Book of Serenity #30: Dasui’s Aeonic Fire
A monk asked Dasui, “When the fire at the end of an aeon rages through and the whole universe is destroyed, is this destroyed or not?”
Dasui said, “Destroyed.”
The monk said, “Then is goes along with that?”
Dasui said, “It goes along with that.”A monk asked Longi, “When the fire at the end of an aeon rages through and the whole universe is destroyed, is this destroyed or not?”
Longji said, “Not destroyed.”
The monk said, “Why is it not destroyed?”
Longji said, “Because it is the same as the universe.
“Aeonic” is such an evocative term.
I have spent some time reading, and reading about, David Bentley Hart’s new translation of the New Testament. His intention has been to return some of the stark weirdness of that text to our modern ears, trying to bring forward the rushed and unpolished voices of the evangelists, the harsh and urgent juxtaposition of the mundane and transcendent among this apocalyptic group that called itself “the followers of the way” before they were “Christians”. He attempts to give us something close to a transliteration, unhindered by the interpretive structure created by later Christians, whether it be the generation just after Nicaea or the translators of the King James Bible. As all of Hart’s critics (and he himself) point out, a non-interpretation is impossible when translating, but I find the results of his effort very satisfying, especially as I read it (dare I say it) Buddhistly.
Of interest here is his work with the Greek word also brought to our attention by this koan: aeon. This word in most or all translations of the NT is given in English as “everlasting” or “eternal” — as in Matthew 25, wherein the nations that care for the hungry, the naked, the sick, the stranger, and the imprisoned are promised eternal life, and the nations that do not, eternal punishment. Timely reading no matter how you read it. Hart, citing sources contemporary to the NT authors (or author-communities, as is more likely), says that this aeon is more properly interpreted as referring to “the age”, as in “The Age to Come”. An age can be any length (from the length of a lifetime, to something approximating the kalpa Roshi has described to us) but are certainly not understood as the endless duration indicated by “eternal” or “everlasting”. They refer to a limited duration. Further, that age can be bounded by meaning than by any definite number of years. It might be closer to how Blake uses eternity and infinity, here:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour….
I wonder then if the “Age to Come” that Christians are thinking about and promising is here, now, and the salvation and punishment are as well — or again, Buddhistly, that the One The Comes Thus, the Tathagata, is always impending, bending our ordinary linear time onto itself. The aeonic fire, that which it burns, and the ash that remains are always right here.
It also puts me in mind of the Ages of the Earth. Enkyo Roshi O’Hara speaks of the aeonic fire in connection with the looming nuclear threat, but the climatic one. Maybe this is a generational thing (speaking of age and meaning). The fire of this age, that comes age over age, makes me think of this XKCD about historical (and beyond) global warming. I urge you to take five or ten minutes to scroll through it — when I first did it, it gave me this aeonic perspective, the scale on which we absolutely must think of how we are so dramatically altering our climate.
It’s true that our planet has changed drastically before, it’s true that it is changing drastically now, and it’s true (97% of scientists say!) we are the source of that change. But that attitude of “we humans, separate entities, have changed this other thing, the environment, over there” is so obviously shortsighted in the aeonic context of climate change. We are so intimately connected to our climate — how can we be said to be separate from it? It is our source, our context, and the boundary of our lives. The cosmically paper-thin surface environment of this Earth is our whole kosmos. No one looking from far away would see humans and the Earth, and see two. It is our thought that those are two that got us in this mess: we thought, we can take without limit from the Earth and not somehow take from ourselves as well.
So the aeonic fire comes from us, comes for us. It seems that we have to think on this level to be able to respond effectively — to see our persistent economic and industrial growth and the material security and comfort it has created intimately linked to the danger and disruption coming our way as the aeon moves toward a dramatic climax. It is all cause and effect: “karma” according to another tradition.
In that sense, we are threatened along with the universe, but are also that aspect of the universe that can choose to act. And here I can scale down from the aeonic perspective into what I do in my own life, noticing at each notch that I am never separate from what’s around me, as I’m never separate from the Earth. Grabbing or pushing away another will grab or push away some aspect of my Self. I’m thinking of Thomas Merton describing an argument made by Augustine:
“that envy and hatr
ed try to pierce our neighbor with a sword, when the blade cannot reach him unless it first passes through our own body.”
When I encounter a person who I feel I cannot tolerate, I remember sewing my rakasu, into which I stitched every aspect of my life. Whatever is offending me that I want to push away is the same as me, not separate from me, and so my responsibility, my reckoning with my own intolerable aspects, my path.
This scales up again, all the way up to this aeon we now call the Anthropocene, and beyond — we face a reckoning of our own creation. What we deny consciously will come back to haunt us, until we recognize we are exactly it. The universe and the fire and the ash.
Jingzun:
Clearly there is no other truth
Only the Way sealed Huening of the South
One saying — ‘it all goes along with the fire’
Sends a monk running over a thousand mountains
Hustling, running, ruining! I’ve run over a thousand words! What about you?
