January 5 – the burning world

We’ll walk a burning world where the sun shines darkness

― Swans, Mona Lisa, Mother Earth (The Burning World, 1989)


Around two-and-a-half millennia ago in what is now Bodh Gaya, sometime after breakfast*, the Buddha spoke what has become known as The Fire Sermon**, or Adittapariyaya Sutta in Pali. 

The beginning of that sutta (or sutra in Sanskrit), runs as follows:

“Bhikkhus (monks), all is burning. And what is the all that is burning? “The eye is burning, forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.”

He goes on to say the same about each of the other five consciousnesses (Buddhism has mind as a sense consciousness as well as the five we would usually consider), the ears, nose, tongue, body and mind. 

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January 4 – time of the dying

“In my time of dying, want nobody to mourn
All I want for you to do is take my body home”


― Led Zeppelin, In My Time of the Dying (Physical Graffiti, 1975)


I am coming to the end of reading In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.  Yongey Mingyur is a Tibetan Buddhist monk and abbot of Tergar monastery and the book is about his decision to go into retreat as a wandering aesthetic on the streets of India. 

Becoming sick with dysentery after eating leftover food, he finds himself contemplating death and the ways that Tibetan Buddhism prepares its followers to deal with that inevitability. 

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January 2 – David’s day

“This must be Thursday.  I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”

― Arthur Dent in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)


Good morning! 

And so, the second day of the year dawns.  Thursday is notable in my house for one reason – my friend David’s afternoon visits. 

When I moved to my small village in rural Kent in 2001, I was surprised to find that it was home to a Christian community of Anabaptists (who favour adult baptism, when a person is old enough to decide for themselves whether they wish to commit to the faith or not) known as the Bruderhof (German ‘brotherhood’).  A Canadian friend who visited immediately recognised them as related to The Hutterite community she had grown up knowing in Alberta.

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January 1 – a new decade

A new decade, and the radio plays the sounds we made.” 
― The Verve, A New Decade (Northern Soul, 1995)


I imagine we all know that time is a construct and that is true for 1 January 2020 as much as any other day.  In the west it is a new year, and new decade, in other cultures that will happen at a different time.

But, beginnings need to happen at some point and now is as good time as any! 

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