growth fir, strong and dense and full of energy gathered by those trees over hundreds of years before Euro-America even got it's start here. It struck me as both a disaster and a problem and also so inevitable and natural, the exhalation after a long careful inhalation of building and teaching and maintaining. And I felt so badly for those teachers too, having been a school teacher myself, I know the great effort goes into the files and lessons and handouts that were burning up in there and being soaked by the thousands of gallons of water the firefighters were pouring into the building. Fire fighting is strange that way, it's really very destructive. They knock holes in windows and doors and walls and pour in unbelievable amounts of water. Ruining the building to stop it burning up any more or burning up the block or the whole city which is of course what used to happen in wooden cities all the times. A big fire like that wouldn't just burn a building, a whole neighborhood might burn up.
And then I was thinking about the chemistry of this. It all comes down to molecules and atoms eventually if you think about it. Fires can happen because of an incredible ability of molecules to change states and store and release energy. Photosynthesis enables plants to create cells with energy bound up in them. The energy is somehow in the interaction with the electrons and the nucleus of the molecules. I don't really totally understand it.
Even though a hunk of wood looks very inert to our limited sense even after a hundred or a thousand years it's full of these super-speed electrons moving around. And even just sitting there those electrons on the surface of the wood have a strong tendency to jump into oxygen molecules that are floating by. Especially if those oxygen molecules are by themselves. O2, two oxygen molecules bound together, is pretty stable but there is always a bit of single oxygen molecules floating around - ozone they call it when it's by itself.
And there's more energy in forces that bind together the different atoms in hydrocarbon molecules like cellulose, which is most of what wood is. So wood very gradually decays if there's oxygen around. If it's damp all the more oxygen is to be found as it's in the water. I guess how it goes is the electrons jump out of the carbon atoms into the oxygen atoms and then we say the wood is oxidizing. So wood is full of stored up energy, stored up sunlight, and it very slowly leaks out or if the conditions are right it pours out very quickly and we call that fire. This happens I learned largely because when wood heats up hot enough the cellulose molecules start splitting up into carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The break up of the molecules releases more energy which make more heat and these naked carbon and oxygen atoms are ripe for electrons to go hopping around generating even more energy through oxidation and soon you've got yourself a chain reaction that keeps going until something stops it. All of that energy being released into the environment. Burning.
An odd fact about fire that I just learned is that the wood itself isn't burning. The wood is oxidizing quickly, releasing energy and charging up passing oxygen atoms but it's not burning, the process generates flammable gasses that are burning. The article I read pointed out that if you look really closely at fire, at the end of a match say, there's a little gap in between the wood and the fire. So it's gases that are burning, the wood is oxidizing and releasing those gasses. Even common everyday things it turns out we don't really understand so well.
So if you think about it, it's completely inevitable that things made of wood will burn sooner or later. And in Japan I know that old wooden buildings there have usually burned to the ground and been rebuilt multiple times. It's just how it goes. It makes sense to build things out of wood, it's a great material and given to us by the Earth but we're building our buildings with energized materials that are vibrating and intensely powered up, pretty much just waiting patiently for the conditions to be right to burst into flames. So learning science can help us in the same way that learning Buddhist teachings can help us. We can change our attitude to act and think more in accord with how things really are.
And the other thing about this oxidation reaction that wood does is that's what powers us too. All of our food, ALL of our food, originates in the same process of photosynthesis that creates the wood. This is true whether we're eating plants directly or eat animals that ate those plants. And then our body cleverly reworks the molecules in the food into new molecules that store energy just like wood does only in glucose molecules instead of cellulose. And then those glucose molecules (which each consist of 6 carbon, 12 hydrogen, and 6 oxygen atoms in case you're wondering) can move around the body into our cells where they essential burn up in a chemical reaction just like the burning of wood. And very amazingly the chemical reaction of glucose burning to make energy for our cells is almost the exact opposite of the chemical reaction that happens during photosynthesis when carbon dioxide in the air is reduced in sugar molecules that power the growth of plants.
Isn't that amazing? We are burning too. Plants use the sun's energy to kind of an anti-burn carbon dioxide into sugar molecules. Plants arrange those molecules into their bodies. We eat the plants and burn that energy back up again to keep the biological chain reaction that is our body running.
And with all of this energy flowing around it's no wonder that the forms and details and timing of things doesn't always run to our preference. Big old school buildings burn up after 100 years instead of 200 years like we'd prefer. People die at 25 years old instead of at 85 years old like we'd prefer and everything is burning forwards and backwards as forms and energies arise and fall. As the great dance of form and emptiness plays out on the infinite stage of reality.
These basic chemical and energy interactions between things are so surprisingly in line with Buddha's teachings. The Buddha taught us that everything without exception is impermanent, can only arise in relationship with other things, and cannot be grasped or held in a way that will give us lasting satisfaction from that grasping. You try to grasp onto something, a building or a loved one, and you find that it's burning, here and then gone.
Buddha gave a famous teaching on this called the Fire Sermon, it's one of his first ever teachings after enlightenment according to tradition.
I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying in Gaya, at Gaya Head, with 1,000 monks. There he addressed the monks:
"Monks, the All is burning. What All is burning? The eye is burning. Forms are burning. Consciousness at the eye is burning. Contact at the eye is burning. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Burning, I tell you, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.
"The ear is burning. Sounds are burning...
"The nose is burning. Aromas are burning...
"The tongue is burning. Flavors are burning...
"The body is burning. Tactile sensations are burning...
"The intellect is burning. Ideas are burning. Consciousness at the intellect is burning. Contact at the intellect is burning. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the intellect — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Burning, I say, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.
"Seeing thus, the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones grows disenchanted with the eye, disenchanted with forms, disenchanted with consciousness at the eye, disenchanted with contact at the eye. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye, experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain: With that, too, he grows disenchanted.
"He grows disenchanted with the ear...
"He grows disenchanted with the nose...
"He grows disenchanted with the tongue...
"He grows disenchanted with the body...
"He grows disenchanted with the intellect, disenchanted with ideas, disenchanted with consciousness at the intellect, disenchanted with contact at the intellect. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the intellect, experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain: He grows disenchanted with that too. Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is fully released. With full release, there is the knowledge, 'Fully released.' He discerns that 'Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.'"
That is what the Blessed One said. Gratified, the monks delighted at his words. And while this explanation was being given, the hearts of the 1,000 monks, were liberated from taints through clinging no more.
Source: <http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn35/sn35.028.than.html> with a few modification by Tim (mostly replacing "aflame" with "burning')
So what is the Buddha saying here? What's wrong with being enchanted with our sense perceptions, is he saying don’t love the world? Sometimes a narrow reading of early Buddhism seems to bring us to that conclusion. That a student of Buddhism should be cold and removed and uninvolved. Being attached is bad so being unattached must be good. But if you also read the way the Buddha interacted with the world and you meet his committed descendants you see that the fruits of practice seem not to lead to that. Long term students of Buddha are fully engaged and in love with the world but it's a love with less burning in it. With less clinging. A love that includes gain and loss, includes building the building and watching it burn down. A love that includes birth and death not as opposites or enemies but as two halves of the very same coin.
The Buddha says all through his teachings that if we want to reduce suffering and be available to beings to help we need to intimately understand the limitations of our habitual ways of looking at the world and the many unexamined assumptions we make as living beings peering out at the world through our six senses. We see solid, permanent wood and we're shocked when it burns up. We hear the wonderful sounds of children playing and we suffer when those sounds cease. We think we understand the way things go and then we learn some more and we realize our understand was too narrow, too limited, and we expand our view. And even then we remember that our new view isn't quite right either but it might be more skillful and less inclined towards suffering. Less caught by birth, aging and death, less bound up in sorrows, lamentations, pains, distressed and despairs as it says in the sutra.
I was opening one of these huge books of translation I have which has the fire sermon in it and I noticed the very first passage in the Samyutta Nikaya, the collection of discourses it's in. This somehow gives us some guidance on negotiating this burning world.
I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying near Savatthi in Jeta's Grove, Anathapindika's monastery. Then a certain devata, in the far extreme of the night, her extreme radiance lighting up the entirety of Jeta's Grove, went to the Blessed One. On arrival, having bowed down to him, she stood to one side. As she was standing there, she said to him, "Tell me, dear sir, how you crossed over the flood."
"I crossed over the flood without pushing forward, without staying in place."1
"But how, dear sir, did you cross over the flood without pushing forward, without staying in place?"
"When I pushed forward, I was whirled about[ by the currents]. When I stayed in place, I sank [into the mud]. And so I crossed over the flood without pushing forward, without staying in place."
[The devata:]
At long last I see a brahman, totally unbound, who without pushing forward, without staying in place, has crossed over the entanglements of the world.
That is what the devata said. The Teacher approved. Realizing that "The Teacher has approved of me," she bowed down to him, circumambulated him — keeping him to her right — and then vanished right there.
Source: <http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn01/sn01.001.than.html> [extensions in square brackets mine]
Fires and floods. How can we live in this burning world and cross the floods of ignorance, craving, and anger so that we can be of help to each other. Can we recognize and work directly with the world as it is? We are all dying. We are all just born. We are burning bodies of chain reacting chemical reactions. We are Buddhas. We are going to be extinguished. Zen masters are famous for sitting zazen right at the time of their death. Maybe I just keel over dead right now to make my point more vivid. Well better not, there are suffering beings to help out of burning buildings and to guide, steadily, across the floods.
Thank you very much.
Resident Priest Nomon Tim Burnett has been a student of Zoketsu Norman Fischer since 1987 when he was a resident at San Francisco Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm. After sitting practice periods at Green Gulch and Tassajara Zen Monastery, Tim helped found the Bellingham Zen Practice Group in 1991. Tim was ordained as a Zen Priest by Norman in June, 2000. Like his teacher, Tim is interested in the possibility of deep and complete practice by lay people.
A person of wide-ranging professional interests, Tim has been a botanist, elementary schoolteacher, writer, and computer programmer. In addition to his work at the Resident Priest of Red Cedar Zen Community, Tim works as a software developer.