Eight Realizations of Great Beings (VIII): Burning
Photo by Cullan Smith
In this talk Zuisei dives into the center of the eighth realization—the awareness that the fire of birth and death is raging, causing endless suffering everywhere. Even in difficult moments there is a soft spaciousness, perfect and complete, where we are whole and things are as they are. How do we remember this in the very real and present stress of our day to day lives?
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hello, everyone. We have arrived at the Eighth Realization of Great Beings. For those of you who are joining us, we've been going over a teaching called the Eight Realizations of Great Beings which is said to encapsulate the Buddha's last teaching. There are several versions of the Buddha’s last words, and this is one of them.
This particular sutra is very short, very pithy. The Eighth Realization is the awareness that the fire of birth and death is raging, causing endless suffering everywhere. Not exactly chipper—and this is the last one.
I was thinking about how to speak of this Eighth Realization, and then I was handed the perfect way. So let me tell you a story.
This past weekend, Saturday morning, Julia and I headed upstate to pick up some books that my friends had been storing for me for a while. I had everything ready. I had a storage space. I borrowed a car from a good friend of mine, a close friend. We thought, we'd go up there, we'd camp, maybe we'd swim. Just make a weekend of it.
The first glitch happened on Friday. If it had been a movie, we would have gotten some kind of warning. There would have been a foreshadowing of what was to come. Maybe some ambient music, some way for the viewer to notice that something was not quite right. Of course, it wasn't a movie, so we just ambled on, unaware of the approaching storm. Right at the beginning our plans to stay overnight fell through. We thought, no problem, we'll just come back here and put the books in storage and go to the beach here. That's fine, we can adapt, that's not a problem.
We got upstate without an incident and picked up the books. We did some other errands. We stopped for a very nice lunch at Bread Alone. There were chickens, running around us, a rooster, and we were feeding them bits of our pizza. It was a gorgeous day, warm, but not too warm. One of those bright, very crisp, summer days. On the way back, we stopped by a small lake and dipped in with a very excited French Bulldog named Ruby. We had a very nice time.
One the way back, we decided to stop by a goat farm to pick up some milk. It was a little out of the way, but not too much. It was a beautiful drive through Catskill back roads, and the owner was not there. I was a little disappointed because I really wanted to see the goats, city girl that I am. But the woman was not there. Her husband was not at all interested in showing us the farm, giving us milk, or anything. So we thought, okay, we'll just go back.
Getting back into the city, there was traffic because when you take millions of cars and try to funnel them into a few lanes, anywhere in the world, that is what happens. By the time we made it in, we were a bit tired. I was more than a bit hungry and car weary. So, near Chinatown, when Julia said, “Why don't we stop and have a meal?” I thought, Sure, why not?
We found a parking space, immediately, miraculously. We parked the car. Part of me is thinking, it really would be great to get home, take a shower, get out of the car. No, get out of the car first, then take a shower, and be done with the trip. On the other hand, I thought it would be nice to break up the trip. Food sounded very appealing. Walking sounded extremely appealing. So we did.
As I said, we found a spot. I parked the car, and I did something I never do. My backpack is in the car with my computer, and I leave it there, but it’s kind of tucked in under the seat. I don’t want to carry it. I actually don’t even think to take it with me.
So, I locked the car, and checked that it was locked. It was definitely locked. I looked up and made sure I wasn’t parking somewhere I shouldn’t. I did know it’s a little risky to leave the car on a busy New York City street, near a busy corner. Chambers and Broadway, I see when I look up at the street sign. But I figured we weren’t going to be very long. The boxes looked really old, the car looked pretty old and beat up. Who’s going to want to break into it? So, twelve boxes of books, some camping gear in a bag, some skis, Julia’s iPad, and my computer are all in the car.
I think this is one of our strengths, right? Our optimism. We think nothing can go wrong, and if something does, it’s not going to happen to me. It’s not going to happen to me, now. I think it’s our optimism, until it becomes something else. Until it turns into denial. But I’m not thinking about any of this, and we walk away. The restaurant is about fifteen minutes away. There’s not that many people on the street. It’s early evening, and we have a nice walk. As we crossed one street, I noticed that we were crossing Broadway. I think, Well, that's strange. We parked on Broadway. I’m ashamed to say this, but I’m not the most oriented person. I’ve always thought that I was, and it has always saddened me a little bit that, actually, I’m a little spatially challenged. It is very hard for me to visualize things in three dimensions. So, I didn’t think it was actually that strange that we crossed Broadway twice. I know Broadway is diagonal. I thought, Maybe we’re just walking funny, whatever. I was hungry, tired, a little hot. I didn’t think about it.
We got to the restaurant and it was packed. It didn’t really have any vegetables to speak of, so we decided to go to another one. We find another one very aptly called Happy Veggies. It’s not full. It’s very nice. We sit down outside and have a great meal. There are families walking around. We’re in Chinatown, and there are people out, enjoying the evening. We were basking in the afterglow of a really nice day, enjoying a nice meal. Then we headed back. We walked back to the corner where we left the car—and there’s no car.
All the blood in my body rushed to my feet. I went completely cold. I walked, slowly, from the corner where we parked the car and down the street. There was no car. No RAV4. No boxes.No computer containing my entire life. I’m still disbelieving, because what are the chances? Then I look up. I look up behind me and see a No Standing sign. One side of the sign says, “No Standing Until 7pm.” The other side says, “No Standing Anytime.” I think, how did I not see that? But by the point we got to the city I was dizzy with hunger, so it’s completely possible that I didn’t see it. So, I think the car has been towed, and I braced myself to tell my friend.
One of us, I don’t remember who, goes up to a couple of policemen nearby to ask if our car’s been towed, where it would be taken. They say that the pound used to be there in Manhattan, but now it’s in Brooklyn. I curse—once, I think, although Julia tells me it was more than that throughout the night.
I called my friend and told her that her car had been towed. I apologize profusely. She said, “No problem. It’s really okay. I'll find it.” She got on the phone, and then we exchange a flurry of texts and calls. The pound was closed, it’s closed until Monday. I think, ugh, okay, not the end of the world. Then she called me back. No, it’s open, but they can’t find the car. She double checked the license plate. I called them. They don’t have it. She called. They don’t have it. They don’t have it by the license plate; they don't have it by the VIN number. I don’t even know what a VIN number is, but they don’t have it. Now I’m starting to silently freak out.
Part of me is immersed in what is happening. Part of me is just slightly over here, watching what’s happening, watching myself, and I just see myself go whoosh, and kind of deflate a bit.
Still, they can’t find the car. But we know bureaucracy, especially in the city, so we think we're just going to go there and beg them to let us look for the car. We have to.
We get on the subway, and I’m sitting there and thinking: the irony. I’ve waited two years to pick up these books, and on the day that I pick them up they get stolen. My books, a few clothes, my desk, and my chair, that’s the entirety of my belongings. I thought, really? I mean, really, this is my karma? Then again, why not? I think of the shame of having to face my friend, who’s been unfailingly kind to me for two years since I landed in the city, and telling her that the one time I asked for her car, it was stolen. I think of the money that I’m going to need to replace everything before I move in two weeks. Then, I start thinking, Almost every week I’m talking to the Wednesday group about groundlessness. Right? I remember an exchange I had with someone just two days before, where I said to her that everything has a solution, except death, which doesn’t need one. I’m telling this to myself, but I’m also not quite there yet.
And I’m sitting in the subway but I’m really in the bardo. The bardo, technically, is the state between one life and the next. Used more loosely is an in-between state. Often, it’s said that you don't even know you’ve died. So there’s the before and the after the death of one life, and the beginning or rebirth of another. I know that depending on what I do, a particular person will be born in the next moment, the next day, and the next few days. I know that. I do know that. At the same time, “the fire of birth and death is raging, causing endless suffering everywhere.”
So, it’s a long ride to the pound. And yet, it wasn’t the end of the world, right? I mean, as Julia later said to me, my life was actually not in the computer. It’s right here. We were certainly in one piece, healthy enough. Everything that was in the car was replaceable. I knew that too. And yet.
We got to the pound, and the woman in charge took one look at me after I explained what happened and took pity on me. She said she’d let us go look for the car. She confirmed that it wasn’t not there, according to their system. So, I get into a police car, and of course it’s started to rain. We start driving slowly from row to row. The windows are down. The rain is pouring into the car, but I want to make sure I don’t miss the car. Even though I can feel it. I can feel it’s not there. I don’t want to believe that. I don’t want to know that. We go through the whole parking lot. The car is not there. We go back and decide to file a police report.
But when I call my friend, I find out she’s already doing that in Manhattan, where she lives. More texts, more phone calls, she says, “I’m going to go look for the car, just in case.” We decide to go too. “No, just go home,” she says. “Go to bed. It’s been a long day.” But how in the world am I ever going to sleep?
We get a Lyft and get into the car, and Julia sees on her phone that her iPad is on Chambers and West Broadway. Although, her phone also says her earphones are at home, but they’re really in her bag. So, we're not sure whether to trust it or not. Then it hits—wait, wait, wait, wait. West Broadway. That’s where we walked back to, right? We’re sure that’s where we walked back to because we know there are two Broadways. We do know that Broadway runs close to the courthouse, and we definitely walked farther than that, to West Broadway. We could not make a mistake like that. We’re in the Lyft, looking at each other. We get there, and… there’s the car!
Honestly, I can’t feel relief yet. I just want to throw up. My friend, at that point, comes out of the subway. We’d sent her the picture of the car, intact. Nothing had been touched. There is no No Standing sign, anywhere. I parked where I needed to park. My friend comes out of the subway; we hug each other, and one of us is shaking. I can’t tell if it’s her or me, but one of us is shaking.
Then, for the next two days, the pent-up stress just leaks out in the most unfortunate ways. Even though things turned out the absolute best that they could have. On Monday, I had to go back to the pound to pick up my driver’s license that I left in my distress.
“What happened to you?” says the woman behind the desk. I started to explain and she just nodded, knowingly. She said, “Oh, you had too much to drink.” I laughed. “No, I don't drink.” I don’t think she believed me. I was in my own world. I just couldn't see. It was right in front of me, and I couldn’t see it.
That is the encapsulation of suffering. It's not what happens to us, but what we do with it. Right? We know this, and we’ve spoken about this quite a bit. It is not what happens to us, but what we do with it.
The Buddha said:
Friends, everything is burning, the eye is burning, forms are burning, eye consciousness is burning, eye contact is burning, the ear is burning, the nose is burning the tongue, the body, the mind are burning, ideas are burning, mind consciousness is burning. Also, whatever is felt as pleasant, or painful, or neither painful nor pleasant. That too is burning. Burning with what with a fire of passion, the fire of aversion and the fire of delusion. It is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrow, with lamentation, with pain with grief, with despair.
This is from the Fire Sermon, one of the most famous of the Buddha’s teachings. The world is burning in small and large ways. In ways both recognized and unacknowledged. It’s burning individually, and it’s burning collectively. In the scheme of things, my example is inconsequential, thankfully. Even in the worst case scenario, if the car had been stolen, I was fundamentally okay. We were fundamentally okay. And yet, for two hours, I had my own little hell in a bottle. All the scenarios running through my mind as another voice just kept saying, “Wait, you don't know.”
Those of you who’ve been reading Thich Nhat Hahn’s book, Understanding Our Mind, know he states at one point that we should ask ourselves, “Am I sure?” This voice kept saying, “You don't know yet what’s going on. Whatever it is, you’ll deal with it, and underneath all of it, you’re okay.” And yet… and yet.
I’ve said, in a different context, that what is highlighted in a moment of unease, of dis-ease, takes on very sharp edges, very rough, very spiny edges, so things can’t flow. You can’t flow. Everything becomes very jerky and threatening. Everything feels bound up. So myself as a self, and the moment as a moment, have edges that are not there, fundamentally. Yet they feel so real.
At the core of each moment, however, is also a very soft spaciousness where everything is okay, and not just okay but perfect—as in complete, as in whole, as in things as they are. My own work, as I continue to see it, is to gentle myself into the heart of the moment, is to soften into that core, so the edges can soften too.
I was telling someone last week that a singer friend pointed out to me that when you are able to hit the center of a note or a tone, there’s complete ease, complete relaxation. The sound just comes out effortlessly, pure, unobstructed. The center of a moment is like that, too.
So, to wrap up. The comment to the Eighth Realization says, “Take the great vow to help all beings, to suffer with all beings, and to guide all beings to the realm of great joy.” The meaning of compassion is “to suffer with.” That’s its etymology. Of course, we’re also vowing to help all beings, to guide all beings and not just that, but to walk with them to the realm of great joy. What are the ways we can do this for one another, even remotely? What are the ways that we “walk” each other along the path to joy, which is not a place. It doesn’t take years of practice. It takes a moment, an instant, softening from this [clenches fist] to this. [softens fist]
Bhikkhu Bodhi, reflecting on the Fire Sermon, says that we have to reimagine our life’s ultimate purpose. Instead of seeing in terms of wealth, power, domination, we recognize beauty and goodness. I would say we have to find it in things as they are. Because if suffering is the gap between wish and reality, practice is in that gap too. That’s where practice actually happens. Therefore, my dream of this Bodhisattva Academy, this aspiration that I’m putting into motion—I think of it as a program to inspire one another to the realm of great joy. May it be so with the help of all buddhas and bodhisattvas.
So, the world is burning, but let me close with this image from one of the poems in the Book of Serenity that has a slightly different tilt to this burning. It’s actually my teacher's favorite poem.
Grass boundless;
Inside the gate, outside the gate, you see by yourself.
To set foot in the forest of thorns is easy,
To turn the body outside the luminous screen is hard.
Look! Look!
How many kinds?
For the while going along with the old tree, with the same emaciation
in the cold,
About to follow the spring wind into the scars of burning.
Explore further
01 : Ādittasutta: Fire Sermon translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi
02 : Case 89, Book of Serenity, Verse by Hongzhi, translated by Wick and Cleary