Playing With Fire
by Jundo Cohen Roshi

When Buddhism came to China, Korea, Tibet and Japan … the Buddhist teachings on the emotions subtly changed (I paint with a broad brush, but I speak as a general trend). The fires of emotions were not seen as necessarily negative things, but they must be handled carefully and with balance. A campfire, so useful for cooking our supper if skillfully made, will quickly burn down the woods if left untended. A single candle which offers light can burn us and others, and the whole house down, if handled wrong. So it is with our emotions. Thus I say that the Precepts guide us away from excess and uncontrolled anger, greed, jealousy … Anger at injustices in the world, for example, may spur us on to fight for change … yet that anger should be kept in balance, and tempered with an equal dose of acceptance of life, lest it burns us to ashes too. The desire for change should not be allowed to run rampant as greed for and attachment to change from ‘how things are’. A healthy dose of competition need not become jealousy and violence. We should use strong words much as we would scold a 3 year old child found playing with matches … that is, with love and concern and understanding, not simply to hurt the child. A harsh word can be an “intervention” to shake a friend up who needs to hear … or it can simply be a cruel and destructive word meant to hurt someone (the most famous example of “Zen tough love” may be all those old tough talking Masters administering “40 blows” of Wisdom). Thus, do not extinguish life fires … but handle them with care and use them in constructive ways!

… I believe that there is a difference between angry thoughts, angry words and angry actions. Thus, if you think ugly thoughts (I do not know of any human being, short of a Buddha, who will not think ugly things sometimes … like yesterday when someone dumped trash in the farmfield behind our house), simply do as you can not to let them pass your lips. If ugly words pass your lips (again, I think it hard to be a human being and escape that … as my wife can testify when we have our semi-annual husband-wife barn burner) … do not act upon the angry and harmful impulses. All should be avoided, but thinking “I want to burn down your house” is not quite saying out loud “I want to burn your house” … each far removed from actually pouring gasoline on the house and lighting it!

What is more … we are not machines. We will all slip (although, hopefully, not doing too much damage in the process. I have never killed anyone … Thank Buddha! … let alone broken anyone’s jaw … but I do have a lovely dent in the wall that I made about 5 years ago in a moment of unbridled fire. I intentionally never fix it … and even cut it out and brought it with me when we moved … as a reminder of what I am capable of.) That is what it means to be human … a creature made, in traditional Buddhist understanding, partly of the fire element!

If we fall into the fire we should simply pull ourself out, dust off, learn from the experience … forgive what can be forgiven in our actions, sincerely apologize to whom we should … move on and try not to fall into the flames again.

Sekishin: That leads us to ‘Do not yield to anger’ …..

Gudo: Yes. This precept reminds us that Buddhism asks us to maintain balance in both body and mind, and as one aspect thereof, guides that we should seek to avoid falling into extremes of emotion, be it sudden bouts of anger or of fear or the like….. we should seek for the calm and peace of the middle ground.

IX: To seek as you can, in this body and life, to refrain from all anger.