There are many analogies to the phrase: “Samsara (the
wandering-in-circles world, the world of life and death) is broken” from my
previous blog. One that we are
currently studying in the Lotus Sutra
class at Clouds in Water Zen Center is the story of the Burning House from
chapter 2 of that sutra. These
stories in the Lotus Sutra are literary and teaching methods that encourage us
to respond skillfully to each specific, unique situation. They are stories and yet they are also
alive. They are alive with
resonance in our psyches. The
images stay alive as they vividly arise in our minds over and over within our
practice and daily life. It’s very
easy to remember a burning house, for example. These images are literary devices but, as the Lotus Sutra
says, they are also the Buddha and the Dharma themselves. This alive quality is Buddha/Dharma.
Samsara is a burning house and, uninitiated into the Way, we
play in the house, amuse and distract ourselves, without even noticing that it
is burning. The Lotus Sutra
describes this house in a lengthy 3-page verse with very vivid descriptions of
decay. Let me use a few verses to
give you a suggestion of the House of Samsara:
A lofty hall in dangerous
conditions,
Pillar bases broken and rotten,
Beams and rooftree toppling and
leaning,
Foundation and steps in a state of
collapse,
Walls and partitions ruined and
cracked,
Their plaster crumbling away……
Then the Sutra goes on to describe all the wild animals
living there and:
All sorts of evil creatures,
Run about in every direction;
There are places stinking with
excrement and urine,
Overflowing with uncleanliness……
In every direction there are
Goblins and ogres,
Yakshas and malign demons,
Who devour the flesh of men….
Evil birds and brutes
Hungrily hurry in all directions.
All of a sudden the whole house
catches fire,
Its flames are in full blaze;
Rooftree, beams, rafters, pillars
With cracking sound burst open,
Break, split, and topple down.
All the animals, demons and others
Hurry about in alarm
Powerless to escape….
They are driven by the fire,
Cruelly hurting each other,
Supping and devouring each other’s
flesh and blood.
There are three pages of this kind of description of the
Burning house! Wow, it can’t be
emphasized enough that the house of Samsara is, indeed, already broken and
filled with suffering.
The master has left the house already, but his children are
still inside. Getting the children
to leave their distractions and games to come outside for the dharma teaching
is very difficult. The children
don’t want to leave, and the “father” has to try all sorts of skillful means to
get the children to leave. He doesn’t want to carry them out or force
them. He wants them to come out on
their own power. In the end, he’ll
use anything to get the children to come out, even bribery. He entices them out
by three carts which are the three vehicles in the Dharma teaching. But in the end the Great Vehicle, the
carriage pulled by a huge white oxen is the biggest prize. When the children
finally leave behind their games and distractions, they find outside, a life
that is unimaginably more “fun” and expansive than the games they were playing
inside the burning house.
The Buddha, is
much like the father in the parable, attempting to save his children from the
fires of birth, old age, disease, death, grief, sorrow, suffering and so on. We
don’t understand enough to escape without instruction. We can’t even stop our obsession with
our distractions, to realize that the house is actually burning. What the
parable stresses is the urgency of the human condition, making it necessary for
the Buddha to find some way to get people to leave their play and suffering
behind in order to enter the Way.
This is not escaping the world but having a change of mind
and heart in how you view the world.
“Right View” in the Buddha’s teaching. We learn through the dharma teaching how to take care of our
life even as we are not consumed by our life. As Joshu so succinctly said, “We use our 24 hours rather than being used by them.” By
working and transmuting greed, anger and ignorance, we can play freely within
the stories of our constructed lives.
Dogen emphasizes that practice is deporting oneself freely in this Buddha-world. Disporting is a translation of two
characters that both mean to play or
transform. To frolic, to be
free. In Daigo, another fascicle of the Shobogenzo, he
writes that we should play freely with
the mudballs of life. This is to realize
great emancipation even while tended to the precise details of our daily
life. This is when the dharma joy
can really arise.
Labels: Dogen, Ragir, right view, samsara, The burning house, The Lotus Sutra