This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Warmth & Cool; Insight & the 5 Elements (3/5) Fire!. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by an unknown speaker at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Welcome, everyone, to the series on the five elements and insight. I’m very happy to be sharing these teachings with you this week. I’d love to have you either share with a friend now or later, or in your heart, what you’ve noticed about practicing with fluidity, the water element, and motion in the last 24 hours.
As we’re getting started, the invitation is to tune in again to your body. Perhaps take a couple of longer, slower breaths, noticing the weight of your body on the cushion or chair. Feel a sense of being grounded. Then, allow the breathing to be natural and feel into the moisture on the skin, perhaps in your mouth, in your breath—moisture or dryness.
Invite the mind and the heart to bring awareness of this moment to the forefront. Feel into a sense of warmth or cool, the heat in the body. Maybe the coolness of the air on your skin, the warmth of the sun, or the coolness of a cloudy day. Just check in.
In general, feel into the change, the shift, the flowing nature of all of these sensations. Attune more closely, perhaps, to the motion and movement of the breath if that’s your anchor, or the overall flow of sensation coming and going throughout the whole body. Invite the heart to rest and the mind to settle in this embodied moment.
Tune in also to any resonance of warmth or coolness in the mind and heart. Notice without judgment any agitation. Meet that with the warmth of kindness and compassion. Allow mental activity to cool and to calm as you allow awareness to move inward and downward, settling into the body. Feel into the warmth and vitality of this body, one breath at a time.
We’ll now practice in silence for a while.
From time to time, reconnect with the felt sensations of aliveness: the warmness or the cool, the weight or lightness, fluidity or stillness.
In the last remaining moments of this formal meditation together, the invitation is to open up the aperture of awareness, allowing all of present moment experience to be included within it, just moving through.
As we bring this meditation to a close, consider for yourself any moments of goodness, connection, presence, or peace in this meditation, letting them nourish your heart and practice. Then, turn your attention and intentions outwards towards all the others your life touches, directly and indirectly. Cultivate the wish that they may benefit, that the benefits of our practice here together ripple out to all of the lives we touch, and all of the lives they touch, outwards and outwards.
May all beings be safe, happy, peaceful, and free. And may our practice here together be a cause and condition for greater love, liberation, and peace in the world.
Thank you for your practice.
Today we are picking up on the third in a five-part series on practicing with the elements in support of insight. The five elements are earth, water, fire, air, and space. And today, we are on fire.
We’ll continue this exploration both in terms of contemplation—that’s intentional consideration of these qualities of experience—and how the Buddha framed them and talked about them in the ancient teachings, and also in terms of the direct experience of the quality of the fire element, which I’ll talk about in a moment, in our own practice. Then I’ll drop in a little bit about some of the inspirations that he offered, both for fire and for fire going out. So that’s where we’re going.
First, to say the direct experience of the fire element is very simple: sensations of warmth or cool, or even hot or cold. And its function, whether it’s in the core of our bodies or the earth’s molten core or in a campfire, is to heat. Simple, right?
So, noticing shifting and changing sensations, like we went over in the meditation—of hot or cold, warmth or cool—can be one more set of embodied experiences that can highlight the sense of nature and inconstancy, of change. It can be interesting to notice how other conditions, including external humidity or dryness, or our internal emotional and mental perceptions and filters, impact even something as basic as how we perceive heat or cool.
I was just camping on a retreat, and it was really interesting to notice that over the course of the week, my tolerance for cool went up, because there were some quite cold nights at altitude. What would have felt uncomfortably cool here in Santa Cruz felt just fine there. And the perception of heat also shifted over the course of the retreat. In part, that’s true not just because of acclimatization in our bodies, but how our minds relate.
For example, if one is agitated, one is much more likely to feel warmer, perhaps even more bothered. There’s that term, of course, “hot and bothered,” right? This is dukkha1. However, if one is very calm, one can be likely to feel cooler even in the exact same external temperature. With equanimity, not agitated either way, there’s a kind of an internal coolness that’s more of a mental quality that allows for shifts and changes without getting caught up, bothered, or overly attached.
In terms of contemplation, the ancient teachings have a number of similes and idioms about fire, both in terms of helpful qualities and unhelpful qualities. There are far too many to unpack in a short little talk like this, but I’ll just touch on a few of the more important ones in the sense of the tradition.
Many of the Buddha’s similes and metaphors associate fire with unhelpful qualities. The Buddha likened holding resentment towards others to picking up a hot coal and holding on to it, hoping that they will get burned. It doesn’t work, does it?
Also, in his famous Fire Sermon, the Buddha said, “All is burning.” In that, he was referring to all of our senses burning with greed or lust, hatred, and delusion. As I mentioned Monday, this picks up on how the Buddha was a brilliant reframer and repurposer of the cultural soup within which he lived in ancient India. In the Upanishads2, which emerged before the Buddha’s time and continued to be spoken and recorded perhaps during his time (we’re not sure because all of this was ancient and quite an oral history), natural elements like fire were considered qualities or potentialities imbued with life. So, for example, when fire was provoked or agitated, it ignited. These same exact words for anger that were used in the Upanishads were used in the Buddha’s teachings. And they didn’t just talk about the physical igniting; they spoke to the emotional resonances, the emotional processes. Today we use similar expressions, like “burning with rage,” right?
A mature practitioner, an awakened person, is released from this kind of burning by a cooling, an inner cooling of disenchantment—disenchantment with being drawn into the stories, the miasma of reactivity based on greed, hatred, and delusion, based on senses and the ideas that come from what comes through our senses.
The Buddha taught that letting go of clinging also releases the fires of greed, hatred, or delusion. I personally think it’s fascinating that the word for clinging and the word for fuel for a fire are the same ancient word: upādāna3.
So what that means is—and check it out for yourself—letting go of some obsessive want or grudge releases and dissolves reactivity. And when someone completely frees their mind, the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion are released, blown out: nibbāna4, or nirvana.
There was an allusion to this in the poem that I read at the end of the first talk in this series. I’ll just read the very end of it. This is from Paṭācārā5, and it’s based on the Therīgāthā6, the awakening songs of the first women who practiced with the Buddha.
I let my mind go, and it flowed downhill with the water toward my little hut. I went inside, sat on the bed, and lowered the wick of the lamp. All by itself, the flame went out.
So fire released, or as Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu7 calls it, “fire unbound,” is one of the most important similes for fully waking up, for not burning with reactivity.
At times in the Buddha’s teachings, he used similes about fire to communicate helpful qualities too. In fact, the ancient tradition likens the eye—remember we’re back in the Bronze Age here—to a fire stick. And there’s actually kind of a detailed anatomy that isn’t that far off, if you think of what they had available to them, about how fire and the eye are linked to sight, to vision, to light, to clarity. This gets picked up on in the later traditions because fires, after all, don’t just emit heat; they also radiate light.
So this is my fanciful riff on the fire element combined with the water element: heat plus water brings steam, capacity, and power. Light plus water can bring the beauty of shimmering waves or the breathtaking moment of a rainbow.
On a metaphorical, emotional level, we can connect with the warmth of care, the heat of determination. The Buddha advised his son Rāhula to make his meditation like fire. Anything bad or disgusting thrown into fire is simply used as fuel, burned up. He said if you make your meditation like fire, agreeable and disagreeable things will not invade the mind and remain.
For me, this teaching demonstrates that even the most unwanted experiences can be fuel for awakening, and that one kind of fire—meditative fire—can contain the damage of the other, of reactivity. Kind of like a controlled burn.
So to recap, practicing with and meditating on the sensations of hot and cold, heat and warmth, and our relationship to those sensations can help open us up to the perception of inconstancy and how our minds and hearts can shift our relationship to experience, including our relationship to reactivity and to inconstancy itself. Noticing any clinging for or against what comes through our senses is a first step towards shifting from burning reactivity to coolness, and eventually to freedom.
Thank you for your kind attention. And your assignment, should you choose to accept it over the next 24 hours, is to notice heat and coolness in your own direct experience and how you’re relating to it based on your own state in that moment. And for extra credit, notice moments of clinging and reactivity, and moments where the clarity of light and awareness emerges.
Thank you so much for your attention. I look forward to being back with you tomorrow.
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” Original transcript said “duka.” ↩
Upanishads: A series of ancient Sanskrit texts that contain some of the central philosophical concepts of Hinduism. Original transcript said “upupanachads.” ↩
Upādāna: A Pali word that means both “clinging” or “attachment” and “fuel” or “sustenance.” The original transcript said “Upana.” ↩
Nibbāna: The Pali word for the ultimate goal of Buddhism, which is the cessation of suffering and the cycle of rebirth. It literally means “to be extinguished” or “blown out,” like a fire. It is the equivalent of the Sanskrit word “Nirvana.” The original transcript said “nibban.” ↩
Paṭācārā: One of the most renowned female disciples of the Buddha, whose story of immense loss and eventual awakening is recorded in the Therīgāthā. The original transcript said “Patachara.” ↩
Therīgāthā: A collection of short poems in the Pali Canon, attributed to the early Buddhist nuns, recounting their struggles and attainment of enlightenment. The original transcript said “terriata.” ↩
Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu: An American Buddhist monk of the Thai Forest Tradition. He is a well-known author and translator of the Buddha’s teachings. The original transcript said “Tanisro.” ↩