The Fire Brigade
Whose House do We Save First?
In chapter 3 of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka, aka the Lotus Sūtra, we find the parable of the burning house. Generally, when this parable is discussed, the focus is on the three types of carts the father of the children of the house uses to entice them from conflagration. When they arrive outside they find only one kind of cart gifted to them by their father.
The Buddha interprets the meaning of this parable for Śāriputra:
“A tathāgata has wisdom, strengths, fearlessnesses, and the unique qualities of a buddha. He has great power through miraculous powers. He is a father to the world. He has reached the perfection of the supreme wisdom of skill in great methods. [F.31.b] He has great compassion. He has an untiring mind. He wishes to benefit. He is compassionate. He appears in the three realms that are like a house with a ruined upper story and roof burning with a great mass of suffering, and he liberates from desire, anger, and ignorance those beings who undergo birth, aging, illness, death, misery, wailing, suffering, unhappiness, the darkness of ignorance, the obscuration of the dark of blindness, and being in bondage, in order to bring them to the highest, complete enlightenment.
We mortals tend to focus on beings who seem to be suffering the most and who are most visible to us, especially of those beings who look like us:
“As soon as he appears he sees the beings who are being burned, roasted, pained, and tormented by birth, aging, illness, death, misery, wailing, suffering, and unhappiness. For the sake of pleasures, with their desire as the cause and basis, they experience many forms of suffering. In this lifetime their grasping is the basis for experiencing in their next life many kinds of sufferings in the hells, as animals, and in the realm of Yama.
When we look at economic inequality, most people feel it is unjust that so few billionaire oligarchs control a vast portion of human wealth.
“The devas and humans experience the suffering of being poor, encountering what is unpleasant, and being separated from what is pleasant. While circling within a great mass of suffering, they take pleasure in amusements, are not afraid, are not terrified, and cannot be made to be terrified; they do not understand, are not aware, are not troubled, and do not wish to leave.
“They amuse themselves in the three realms, which are like a burning house, running back and forth. Even though they are afflicted by that great mass of suffering, they do not see it or identify it as suffering.
From the Buddha’s perspective, these people are all suffering, they just do not know it.
From the Buddha’s perspective we are locked in karmic conflicts older than this universe. In some incarnation or another, we have inflicted every harm and received every harm.
In some incarnations we are mother and child, in other incarnations, mortal enemies. In some incarnations we are rulers, in others, we are paupers. It is all driven by fundamental delusion. If one wants to cure an illness, one must treat the cause, not the symptoms. Treating the symptoms is merely palliative care.
When we look at the suffering in the world, I notice that many Western Buddhists refuse to acknowledge that all suffering of whatever kind is a result of karma. They often try to explain this away. In fact, most people in the West who assert they follow the Buddha’s teachings are also agnostic on the question of rebirth. Why this refusal? Their notions of karma are confused with justice and also stem from a one-lifetime view. They fail to recognize that all birth in the three realms is driven by the ripening of karma. This means that everything that occurs to sentient beings is bound up in karma and its results either directly or indirectly.
For many people, the Buddhist teachings on karma seem monstrous, and appear to be victim blaming. If we accept that the suffering of the cruel and unjust wars is the ripening of karma, as well as the creation of karma, it will seem to those whose thinking is primarily justice-oriented that the Buddha’s teaching of karma are unjust, unfair, and unkind. The Buddha said:
2. “Master Gotama, what is the reason, what is the condition, why inferiority and superiority are met with among human beings, among mankind? For one meets with short-lived and long-lived people, sick and healthy people, ugly and beautiful people, insignificant and influential people, poor and rich people, low-born and high-born people, stupid and wise people. What is the reason, what is the condition, why superiority and inferiority are met with among human beings, among mankind?”
3. “Student, beings are owners of kammas, heirs of kammas, they have kammas as their progenitor, kammas as their kin, kammas as their homing-place. It is kammas that differentiate beings according to inferiority and superiority.”
When it comes to the results of actions, the Buddha continuest length:
5. "Here, student, some woman or man is a killer of living beings, murderous, bloody-handed, given to blows and violence, merciless to living beings. Due to having performed and completed such kammas, on the dissolution of the body, after death, he reappears in a state of deprivation, in an unhappy destination, in perdition, in hell. If, on the dissolution of the body, after death, instead of his reappearing in a state of deprivation, in an unhappy destination, in perdition, in hell, he comes to the human state, he is short-lived wherever he is reborn. This is the way that leads to short life, that is to say, to be a killer of living beings, murderous, bloody-handed, given to blows and violence, merciless to living beings.
On the other hand, Steven Batchelor, the charioteer of “Secular” Buddhism, writes in After Buddhism (pg. 297):
The doctrine of karma is theory of cosmic justice. Rebirth is simply medium within which such justice plays itself out.
But is it? Batchelor’s account is suffers from a category error. There is no judge or jury handing out karmic justice. There is no such thing as “karmic justice” Karma is not justice, though it is often presented that way. The Buddha’s account of karma however leaves no room for his interpretation at all:
3. "Student, beings are owners of kammas, heirs of kammas, they have kammas as their progenitor, kammas as their kin, kammas as their homing-place. It is kammas that differentiate beings according to inferiority and superiority."
While karmic causes and effects do inhabit a moral dimension, it is distinct from the explanation of afflictive production and birth through dependent origination’s three modes—serial over three lifetimes, simultaneous, and instant. The goal of the doctrine of dependent origination is simply explain why sentient beings are born in samsara. Vasubandhu states that dependent origination was taught in part to stem questions concerning past lives from his students. He condenses dependent origination into three main members: affliction, action, and results. If one knows these causes, one can apply remedies to prevent these results. It is here that karma is then discussed.
The goal of the doctrine of karma is to avoid suffering, permanently, not temporarily, through the avoidance of negative deeds, the cultivation of positive deeds, and the cultivation of a purified mind. Due to this, Vasubandhu’s presentation of karma contains a detailed discussion of personal liberation vows prior to discussing the causes and results of karma.
The Mulasarvāstivādin Sūtra on Personal Liberation presents the personal liberation discipline taught by the past seven Buddhas:
Do not engage in all misdeeds. Engage in abundant virtue. Completely tame one’s mind. This is the doctrine of buddhas.
Dānaśīla comments in his Memorandum on the Sūtra on Personal Liberation :
“Do not engage in all misdeeds” shows the training of superior discipline (adhiśīla), “Engage in abundant virtue” shows training of superior prajñā (adhiprajñā) because the abandonment of all afflictions is ultimate virtue. “Completely tame one’s mind” refers to training in a superior mind (adhicitta).
In order to escape (niḥsaraṇa, nges ‘byung) from the three realms, Dānaśīla points out that the training of superior discipline is necessary as a support for training in superior mind. What is superior mind? He equates this with the four dhyānas. Essentially, the superior mind is cleansed of the obscuration of desire (rāga) and the obscuration of confusion (moha).
In short, this is the classic trio of three trainings: discipline, concentration, and wisdom. This trio, Dānaśīla writes, is the method of escape. He also writes that the purpose of superior discipline is purify the gates of lower realms and attain the noble path. Because it liberates from all suffering, freedom from suffering is the long term result of a person engaging in discipline. Thus, the very point of superior discipline, mind, and wisdom is escaping from samsara. In order to free ourselves of samsara, we need to purify the three poisonous afflictions in our mind streams. Why? Affliction is the cause of karma and nothing else. Every afflicted intention creates either positive or negative karma.1
Even from a Mahāyāna point of view, we must ourselves escape from samsara—attain liberation by overcoming the afflictive obscuration—before we can be of any real benefit to others.
From the point of view of the Buddha, therefore, that karma leads to suffering is just a fact, an ineluctable fact. However, since there is no truly existing agent of karma, there is no truly existing subject upon whom karma ripens. There isn’t even a conventionally existent agent or subject.
Suffering and causes of suffering exist, but no suffering sufferer exists. The root cause of suffering is the ignorance that imputes a self, an agent. From the moment of “I am” there is the dualism of “They are,” leading to the three afflictions: desire, hatred, and confusion. The causes and conditions of all of this terrible suffering will not be found in the history of the world, material relations analyzed by Marx, and so on. All of these worldly scholars merely describe symptoms, not root causes.
One difficulty that people have with the karmic perspective of the Buddha is that even though there is no conventionally existent agent of karma, the ripening of karma is personal, individual, and specific. The way this is explained in Madhyamaka teachings is that the falsely imputed I—and therefore, the nonexistent I—can act as an agent and a recipient of vipaka, the ripening of karma, in just the same way that a car, which does not exist in its parts, one of its parts, or all of the together—being a purely an imputation on a collection of parts that can produce a function—one can drive to a store in a car, and also be hit by another driver. But the driver does not conventionally exist, and neither does the car. Why do we say that the driver and car are conventionally nonexistent? Because no driver actually appears. The driver is a false imputation on a collection of parts, a mere label for an appearance of parts. Labeling the parts “driver” or “car” does not make a driver or car appear, any more than labeling an apparent elephant “pink” makes pink elephants.
Both the conventionally nonexistent driver and car are capable of acting as agents of karma and can experience the ripening of karma. Therefore, the karma and its ripening conventionally exist in the sense that karma is created and ripens, but it is created by a delusion and ripens on a delusion.
Thus, the purpose of the Dharma is not to rescue nations, groups, or other imputed identities. These are mere temporary labels applied out of delusion which impute an unreal identity onto impermanent formations, just as we impute “I am” onto our own five aggregates.
The purpose of the Dharma is not to address climate change, political and economic injustice, and so on, despite these issues being laudable goals for us to address with worldly means, through politics and economics, but that is not our main objective. The purpose of the Dharma is to show sentient beings that there is a true path to freedom and omniscience. First, to be any real benefit, we must attain our freedom. Second, to be of lasting benefit, we must attain the two-fold omniscience—which here means only that we have knowledge of the real nature of all phenomena and all true paths of liberation.
There is no such thing as “collective liberation.” Every sentient being must choose the Dharma for themselves, choose to follow the path, and realize for themselves the truth of the Dharma: “All compounded phenomena are impermanent. All afflicted phenomena are suffering. All phenomena are without identity. Nirvana is peace.” This must be known individually (pratyātmajñānatā) by each of us, one person at a time. But this will not happen out of some revolution. This will only succeed through personal evolution.
My teacher, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, discusses the need for evolution as opposed to revolution:
I always say that we should develop evolution – that means developing my knowledge, not remaining in dualistic vision too much, not being conditioned by that. And developing my knowledge then that becomes a good example in this society.
Many people say that we need peace in this world. But how can we have peace in the world when everyone is limited and will not open up a little, always thinking of ‘me’ ‘we’ etc. Political parties are the same, countries are the same. If we need peace, we need evolution and evolution must develop in the condition of the individual, not revolution. We always have the idea that we want to change someone. This is called revolution, but it doesn’t work and it has no benefit…
Some people have conflicts and think egoistically, “That person is creating problems for me, but I am innocent.” That is not true because Buddha said that everything is interdependent, so if you know that, it is not difficult to understand. If you have nothing to do with that person, why do you have problems? If you have a problem it means that there is a relationship. In this case you shouldn’t think that you want to make a revolution. You cannot convince another person at all. You can observe yourself and free your tensions. It is not difficult to discover your real nature, your condition. If you have this kind of problem and free your tensions, you feel much better. You are happy. If you develop your tensions more and more, you feel much heavier and are more charged up and confused.
In closing, we are not picking this or that house to save, because the whole of the three realms is on fire. We are trying to save the whole house. Not just the part we see burning in front of us. Come on in, at least the fire is warm.
One essential point missing in so-called modern mindfulness movement and MBSR is that through insight, we can easily control the positive and negative mental factors in our minds, since they function in groups. It is impossible for a negative mind to arise when there are positive mental factors in the mind such as faith, and likewise, it is impossible for a positive mind to arise in the presence of negative mind such as doubt, and so on, when affected by the afflictive mental factors.