The Fire Sermon

An Introduction to the Buddha’s Fire Sermon

We owe the translation of the title of the discourse known as ‘The Fire Sermon’ to the American translator Henry Clark Warren, whose Buddhism in Translations was one of those pioneering Victorian works that brought the spirit of Buddhism into the west. Someone who read Warren’s translation was the poet T.S. Eliot, who studied Sanskrit from 1911–14, at Harvard. And Eliot’s reading of Warren’s translation resulted in his naming the third section of his 1922 poem The Waste Land ‘The Fire Sermon’. I’m sure the Buddha could never have guessed that he would get quoted in modernist literature.

The title ‘The Fire Sermon’ has a great ring to it. More literally, the title (āditta-sutta) is ‘The Discourse about What is on Fire’, or simply, ‘Burning’. And, while the so-called ‘second sermon’ is more like a Socratic dialogue than a sermon, this ‘Discourse on Burning’, is more rightly called the ‘third sermon’ – the third teaching of the Buddha. A problem of course with the English word ‘sermon’ is its connotation of a tedious long talk in a church. But all of the Buddha’s discourses were delivered out-of-doors, and they are all records of the Buddha’s attempt to directly get across his awakening experience, to the extent that it can be put into words. The Pāli canon gives us a vivid sense of how the Buddha’s teaching was always delivered to a specific person or group, always tailored to his audience’s interests and expectations. The Dharma was never primarily a set of lists or doctrines, but rather the familiar ways in which the Dharma came to be expressed were the result of the Buddha’s teaching experience to specific people over a long period.

Once again I invite you to consider the early Buddhist discourses as literature – not as any kind of more-or-less accurate record of what the Buddha said in ancient India, but as the way that the early Buddhists, after the time of the Buddha, tried to re-create in a literary form the style and impact of their teacher. This involved the development of stories, which have the look of historical accounts, but are really later reconstructions of events. One these stories is that of what the Buddha did after his awakening experience, under the Bodhi tree. It is a long and detailed story, and is preserved in the Vinaya (the book of monastic discipline). Two episodes of this story are the Buddha’s ‘first sermon’ to his former five companions, given at the Deer Park at Sarnath, and then the ‘second sermon’, which brings them all to awakening. Let me give a summary version of what happens next.

We hear about a spoiled young man called Yasa, who becomes disgusted with his superficial lifestyle, whom the Buddha converts, in a story that later is switched to the Buddha himself. Then we hear that, once there are sixty arahants, the Buddha sends them out in all directions, exhorting them to ‘wander for the well-being and happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the benefit, well-being and happiness of gods and human beings’.

The Buddha then wanders eastward, towards Uruvelā (where he had gained awakening). On the way he meets a group of thirty young men with their twenty-nine wives. The girlfriend of the unmarried man has stolen their things and they are looking for her. ‘Which is better for you?’ the Buddha asks them; ‘seeking a woman or seeking for your self?’, and he converts them too. Arriving at Uruvelā, the Buddha meets three fire-worshipping dreadlocked ascetics, each called Kassapa, with their thousand followers. By performing a series of miracles, starting with the taming of a fierce nāga (python) living in one of the fire-huts, the Buddha converts the ascetics. Now follows the Buddha’s third sermon, to the former fire-worshipping ascetics (my translation can be found here).

The later Theravādin commentary adds that the Buddha thought, ‘What might be an appropriate dharma talk for these people, who tend the sacred fire in the mornings?’ And he came to the conclusion, ‘I will teach them about the six senses and their objects, comparing them to what is burning and blazing, and in this way they will be able to obtain arahantship.’ Then he spoke this formulation of the Dharma in order to teach the Dharma to these people.

The commentary can be a bit dry and literal in its interpretations of early Buddhism, but in this case it is very helpful. It points out that this particular discourse was delivered to a particular group of people, fire-worshippers, so that the Buddha tailored what he said to meet their interests and preoccupations. This is an example of what the later tradition called the Buddha’s ‘skilful means’ (upaya-kauśalya), his ability to teach people appropriately. The fire-worshipping ascetics believed that tending the sacred fire, performing fire-rituals every morning, pouring ghee into the flames to feed the gods, was the way to salvation. The Buddha gets their attention by saying, everything is burning, everything is on fire. One might imagine that they would have responded by saying, or at least thinking, no it isn’t. But nevertheless he has their attention.

What is supposedly burning and on fire? What follows is another analysis of the whole of experience. In the second sermon the Buddha used the framework of the five constituents of experience (khandhas, ‘aggregates’). In this discourse, he uses a different framework:

• The five senses-organs plus the mind.
• The five sense-objects plus the contents of mental experience – ideas.
• Sense-consciousness.
• The contact between the senses, including the mind, and the world.
• Experience arising from contact.

I find this a fascinating analysis. Elsewhere, having used this same framework, he asks, is there anything else in experience apart from this all this? Of course, it is a quite reasonable and sensible belief that there is a world independent of our sense-experience, but all we ever have to go on is the experience of our senses. This is it – what is seen, heard, smelled, tasted, touched and thought – this is the whole world. Anything else is an idea in our minds. And ideas are already included.

So everything, the whole of our experience, the whole world, is burning. Now comes the twist. Burning with what? With the fires of compulsion (rāga, ‘greed’), hostility (dosa, ‘hate’) and confusion (moha, ‘delusion’). This group of three bad guys is very common in early Buddhist discourses. It is a way of characterising our basic psychological afflictions. Compulsion and hostility are emotional – they characterise attraction and aversion reactions to experience – while confusion is intellectual – characterising basic lack of understanding of what is happening. The early Buddhist teachings stress that awakening or nirvāna is the ending of compulsion, hostility and confusion. In a way, you can say, that’s all awakening is. But it’s perhaps preferable to say that the ending of compulsion, hostility and confusion is a way of describing awakening in negative psychological terms. More positively, we could add that awakening can also be described in terms of contentment, love and wisdom.

Everything is burning. It’s a way of putting the Dharma – a dharma-pariyāya, a formulation of the Dharma. Does this speak to us? I once lived in a community of men (four of us, in a half-renovated house, with two cats and a dog, and a lot of dope-smoking), and one of the men was obsessed with sex. Whatever one might say, he brought it round to sex. Beds, beaches, lawns, woods, floors, bicycles, breakfast, dinner, tea – it all triggered compelling ideas of various sorts in my friend’s mind. Everything was burning for him – burning with a specific kind of compulsion. Then there was the mother of a dear friend. Any topic of conversation one might bring up was an opportunity to be gloomy. I was once visiting with my friend, and we’d been to the park. So I said, ‘the park here in town is big, isn’t it?’; to which the response came, ‘oh, the parking in town is terrible, so terrible’. Everything was burning for her – burning with a particular kind of gloom, of negativity.

Now we can make sense of the links between the Buddha’s Fire Sermon and T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. Eliot quotes the Fire Sermon like this:

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

The allusion to the Fire Sermon (‘Burning burning burning burning’) is sandwiched between allusions to the Confessions of St. Augustine, who went to Carthage as a teenager and was embroiled in ‘unholy loves’ – Augustine was burning too. Earlier in section III of The Waste Land, we read:

On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing…

These lines allude to Eliot’s own recuperation from a nervous breakdown in the seaside town of Margate in Kent. Perhaps Eliot evokes another way in which the whole of our experience might be ‘burning’ – or tingling or hurting – with the inability to connect with, or find meaning in, what is happening; a symptom of the dissociated modern sensibility, one that perhaps many of us can relate to, at least occasionally.

But the Buddha’s Fire Sermon is an invitation to overcome burning, obsession, gloominess or dissociation, by identifying it as such. The truth is that sense-experience isn’t just what happens to us – it is how the world appears as a result of our active involvement with it. The world shows up according to what we want, what we care about, what we believe, according to the quality of our attention. It strikes me that these days not many of us might be fire-worshippers, but a lot of us pay attention to the news as it is represented on the internet. In fact, it is rather easy to pay a great deal of attention, not only to the news, but to the opinions people have about the news, and then to think about our own opinions about those other people’s opinions. It’s not so much that the world is burning, but that the world is a drama. The world of our experience is a constant drama, driven by the plot-lines of compulsion, hostility and confusion.

But what happens when we notice this, and begin to pay attention, not to the contents of our experience, but to how it shows up for us? The first thing we might notice is that we ourselves are largely responsible for how the world appears and shows up. If everything reminds you of sex, or everything is terrible, or the world going to the dogs, that tells you something about your own psychological tendencies. After all, it is we ourselves who choose what to pay attention to, and how to respond or react. Of course, we are talking here about deep-rooted habitual tendencies. But they can change, and that is the point of engaging in Buddhist practice. Hence the discourse goes on to identify three stages of positive change – disenchantment, self-possession and liberation. These summarise an insight process.

In another discourse (Itivuttaka 93), the Buddha teaches the overcoming or quenching of the three fires of compulsion, hostility and confusion through three distinct methods. Compulsion is quenched by attending to the unattractive qualities of our experience. Hostility is quenched by developing kindness (mettā). Confusion is quenched by developing wisdom. If we can imagine our experience as being on fire, in terms of a metaphor of burning, then to practice the Dharma is to quench the flames:

Those who practice, day and night,
the teaching of the perfectly awakened one:
they put out the fire of compulsion,
constantly noticing unattractiveness.

Those excellent people put out
the fire of hostility through kindness,
and the fire of confusion through the wisdom
that leads to piercing through.

Those mature beings, having put out the fires,
indefatigable day and night,
are completely quenched, remainderless;
they have entirely overcome suffering.

Based on a talk given at Bristol Buddhist Centre, 14 November 2017.

The Not-Self Characteristic

An Introduction to the Buddha’s ‘Discourse on the Not-Self Characteristic’

The ‘Discourse on the Not-Self Characteristic’ (Anatta-lakkhaṇa-sutta) (my summary translation can be found here) goes by another title in Sri Lanka – the ‘Discourse to the Group of Five’ (Pañca-vaggiya-sutta); and the alternative title gives us another clue to what it’s about. The Buddha is shown as being in conversation with his five former companions in the ascetic life, so that this discourse is traditionally regarded as the Buddha’s ‘second sermon’, following the famous ‘first sermon’, the Discourse on the Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma (my introduction to which is here). At the end of the first sermon, Koṇḍañña had the insight that ‘whatever is of a nature to arise, all that is of a nature to cease’, and this insight was a breakthrough for him. It was also a breakthrough for the Buddha, who for the first time had managed to communicate something of the Dharma to someone else, enough at least to induce the kind of insight that leads to ‘stream entry’ – an irreversible engagement with the path that leads to nirvāṇa, the end of dukkha. In this second sermon, the Buddha goes on to give the ‘group of five’ a direct and specific teaching, on the ‘not-self characteristic’ – a teaching which leads all of them all to see through any confusion they might hold about who they really are, and move them on and into a liberating knowledge of how things actually are.

In my introduction to the first sermon I made the (possibly unfortunate) comparison of the Buddha’s teaching with the Abba song ‘Waterloo’– a song that announced the sudden, brilliant, appearance of soon-to-be-world-famous talent. My point was that the four ‘ennobling truths’ taught in the first sermon were like a universe-wide hit, like a memorable tune that could get the Dharma into everyone’s heads. By contrast, in the second sermon the Buddha might be said to abandon jumpsuit and boots, and put on the dark clothes and hat of Leonard Cohen, and sing something that goes straight to the heart.

This might not be so obvious from the bare words of the discourse, which, as usual, is replete not only with repetition but with a somewhat forbidding technical vocabulary. Let us once again think about the discourse as literature. It is almost absurd to suppose that this discourse represents in a literally historical way the words of the Buddha to his first five disciples. The Buddha would have been at the very beginning of his teaching career, and he was yet to develop the many ideas and methods that have been preserved in the Pāli canon. It makes more sense, I think, to suppose that the Discourse on the Not-Self Characteristic represents  a way of putting the Dharma that the early Buddhists considered to be especially characteristic and typical of their teacher. And by imagining the Buddha as putting the Dharma in this way to his very first disciples, the Buddhists, who composed these early discourses, were in their own way doing justice to the memory of the Buddha. In this way, one might suppose, they managed to put into this discourse a kind of condensed version of one way in which the Buddha taught.

There is hardly any scene-setting. The Buddha addressed the group of five monks while they were living together in the Deer Park at modern-day Sarnath, near Vārāṇasi. But rather than telling them something ­– as he had done in the first sermon, when he told them about the middle way and the four ennobling truths – he simply asks them questions. This is reminiscent of the Buddha’s teaching strategy when he was talking to the Kālāmas (my introduction to the Discourse to the Kālāmas is here). The Kālāmas had had enough of being told by religious teachers what the truth was, and how any other truth-teaching was rubbish. The Buddha understands this and gives them a method by which they can decide for themselves what should count as a wholesome mental state and the advantages of developing such a state. But here, talking to the group of five monks – experienced spiritual strivers, intent upon liberation – the Buddha can assume a shared understanding of ethical conduct and meditation practice. Within this framework of commitment, he leads the monks through a set of analyses of experience, designed to get them to question their assumptions and re-think their views.

Any of you who have read any Plato might recognise this method of questioning – it reminds us of Socrates, who always claimed he knew nothing except that he was ignorant, and who proceeded to cross-question his poor interlocutors until it became apparent to everyone that they didn’t know anything either. Have you ever had the experience of having your assumptions pulled out from beneath you? I had always thought Leonard Cohen was one of those hippy crooners who’d smoked too much cannabis to make sense. But then Maitridevi played me his greatest hits in the car five years back, and I saw the truth… And probably anyone who meditates regularly has had the experience that our usual way of looking at things suddenly cracks and crumbles, to be replaced by a new perspective – that perhaps our breath is not actually boring at all, or that there is in fact no obligation to hold onto our resentments. I would say, though, that the Buddha is not exactly like Socrates. He always claimed to definitely know something about awakening. On the other hand, awakening is not an idea and cannot be put into words. We each have to discover it for ourselves, and hence the Buddha’s method of leading his hearers.

So he engages the monks in a process of destructive cross-questioning. The method turns on a way of dividing up our experience of ourselves into five khandhas or ‘constituents’, sometimes translated ‘aggregates’ or even ‘heaps’:

1. physical form (rūpa), that is to say, our bodies, the physical stuff that our bodies are made of, the attributes of our bodies, its abilities and characteristics;
2. feeling-tone (vedanā), that is, the bare hedonic tone of our experience, whether pleasant or painful or somewhere in between;
3. perception and cognition (saññā), that is, the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch sensations and thoughts, memories and fantasies that are going on;
4. habitual tendencies (saṅkhārā), which are the more dynamic aspects of our experience, the familiar patterns and dispositions that we sometimes love and sometimes hate; and
5. consciousness (viññāna), the awareness of ourselves as being a body, having feelings, cognitions and perceptions, prone to habit, and aware of being aware.

This might sound complicated, but in practice it is relatively easy to keep these five aspects of experience in mind. Is our experience made of anything else besides these five constituents? It might be useful for us to consider how we might naturally describe our experience. I’ve always noticed that there is a body, there is thinking (in the head), there is feeling (more in the heart), and there is willing (which seems to be everywhere). The five khandhas may be a useful abstraction, that’s the point.

The Buddha then gets the monks to carefully consider whether any of these constituents is the self. By ‘self’ or attā (or ātman) the Buddha means ‘who you really are’. He presents two arguments for the monks to chew on. In the first he gets them to consider how they are not in fact able to control body, feeling tone, perception and cognition, habitual tendencies or consciousness. Is this true? If you are like me, it would be truer to say that we have some control, but not much, and not when it counts. Experience mostly just happens, and we find ourselves carried along, hoping for the best. So who are we really? I think that the most likely candidate for who we really are is consciousness. Thinking this way would mean deciding that who I really am is a deep awareness of being this same person over many years. My body changes slowly, feeling tones come and go, perceptions and cognitions change all the time, habitual tendencies unfortunately have a life of their own, but my consciousness is pretty steadily me. If I can’t control consciousness, that might be because I’m busy, or life is going badly, and a holiday or retreat might bring me back to myself. However, the Buddha will not let us rest with a conclusion like this.

The Buddha then gets the monks to consider whether the constituents are permanent or impermanent. Of course, they’re not permanent at all. So can any of them be truly satisfying? That’s quite a question. Of course, there is some satisfaction to be got from bodies, feeling-tones, from consciousness. But there is an invitation here to consider whether it is really OK that there is some satisfaction in experience. Finally, the Buddha asks the monks whether it is appropriate to say of any of a changing and partially satisfactory set of constituents that ‘this is mine, I am this, this is myself’? Of course, the way the discourse puts it, this is almost a rhetorical question. But clearly what is being suggested isn’t that the monks gave the right answers because they were good Buddhists, but that they were rehearsing a set of deep considerations about what it means to be a human being. For me, when I ask of consciousness whether it is really who I am, it soon becomes clear that after all what appears to be my self is this constant welling up of awareness which I simply continually identify with, as if I hoped it was me, as if I simply kept saying to myself, ‘this is who I am’.

But if in fact one cannot find within experience anything of which one can truly say, ‘this is myself’, this is what or who I really am, then one is free to let go of any idea that one’s experience should be a certain way, and all the emotion reactions that go with such a view. The Buddha describes this process as having three stages. There is the stage of disenchantment – no longer being under a spell, a false impression. There is the stage of becoming self-possessed – ‘dispassionate’ is the usual translation, but that might give the wrong idea of being disconnected from the heart. And there is the stage of liberation – no longer being pushed and pulled by views and emotions.

And the group of five monks gets it. Each in their own way, presumably, through their own individual process of consideration and enquiry. Their hearts and minds are freed and they are understandably pleased. They too have gained awakening and the end of dukkha. So this ‘second sermon’ gives us not so much a historical record of the awakening process of the first five disciples, but a kind of paradigm example of how the Buddha taught, and how the insight process might unfold. In fact the Buddha taught many methods and in many ways, in accordance with who he was talking to, but the Discourse on the Not-Self Characteristic tells it like it is: ‘there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’.

The Discourse on the Not-Self Characteristic is to be found in the Saṃyutta Nikāya, 22:59. This introduction is based on a talk given at Bristol Buddhist Centre 7 Nov 2017.