The Trauma of Everyday Life

powers, he made it impossible for them to tend their sacred fires without his intervention. When they tried to split their logs according to the apocryphal story, they could not, until the Buddha said the magic word. When they tried to light their fires, they were similarly restrained, and when they tried to put their fires out, they could not do that either. The Buddha even materialized five hundred braziers for the ascetics to warm themselves with in the midst of the coldest winter night and then pushed back the floodwaters after a terrible storm so that he could walk on dry ground. The ancient sutras spell out these displays as if they were facts, but the miraculous feats were not the main point. The Buddha was speaking the fire worshippers’ language. He knew how to get their attention. Having roused their curiosity, he offered them a teaching. He then took their devotion to their sacred fires and turned it inside out. He had done the same thing in his first talk by giving new meaning to the word “noble,” which until that point had been used exclusively to demarcate the upper-caste Brahmins in ancient India’s stratified society. The noble person wasn’t noble by virtue of the caste he was born into, the Buddha suggested then; he was noble because he could see the truth. Nobility came from within, he insisted; it was not a product of one’s hereditary place in society.
    In the case of the Fire Sermon, the Buddha did something similar. Whether or not he actually performed physical miracles, he did something miraculous with his language. He took the literal meaning of the word “fire” and turned it into a metaphor. The actual translation of the sutra’s Pali name,
, is “The Way of Putting Things as Being on Fire,” which conveys the Buddha’s metaphorical intent. 2 The matted-haired ascetics, ritualistically tending their sacred fires, were missing the point. Rather than being so concrete about it, he suggested to the mass of
bhikkhus
, or mendicants (literally, ones who live by alms), arrayed before him, that they should see the flames all around them. Everyday life is a trauma, the Buddha proclaimed: It is as if everything is burning. He spoke of trauma as if it were a fire.
Bhikkhus, all is burning. And what is all that is burning?
The eye is burning. Visible forms are burning. Eye-consciousness is burning. Eye-contact is burning. Also feeling, whether pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion; it is burning with birth, ageing and death, with sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair, I say.
The ear is burning. Sounds are burning. . . .
The nose is burning. Odors are burning. . . .
The tongue is burning. Flavors are burning. . . .
The body is burning. Tangibles are burning. . . .
The mind is burning. Mental objects are burning. 3

    With this single metaphor, the Buddha managed to consolidate the most important strands of his thought. He took the sacred fires of his listeners and not only put them out but stripped them of their idealized status. Rites and rituals will get you nowhere, he declared. And he used his metaphorical imagery to drive home his vision of the ubiquity of trauma. Everyday life is on fire not only because of how fleeting it is, which we know but don’t like to admit, but also because of how ardently we cling to our own greed, anger, and egocentric preoccupations. He called these the “three fires,” in another punning play on the three “sacrificial fires” a devout Brahmin householder was committed to tending daily. 4 We don’t have to tend the fires purposively and obsessively, he told his listeners—we are constantly feeding the three egocentric fires unconsciously. Hundreds of years later, when the semantic origins of the “three fires” were long forgotten, greed, hatred, and delusion came to be known in the Buddhist world as the three “poisons,” but this was not a word that the Buddha actually used. His initial language, while strong, was more forgiving than that. Subliminally, the Buddha was saying, we are all tending these fires (of greed, hatred, and delusion), motivated as we are by our insecure place in the world, by the feeling, the
dukkha
, of not fitting in. The fires of greed, hatred, and delusion are defenses against acknowledging that everything is on fire, instinctive attempts at protecting ourselves from what