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Fire of Love

So there's an expression in English of fighting fire with fire. A little strange topic for today given it's raining, but fighting fire with fire. My understanding of the history of the origins of this expression is it had to do with farmers in the early 1800s in the prairies of the central United States. When there were prairie fires, they learned to set smaller fires in front of the approaching large prairie fire in order to protect themselves. And maybe unfortunately, the expression eventually became understood to also mean fighting violence with violence—that whatever someone brings you, you bring the same.

There is a marvelous story, perhaps a myth or fable, from the very first months of the Buddha's teaching, of him fighting fire with fire. I'm going to tell you the story. He was wandering around in Northern India, and he needed a place to stay for the night. He came upon a large group—it says 500 people—who were ascetics or spiritual practitioners living on the edge of a river, who were fire worshipers. They had a firehouse, a place where they did their fire ceremonies and lived their religious life.

He came upon them and he said to their leader, "Would it be possible for me to spend the night in your firehouse?" He needed a place to stay.

The man said, "Oh yes, we would be very happy for you to stay there. However, there's a ferocious, large, powerful fire serpent living in the house. It would be dangerous for you to go and spend the night there."

The Buddha replied, "Oh no, I'll be fine. Could I please stay there?"

Because the man thought it was so dangerous for the Buddha to do it, the Buddha had to ask three times. In ancient India, if you asked three times, they usually didn't say no the third time. So the man said, "Okay."

The Buddha went in and sat down. He made himself a seat inside the firehouse, sat down cross-legged, established himself in an upright sitting posture, and brought forth mindfulness. Often the Buddha would sit and meditate through the night; that was his idea of a good night's sleep.

Sure enough, this serpent came out and was upset that someone was in his house. He approached the Buddha and started shooting smoke at the Buddha. The Buddha thought that was interesting and said, "Well, what if I match the smoke with smoke?" That infuriated the serpent.

Then he started projecting ferocious flames at the Buddha. The Buddha thought, "Well, what if I match the fire with fire, without harming the serpent?" And that's the magic thing: without harming the serpent. The text says that filled with goodwill, filled with loving-kindness and care for the serpent, the Buddha matched fire for fire. He wasn't trying to harm the serpent, but he was matching fire with fire.

People outside could see the flames and smoke billowing out of this firehouse. They thought, "Oh no, the ascetic Gotama^[1] is certainly going to succumb. This will be his end." But in the morning, the Buddha came out with another big, terrible serpent curled up in his begging bowl. He handed it to the fire worshiper and said, "Here." And the Buddha was no worse off than before he went in.

One of the images of this that stands out for me is that the Buddha sat in meditation first. He sat in a strong, erect, upright, present posture—a posture where you can be really present for life, for yourself, whatever is going on, without leaning in and without pulling back, without getting activated, and without crumbling down or collapsing. This danger came at him, and he kept his strong, balanced position. In a sense, it was a neutral position, but also a very strong position. A posture of strength which is unassertive. A strength which is not asserting power over anyone, not being aggressive, just being present.

When the serpent came and attacked him, the Buddha responded somehow in kind. But was it really with smoke? Was it really in flames? There's another teaching where the Buddha is talking to a person whose profession is gathering wood for fire. In the course of their conversation, the Buddha says to them, "I have given up the burning of wood; I burn the blaze of wisdom within."

So he doesn't light the fire of wood; he lights the fire within. The inner fire, or inner light, is a representation of some kind of strength and power, but it's inner.

So the serpent comes towards the Buddha, and the Buddha keeps sitting there and doesn't move. I imagine he looks the serpent right in the eye, unflinchingly. Maybe this is a myth, but that's a powerful idea: that danger comes, and you neither turn away nor attack. It's not an eye for an eye kind of thing. For the Buddha, it is the fire of loving-kindness—his loving-kindness matched to the anger of this terrible serpent.

Apparently, the Buddha thought it was possible for loving-kindness to be powerful and strong. How do we let our love have a strength and power to it that can meet the challenges of our life? That's kind of the question. Is it possible?

I think that often enough in our Buddhist scene, where we emphasize a tremendous amount of compassion and loving-kindness, it sometimes goes along with a kind of meekness. It becomes about just accommodating or accepting others and trying very carefully not to harm. Sometimes it's interpreted as making sure no one feels hurt. But there's a big difference between harming and people feeling hurt. Harm and hurt are two different things. If you tell me I'm a pretty lousy teacher because I'm wearing a red shirt, I don't think you're harming me to say that. But I might feel hurt if my identity is tied up with my shirt.

We have a tremendous emphasis on not harming, but even with that, we can't be responsible if some people feel hurt when there's no assertion or attempt to harm. Sometimes simply being present in a strong way intimidates people. Sometimes holding our ground is taken as being assertive. Sometimes not giving in and accepting what people are saying is taken as an offense.

Maybe all these things are true sometimes, but I think there's a shadow side of our Buddhist tradition that I've seen over the decades. People are a little bit ready to weaken or diminish themselves in order to make other people comfortable. There's a time for that, for sure, but the shadow side is that it's sometimes done too often.

The flip side of that is often not learned in our tradition, I think. What's not really emphasized that often is the idea of becoming a strong person, maybe even a powerful person. But in what way? Strong and powerful in yourself, for yourself, in a certain kind of way—over yourself.

I'll give you an example of something that was very small at the time. I haven't thought about it for decades, but recently I've been thinking about it, and I realized, "Wow, this represented a real turning point for me in my Buddhist practice." How did I come across this practice? I thought back to my early years when I was a full-time Zen student. I was living at the San Francisco Zen Center, which has a farm in Marin County called Green Gulch Farm. I was working as a farmhand doing a lot of farm work.

One day, with another person, I had to carry some very heavy equipment from one side of the farm to the other, just the two of us. It was a long walk, and it was really painful for my hands to hold this. It really dug into my hands, and I said, "Okay, well, this is interesting. Let me see if I can manage this without having any reactivity in my mind. Can my mind stay at ease while my hands feel this pain?"

I don't know how well I did; I can't proudly say that I succeeded. But what I succeeded in doing was maintaining the practice of looking at it. Looking at my reactivity, letting it go, trying to decouple the pain in my hand from the state of my mind.

This decoupling that I was trying to do represented a continued way in which I practiced. I tried to see the reactivity in my mind and see where I had choice not to give in to it, not to pick it up, to leave it alone.

Where did I learn that? I learned it by sitting in meditation. As I sat in meditation, there was first a physical stillness that was hard to learn to do. I had to not give in to the impulse to move, to itch myself, or to avoid discomfort. That was a tough thing to learn—to not have the physical reactivity to it.

But the next stage was watching the mind. I discovered how much my mind reacted. I discovered that the reactivity of the mind often made other pain—physical pain, emotional pain—much worse. So I learned to watch my mind closely and see, "Okay, let go. Don't do that. Don't go along with that. Go back to the breath. Go back to here." I was going back to some peaceful place.

Over time, I started to track what was going on in my mind. When I was carrying this heavy equipment across the farm, meditation had become a reference point for daily life as well. To track my mind, to see what my mind was doing, and to exercise some choice about what goes on in my mind—what I pursue, what I'm involved in. In some sense, I was cultivating a kind of self-control, a certain kind of agency and strength over my reactivity to not give in to it. My reactivity was strong in itself. Maybe that was the serpent, and I learned to not let the serpent have the upper hand.

I don't know if that was the first time I really started doing this in daily life with this heavy equipment, but it represented a direction that my practice went: tracking what was going on in my mind.

A next phase happened after a few more years of Zen practice. I discovered that as I had a little more control over my mind—which meant having power over leaving the mind alone, not infusing the mind or having it caught up in reactivity—I became less reactive. What became important was love. Compassion, care, tenderness—there was space now for these other ways of being to well up within as a spring of goodness. They hadn't had space before because they were crowded out by my reactivity. They were crowded out by all the thoughts, stories, ideas, and imaginations that I had. As those quieted down, there was space to feel and sense something deeper within.

It became a very special time. At some point, I realized that compassion and loving-kindness were partly a choice. Not a choice to do it so much, but a choice to lose it. The choice to lose touch with it was an unconscious choice that my mind would make if I gave in to my reactivity. If I got caught up in the swirling thoughts, ideas, and fantasies of my mind, that closed that part of me out.

So at some point, I made a commitment to love and compassion. Not because I was going to work hard to be compassionate—that was never interesting for me—but rather, I was going to work hard at not covering it over.

Over time, I learned this wonderful thing: love has so many different flavors and qualities that are really beautiful to have, but it can also be very strong. Love can be powerful. Stated differently, love can be supported by, or come along with, a kind of inner strength that we learn to carry with us.

An inner strength that is comparable in daily life to the Buddha statue sitting in meditation. Sitting upright and strong. Neither assertive nor pulling back. Neither attacking nor afraid. Neither giving up nor requiring anyone else to give up, but very present. The statues of the Buddha in meditation usually have him with his eyes half open. One of the theories for that is that the Buddha is always connected to the world, but with soft eyes, a soft gaze.

Can we have the strength and presence to meet challenges and angry people with soft eyes? Can we meet anger not with anger, but with love? When the Buddha fought fire with fire, I would suggest there were two different kinds of fire. Maybe the serpent was a fire of anger, and for the Buddha, it was a fire of love. The Buddha said that hatred and anger are never overcome by hatred; they are always overcome by love.

Can that be something strong? I would emphatically say yes. But it's not a strength of reactivity. It's a strength of getting out of the way, a natural presence. Our ability to really be present and stay with what's happening has a chance to flower here for us, to be really present in a strong, full way.

I had a neighbor once who was really angry at some noise workers were making on our property. He came over and yelled at me. He was furious. I think the whole thing was completely unreasonable, but anyway, I stood there looking at him. I felt uncomfortable, a little bit afraid. So it wasn't like I was fearless. But I still stood there. I didn't back away, I didn't attack. I just stood there and looked at him, and I wondered, "How long can someone have a monologue like this?"

When he finally stopped, I looked at him calmly and said, "When you're talking this way, I feel afraid." I don't think I was expressing fear, but it was kind of true. I just looked at him—that's what was happening. In a sense, that was me meeting fire with fire. I just said, "This is what's happening."

He immediately calmed down, apologized, and left. That's the last time that neighbor has yelled at me, and we're kind of friends now again. But I wouldn't have been able to do that unless I had learned to track my reactivity, to track my fear and how I relate to fear. Fear sometimes gets the upper hand, and I believe it. The usual hindrances^[2] around fear might have come up. When anger arises, one hindrance is to attack others, another is to shut down, another is to get all restless and not know what to do. All kinds of reactivity can happen.

But by knowing and tracking my reactivity, I was able to exercise choice. "Stay here and be with it. I'm not going to give in to these habits." And then I was able to make a wiser choice. The wiser choice was just to stay and watch. I was pretty confident this was not a person who was going to be violent, even though his voice was strong.

Some of you know that Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a wonderful book called Strength to Love. How often do you associate love with strength? How often do you bring forth something in the family of love in a way that is present and strong? Not strong because it's infused with what we want—desire often makes love complicated and gives it forceful strength because we want something. But what is love that is not entangled with desire? Love that is offered to the world without assertion, without need, without wanting something, without leaning forward or pulling back, but allows us to be very present, upright, alert, available for the world, and available for wisdom and care flowing up within us, so that the wisest part of us can then choose what to do.

Lately, I've been thinking of this as a kind of strength. I'm also thinking of starting to use the expression "self-control," which is kind of taboo in our Buddhist scene. First, because of the word "self," and second, because there are a lot of teachings that say, "Don't try to control your experience." Both of these caveats are important. But sometimes, a very important part of Buddhist practice is, in fact, being able to control yourself. Not controlling what happens, but controlling the reactivity with which you respond to what's happening. Including your reactivity to your reactivity.

Some reactivity you can't help, but at some point, we have some choice. We take some control over the situation, even if all it is—which is not a small thing—is saying, "I'm going to be mindful of this. I'm not going to shoot a second arrow^[3]." That's taking control, taking agency, engaging in the practice.

And the "self" part of self-control is a non-philosophical, non-metaphysical self. If you say, "I'm going to go pee," that "I" is not a metaphysical problem. "There's no 'I' in Buddhism, you can't use that!" Well, you could do it for me, then. It's just a simple way of living. Who else is going to care for you? Who's going to take care of all the waste products in your mind? Don't expect other people to do it for you.

So this wonderful little tale of the Buddha fighting fire with fire, which I interpret to mean he fought the fire of hatred with the fire of love. What does it take for you to have that as a strength, so you can match whatever comes your way with something that's comparably powerful, effective, and matching?

The Buddha and his teachings put a very high value on the capacity to do this, no matter how difficult the challenges are. Some of the teachings on how to do this describe outrageous challenges, insisting that you should always maintain loving-kindness. Maybe it's religious hyperbole, but it emphasizes that it is possible to develop oneself. It is possible to grow something so that we don't become victims of what life brings, but we become the first responder that's ready to meet any fire that comes our way with something that can put it out.

I hope that gave you something to think about and reflect on. This idea of the Buddha in the firehouse is a symbolic tale that can be interpreted or applied in other ways, if you think about it. Maybe you'll do that.

Discussion

I thought that rather than taking questions today, maybe I'd like to suggest those of you who are willing to stay form little groups of maybe three and have a little discussion about what this talk has evoked for you. We have about 10 or 15 minutes, so we'll probably take maybe six or seven minutes for that, and then we'll come back as a big group and we can take some questions and hear a little bit more. Then we'll take a break, and at 11 o'clock we'll have the community meeting. If you don't mind, turn to someone near you—three or so people—and introduce yourself. And if you're not interested in staying, thank you for being here.