What’s Burning?

(presented at Peace In Action:  Living the Teaching of the Buddha, BCNY Wesak celebration at the Rubin Museum, NYC 5/18/20, 24)

Depending upon how I choose to perceive it on any given day, the world is burning.

That’s a perception created by a heart and mind clouded by fear, ignorance, selfishness.

What’s really happening though? The reality is that the world is as it always is.  The world is in the process of changing.  Earthly crusts shift, waters rise, clouds gather.  This is not a denial of climate change, injustice and other calamities, mind you, but an acknowledgement that whatever the causes and  conditions, whatever their origins, the world moves towards healing and continues on the path.  And that journey is painful.

Causes and conditions created by ignorance, fear and selfishness are the toxic fuel feeding the raging fire that a heart and mind choose to perceive.  It’s the poisonous smoke that chokes out all hope and blinds me to all the connections to all the life around me.  All I claim to love but fail to even see as I thrash about in a painful pyroclasm of my own making, are caught in the raging flame of my suffering. I am the world in flames.

The Buddha walked the earth in a time we would also say was burning.  He grew up a warrior preparing to fight even in a time of relative peace.  He and his followers walked through kingdoms in a constant state of war.  The Buddha witnessed famine, plague, poverty and injustice not much different from what we are experiencing right now.  He personnally experienced political attacks and assassination attempts.  His life was full of opportunity for suffering.  The world, we might say was burning all around him. 

We might say.

But he told us over and over again that there is a way past suffering.  Our hearts hold a gentle flame, the light of liberation.  It’s our choice what we feed that flame.  The mix of ego and fear or the pure create our smoking hell. The gentle food of generosity, patience, kindness, diligence, meditation, wisdom, all of which are in abundant supply will light the way for everyone if we try.

We can go beyond hoping for peace.  Living the Buddha way, dampening the flames of our own suffering so that when we move through the world as teachers, activists, politicians, civil servants, artists, [your name here] we are spreading a warm light of healing that welcomes inevitable change and healing in place of blinding smoke. 

May all beings be happiness.