The Mind Aflame
July 28, 1959
If the heart doesn’t have any inner nourishment, it won’t have any strength, because it’s hungry and thin. When it doesn’t have any nourishment, it goes out eating whatever it can find—bones and old dry skins—without finding any decent food to eat or water to drink at all. This is why it ends up shriveled and dry, because the heart, if it doesn’t have any inner goodness, is thin and gaunt, and goes running around all sorts of back alleys, scraping together whatever it can find just for the sake of having something to stick in its mouth. It doesn’t get to eat anything good at all, though. It can’t find a single thing to give it any flavor or nourishment. But if the heart is strong and well-fed, then whatever it thinks of doing is sure to succeed.
The Buddha saw that we human beings are thin and malnourished in this way, which is why he felt compassion for us. He taught us, ‘The mind that goes around swallowing sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations is eating a ball of fire, you know. Not any kind of food.’ In other words, ‘The eye is burning.’ Everything we see with the eye is a form, and each of these forms contains a ball of fire, even though on the outside it’s coated to look pretty and attractive. ‘The ear is burning.’ All the pleasing sounds we search for, and that come passing in through our ears from the day we’re born to the day we die, are burning sounds, are flames of fire. The heat of the sun can’t burn you to death, but sounds can burn you to death, which is why we say they’re hotter than the sun. ‘The nose is burning.’ We’ve been smelling smells ever since the doctor cleaned out our nose right after birth, and the nature of smells is that there’s no such thing as a neutral smell. There are only two kinds: good smelling and foul-smelling. If our strength is down and we’re not alert, we swallow these smells right into the mind—and that means we’ve swallowed a time bomb. We’re safe only as long as nothing ignites the fuse. ‘The tongue is burning.’ Countless tastes come passing over our tongue. If we get attached to them, it’s as if we’ve eaten a ball of fire: As soon as it explodes, our intestines will come splattering out. If we human beings let ourselves get tied up in this sort of thing, it’s as if we’ve eaten the fire bombs of the King of Death. As soon as they explode, we’re finished. But if we know enough to spit them out, we’ll be safe. If we swallow them, we’re loading ourselves down. We won’t be able to find any peace whether we’re sitting, standing, walking or lying down, because we’re on fire inside. Only when we breathe our last will the fires go out. ‘The body is burning.’ Tactile sensations are also a fire that wipes human beings out. If you don’t have any inner worth or goodness in your mind, these things can really do you a lot of damage.
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Greed, anger, and delusion are like three enormous balls of red-hot iron that the King of Death heats until they’re glowing hot and then pokes into our heads. When greed doesn’t get what it wants, it turns into anger. Once we’re angry, we get overcome and lose control, so that it turns into delusion. We forget everything—good, bad, our husbands, wives, parents, children—to the point where we can even kill our husbands, wives, parents, and children. This is all an affair of delusion. When these three defilements get mixed up in our minds, they can take us to hell with no trouble at all. This is why they’re called fire bombs in the human heart.
But if, when greed arises, we have the sense to take only what should be taken and not what shouldn’t, it won’t wipe us out even though it’s burning us, because we have fire insurance. People without fire insurance are those with really strong greed to the point where they’re willing to cheat and get involved in corruption or crime. When this happens, their inner fires wipe them out. To have fire insurance means that even though we feel greed, we can hold it in check and be generous with our belongings by giving donations, for instance, to the religion. Then even though we may die from our greed, we’ve still gained inner worth from making donations as an act of homage to the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha—which is like keeping our insurance payments up. This way, even though our house may burn down, we’ll still have some property left.
Anger. When this defilement really gets strong, it has no sense of good or evil, right or wrong, husband, wives, or children. It can drink human blood. An example we often see is when people get quarreling and one of them ends up in prison or even on death row, convicted for murder. This is even worse than your house burning down, because you have nothing left at all. For this reason, we have to get ourselves some life insurance by observing the five or eight precepts so that we can treat and bandage our open sores—i.e., so that we can wash away the evil and unwise things in our thoughts, words, and deeds. Even if we can’t wash them all away, we should try at least to relieve them somewhat. Although you may still have some fire left, let there just be enough to cook your food or light your home. Don’t let there be so much that it burns your house down.
The only way to put out these fires is to meditate and develop thoughts of good will. The mind won’t feel any anger, hatred, or ill will, and instead will feel nothing but thoughts of sympathy, seeing that everyone in the world aims at goodness, but that our goodness isn’t equal. You have to use really careful discernment to consider cause and effect, and then be forgiving, with the thought that we human beings aren’t equal or identical in our goodness and evil. If everyone were equal, the world would fall apart. If we were equally good or equally bad, the world would have to fall apart for sure. Suppose that all the people in the world were farmers, with no merchants or government officials. Or suppose there were only government officials, with no farmers at all: We’d all starve to death with our mouths gaping and dry. If everyone were equal and identical, the end of the world would come in only a few days’ time. Consider your body: Even the different parts of your own body aren’t equal. Some of your fingers are short, some are long, some small, some large. If all ten of your fingers were equal, you’d have a monster’s hands. So when even your own fingers aren’t equal, how can you expect people to be equal in terms of their thoughts, words, and deeds? You have to think this way and be forgiving.
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When you can think in this way, your good will can spread to all people everywhere, and you’ll feel sympathy for people on high levels, low levels and in between. The big ball of fire inside you will go out through the power of your good will and loving kindness.
This comes from getting life insurance: practicing tranquility meditation so as to chase the defilements away from the mind. Thoughts of sensual desire, ill will, lethargy, restlessness, and uncertainty will vanish, and the mind will be firmly centered in concentration, using its powers of directed thought to stay with its meditation word—buddho—and its powers of evaluation to create a sense of inner lightness and ease. When the mind fills itself with rapture—the flavor arising from concentration—it will have its own inner food and nourishment, so that whatever you do in thought, word, or deed is sure to succeed.
