Children at Play in a Burning House

by Nelson Foster

It was a metaphor originally. Lotus Sutra, chapter three. A wealthy old man living with his many sons (and presumably many daughters, too) in a vast compound. Counting his retainers, he sheltered perhaps as many as five hundred people there, within a wall that had just one narrow gate. The building was old, too, and when fire suddenly broke out, it burned hot and fast.

The old man immediately saw the danger and the need to escape, but the children, caught up in their games, didn’t notice anything. He thought first of carrying them out, but with so many of them and the gate so narrow.... He shouted for their attention, hoping to explain the situation, but—you know, kids—“They merely raced about this way and that in play and looked at their father without heeding him.” Sigh.

Then he hit on a stratagem, the “expedient means” of promising them what they wanted: cool toys! In particular, carts drawn by goats or deer or oxen, their very own. Roughly equivalent to a fast, new smartphone. That did it! The kids swarmed out the gate, all safe and sound, and the old gent rewarded each with a cart even better than he’d promised: a giant carriage arrayed with jewels and flowers, canopied, made comfortable with an abundance of cushions, and yoked to—yes!—a swift, powerful, pure-white ox.

I wish it had remained a metaphor. But this summer, as the children continued playing, it shifted category. Here we dwell. The grand old house has gone up in flames, no question, and the wise are screaming for the kids’ attention. Do the kids hear? Not much, it seems.

It surely isn’t accurate or fair to depict them—make that “us”—as completely consumed in games, oblivious to everything except the lure of cool stuff. Obviously, some of us are awake to the inferno raging on all sides, and not everyone is a sucker for the next fancy goat-cart. Yet a great many of us do seem disastrously preoccupied, if not with games then with social media or with what a young German attorney identified as perhaps the essential element in the Nazis’ rise to power: the “automatic continuation of ordinary life.” Doing the laundry. Shopping. Getting to work. Watching the Big Game. Keeping on keeping on.

Like many sangha members, I see this as a time of political crisis in the United States and of dangerous trends in the politics of numerous other countries. But I’ve come to see the fire this time as much bigger than that, as a total cultural and ecological phenomenon that puts the Earth household as a whole in jeopardy. Of course, if our planet’s sixth great extinction goes forward, taking our species with it, some stout forms of life will survive and eventually evolve into a new assembly of beings perhaps just as wondrous as the set that we’ve been privileged to know, a set itself the result, after all, of the fifth extinction. But I find that cold comfort.

If the world as we know it is going to hell in a handbasket, I feel obliged by my love for it, and by membership in it, to impede that process. This sense of obligation persists despite very reasonable doubts about the usefulness of such efforts as I can make; considering the magnitude of the destructive forces now in play, my capacity to affect the outcome seems puny indeed. But concern for effectiveness, at least my concern for effectiveness, pales next to the urgings I feel to protect what remains. Or to state the point in patently Buddhist terms, neither the vows we make explicitly nor the values implicit in practice and realization have much to do with feasibility and “realism.” How realistic or quantifiable is a bodhisattva’s commitment to forgo final awakening until other beings have all awakened?

The question I’m asking myself now, and want to ask you, too, is whether we’ve reached a point where changing our ways—discontinuing the “automatic continuation of ordinary life”—has be- come imperative. You and I may have different perceptions of the conflagration licking at the foundations of the house, how far it’s progressed, how swiftly it’s growing, what chances our current countermeasures have of extinguishing it, and so forth. But do we agree that the time has come to accept full responsibility for it and to revise our behavior in correspondingly urgent and far-reaching ways?

If so, what might those ways be? A number of sangha members have felt moved to step up their activity in the political process, hoping that the mid-term elections will precipitate much-needed changes in Washington. I share that hope, of course. Yet even the best electoral outcome seems unlikely to produce change of the scope, the profundity, and rapidity that our predicament calls for. Our worst problems lie beyond the bounds of legislation: our ever- swelling population, our seemingly insatiable desires for convenience and comfort, our gross insensitivity to the needs of other beings, our willingness to destroy mountains and rivers and otherwise to exploit “natural resources” for human benefit, our callousness toward members of even our own species, and our continuing failure to cooperate in the common cause of life on Earth. Not to mention our age-old fondness for games and our apparently infinite distractibility. I understand all of these as cultural problems at root, not amenable to political solutions but certainly open to solution through other avenues—if, and only if, enough of us get serious about it. Soon.

As for the wondrous ox-cart of the Buddhadharma, what role might it play now? It’s still ready to roll, I hope, but the old image needs an important correction: the cart isn’t waiting for its takers “outside the gate.” Unless you buy into the fantasy of escaping to Mars, our tradition, like everything else in our old home, stands to get crisped in the explosive, kalpa-ending firestorm we collectively have set and fueled. Finally, I think we’d better ask ourselves one more question: are the cushions of our fine cart too comfortable? I hope not.

Quotes

Burton Watson, translator. The Lotus Sutra. Columbia, 1993. p. 57.

Sebastian Haffner (Raimund Pretzel) quoted in Cass R. Sunstein, “It Can Happen Here.” New York Review of Books, June 28, 2018, p. 65.?

Snow falling lightly while I?

Sit empty and full