One Time, One Meeting

If you are of a certain age you may remember the CB Radio craze. In the late seventies, long before the advent of smart phones, Citizens Band radio became wildly popular in America, not only with truckers and tradesmen but also with enthusiasts and hobbyists, who talked back and forth in their cars and trucks, warned each other of road conditions and speed traps, and entertained themselves by tuning into Channel 9, where fires, crimes, and other emergencies were reported and help dispatched.

Such was the pastime of one Allegany County [New York] resident, who lived alone in the country and spent his idle hours on his CB radio. On one occasion, so the story goes, this gentleman was seated comfortably in his bathroom, taking care of business, when he heard a report of a house fire in progress. Listening eagerly for details, he learned to his considerable consternation that his own house was on fire. Fortunately for him, he hastily assembled himself and fled the house, escaping serious injury.

I’ve often recalled and recounted that story, not only for its multiple ironies but also because it bears a direct relation to Zen teachings. The image of a “house in flames” occupies a central place in the lore of Zen. It figures prominently in the Lotus Sutra, a foundational text for Zen practitioners, and it has spawned numerous variations in the American Zen community. A Rinzai Zen practice group in Baltimore calls itself the Burning House Zendo. The Zen Center of New York City, situated in Brooklyn, is also known as the Fire Lotus Temple, an allusion to both the burning house of Zen teachings and the counter-image of a blue lotus flower blooming amidst the flames.

In the Lotus Sutra, the image of a “house in flames” is the core component of a didactic parable, in which it symbolizes what Buddhism calls samsara: the realm of craving, aversion, ignorance, and endless suffering. In the parable, children are at play in their rich father’s house, blithely unaware that their house is on fire. After repeated attempts to persuade them to leave, their father employs “expedient means” to effect their rescue. He promises to give them jeweled carriages, laden with gifts and drawn by white oxen, if they will come out. His stratagem works, and the children survive.

That story is often interpreted as an illustration of upaya, or “expedient means.” The children are preoccupied with playthings, so their father indulges their selfish craving and entices them with bigger and better toys. That he is temporarily fueling their greed and their attachment to transitory things is largely irrelevant. What matters is that he is rescuing them from samsara, the burning house of the temporal world.

That point is well taken, but another element of the parable is no less important. Like the children at play in their burning house, we fallible mortals may be preoccupied with our latest toys—our smart phones, for example—and oblivious of those appetites, aversions, and habits of mind that are shaping, afflicting, and often determining our lives. We may not realize that we are living in samsara.

In Buddhism, the explicit acknowledgment of that reality is known as the First Noble Truth. Often translated as “suffering exists,” this simple recognition establishes the foundation for the three Noble Truths that follow: that the causes of conditioned suffering, particularly craving, anger, and delusion, may be investigated and identified; that conditional, self-inflicted suffering can end; and that there is a concrete path to that outcome. “All my teaching,” the Buddha is reported to have said, “is about suffering and the end of suffering.” But the starting point is the realization that conditioned suffering exists, within oneself as well as in the external world. To escape a burning house, you must first acknowledge that you are living in one.

Zen practice is not, as is sometimes supposed, a technique for putting out the fires of samsara. Would it were so easy. What the practice does offer is a way of cultivating what Eihei Dōgen, founder of the Sōto school of Zen, called the blue lotus “blooming in the midst of fire and at the time of flames.” In Zen iconography the blue lotus represents compassionate wisdom. To become the blue lotus, blooming in the fire, is to realize and demonstrate one’s innate capacity for kindness, equanimity, and understanding in the very midst of suffering, one’s own and others’. That is a fundamental challenge of the practice, and it is also its ultimate reason for being.

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In the Lotus Sutra: Chapter 3.

Eihei Dogen:  Kuge (“Flowers of Space”) fascicle, Shobogenzo, tr. Yasuda Joshu Roshi and Anzan Hoshin Sensei. For a thorough discussion of this source, see Shinshu Roberts, “Steadfast in the Midst of Samsara,” Buddhadharma, Spring, 2020. I am indebted to Roberts’ insights.

Photo: Nymphaea caerulea  (Blue Lotus), by Leandro Avelar