World Ablaze
Issue #3.5 ~ June 29th, 2024
Author’s notes:
(1) I’d like to welcome all the new subscribers who’ve joined us in the weeks since the last issue of TLBR posted in early May. I believe that many of you may have found your way to this newsletter via Maia Duerr’s awesome new Substack listing of Buddhist-inspired newsletters available on Substack, which she has very appropriately named “Dharma Stack”. For those of you who have not yet come across this listing, I encourage you to have a look here. Enjoy!
(2) The essay that follows was written in the days immediately preceding this past Thursday night’s debate/debacle, and was awaiting only a final proof-reading and the usual last-minute edits before being posted. As I sat down this morning to perform that editorial task, I was tempted to put the entire piece aside, and to begin a new and more timely commentary on the upheaval Biden’s dismal debate performance has injected into his re-election campaign. Instead, I’ve decided to go ahead with this post as written, to ask you to ponder your own response to this latest political crisis in light of the many other blazing global issues mentioned below, and to post my own response to the debate and its aftermath in the next issue of TLBR, as soon as possible.
World Ablaze
Under the torrid heat dome that’s encapsulated my hometown New York City and much of the neighboring northeast region of the United States during the past week, and that thankfully is just now beginning to abate, every trip outdoors has reminded me of the famous “Fire Sermon” which Siddhartha Gautama - the historical Buddha - is reputed to have preached to a group of newly acquired followers some two and a half millennia ago.
Here’s an abridged version of the beginning of his talk, as related by the author Pankaj Mishra in his 2004 book “An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World” …
Everything is ablaze. What is ablaze? The eyes are ablaze. The objects seen by the eyes are ablaze. The visual sensations - whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neither - are ablaze. The ears are ablaze. Sounds are ablaze. The nose is ablaze. Tastes are ablaze. The body is ablaze. The mind is ablaze. Objects of thought are ablaze. The sensations produced by thoughts - whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neither - are ablaze.
But what are they ablaze with? I tell you they are ablaze with the fire of greed, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of delusion, ablaze with birth, old age, death, grief, lamentation, suffering, sorrow, and despair.
I’ve cut short the excerpt at this point, because Gautama goes on to urge his listeners to extinguish these fires of greed, hatred, and delusion with which their bodily senses are “ablaze” in order for them to attain some sort of personal liberation from their various physical and mental sufferings.
All well and good, for those alive in that long-ago and long-gone world. But for those of us living today in this here-and-now world, such personal liberation is all but impossible to attain, if not in fact ludicrous to seek.
For what this atmospheric phenomenon currently afflicting my local environs is communicating to us is that it’s not our bodily senses that are ablaze, it’s the world in which we live that’s ablaze. And, to paraphrase the rhetorical question posed by Gautama in the fire sermon above, what is our world ablaze with?
I would assert that it is first and foremost ablaze with the effects of catastrophic climate change - dangerously warming temperatures in both the air and the oceans, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, disappearing coral reefs, and ever more frequent extreme weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and wildfires. It’s ablaze with wars, with famine, with political violence - and with the countless refugees that those three atrocities give rise to. It’s ablaze with the fires of our collective greed, hatred, and delusion. It’s ablaze with a deadly societal sense of dread that things are falling apart and there’s nothing we can do about it.
And thanks to all of the above, the world is newly ablaze with the blind rush of so many to embrace authoritarian leaders as the ones who will save us from all that’s already ablaze.
What we so desperately need is not personal liberation. We need world liberation.
I participate in two separate monthly discussion groups comprised of secular Buddhists interested in how the ethical teachings of Buddhism can inform our efforts at social engagement and political action. In both of these groups, the overriding topic of discussion in recent months has been this emerging global trend toward authoritarianism, and especially how this trend is currently manifesting in the upcoming United States presidential election.
I wish I could report that our discussions have led us to some vision of a way forward. But such has not been the case. For now, it would appear that the fires with which our world are ablaze are neither susceptible to being extinguished nor on the verge of burning themselves out.
If such indeed turns out to be the case, then our collective task becomes even more challenging than it already is. If we cannot succeed in using the ethical teachings of Buddhism to prevent this turn toward authoritarianism, we will need to find creative new ways of using them to persist and persevere in our efforts to ease the further suffering that authoritarianism will surely inflict upon this already blazing world.