Late on the evening of March 26, a fire broke out at the Zendo at Tassajara Mountain Zen Center in California’s Ventana Desert. The entire wooden building, a meditation hall at the center of the oldest Zen monastery in the Western Hemisphere, the date burned. No one was hurt. But cushions, an altar, oroki bowls used for ceremonial meals, a century-old Japanese bell and a 2,000-year-old Gandharan Buddha statue were all buried under the rubble.
This is what makes this time almost incredibly poetic: the community in Tassahara was on the last leg of a three-month practice period, in a closed, mostly silent retreat. A topic they sat on day after day, for weeks? Impermanence.
I don’t know how you will react to such a detail. I sat with this myself for a while, drinking my morning coffee in Saigon and checking the news on my phone. And I kept coming back to the same thought. Not sympathy, although I felt it. Not irony, although it certainly is. What I kept thinking about was what Buddhist practice really is. Not quiet mornings. Not beautiful halls. this.
When I found Buddhism as a teenager in a Melbourne library, I wasn’t looking for a religion. I was looking for something that would make sense of how things felt uncertain and a little out of control. The book I found (can’t even remember the title now) talked about impermanence the way most people talk about gravity. Not as something to be feared or resisted, but as a basic condition of life. Things come up. Things pass. Your task is not to stop this process. Your job is to stop pretending it’s not happening.
This idea stuck somewhere in me and did not leave. But understanding it intellectually and living it are completely different things. I know this because I have spent years learning the difference.
There is a version of Buddhist practice that remains safely in the realm of ideas. You read books. You nod along with the teachings. You find impermanence philosophically interesting. You can even sit on the pillow for twenty minutes every morning and feel a nice sense of calm. All this is bad. But none of this is the thing itself.
The real thing is what happens when the zendo burns.
Or, in less dramatic terms: when the plan falls apart. When the relationship ends. If the test returns incorrect. When you’re standing in a warehouse in Melbourne at 6am stacking TVs and the gap between your psychology degree and your real life seems insurmountable. It was my version of a fire. Smaller, quieter, no one has written an article about it. But it burned away something I had sitting inside, which was the belief that if I just did things right, things would turn out the way I expected them to.
They didn’t do that. And Buddhism, which I read about in a library book, suddenly ceased to be a philosophy. It was the only basis I had for understanding what was going on.
I think this is a part that gets lost in how mindfulness and Buddhism are often presented, including, frankly, by people like me who write about it for a living. We talk about presence, peace, and letting go as if they are life-enhancing things. As if Buddhism is the best way to process a to-do list. And sometimes it is. My daily meditation practice, whether it’s five or thirty minutes, really helps me manage stress and stay focused. This is true.
But that’s not what it’s for. More precisely, this is the training wheels version. Real practice is for fire.
The monks in Tassahara didn’t just sit and watch the building burn. They struggled with it. Staff and residents, many of whom received fire training from previous wildfire threats in the area, grabbed hoses and worked to contain the fire, saving dozens of surrounding buildings. The local fire department praised their response. This is important because there is a lazy caricature of Buddhist practice that says it’s about passive acceptance, sitting cross-legged while the world falls apart and saying with a calm smile, “all is the same.”
This is not what happened in Tassajara. What happened was that people who had trained for months in awareness, focus and calm responded to the crisis with clarity and coordinated action. They did what had to be done. And then, when the building was gone, they sat with a loss.
Both parts are important. Working and sitting with. Buddhism is not just about accepting what happens. It’s about responding to what happens without being overwhelmed by your own reaction to it. To act clearly in the midst of chaos, then to speak honestly of grief without turning away from either.
I think about it in my own life, which is much less dramatic than a fire in a monastery, but still full of small losses and disruptions on any given day. My daughter wakes up screaming at 3am and any plan I had for a productive morning evaporates. A piece of writing I’ve been working on for days seems to be moving in the wrong direction. My brother and I disagree about something in the business, and the conversation gets tense before we find our way back.
None of this is a tragedy. But each one is a tiny zendo fire. The moment when what I had hoped for, the framework I had built in my mind about how things should go, meets reality. And at that point I either practice what I’ve learned or I don’t.
Mostly I practice imperfectly. I’m disappointed. I resist. I spend ten minutes wishing the situation were different before I remember that wishing changes nothing. But then, eventually, I remember. And that remembering, coming back to what is actually happening, not what I wanted to happen, is practice. Not a pillow. Not a zendo. Remembering.
There’s a detail about the Tassahara fire that I can’t stop thinking about. Among the items buried under the rubble was a 2,000-year-old statue of the Gandhara Buddha, part of the ancient Indo-Aryan civilization in what is now northwest Pakistan. It has already survived one fire in Tassahara, back in 1978. Then someone saved him. This time no one could.
Two thousand years. The rise and fall of civilizations. The statue travels from the Indian subcontinent to a mountain valley in California. Survived wars, centuries of bad weather, one fire. Then you won’t survive the next one.
If that’s not the doctrine of immutability, I don’t know what is. And it’s a teaching that doesn’t come from a book, a lecture, or a guided meditation. It comes from the very thing that happens.
Most mornings I run through the streets of Saigon in the heat that makes it feel like the air needs to be pushed through rather than breathed. It’s inconvenient. That’s partly why I do it. Not because I enjoy suffering, but because learning to hold onto the discomfort, to keep going when every part of you wants to stop, is practice for moments when discomfort isn’t optional.
It was not by chance that those Tasajjar monks became calm and capable in the midst of a fire. They’ve become that way over the years, showing up day after day for practices that can seem pointless on any given morning. Sitting still. Paying attention. Noticing the impulse to get up, or check your phone, or do some planning, and choose what’s here instead. It seems nothing. But it creates something invisible, the ability to face reality without flinching.
I don’t live in a monastery. I live in one of the most noisy and chaotic cities on earth, with a child, a business and a coffee habit. My version of practice is dirty. It happens in five-minute breaks between appointments, while driving through traffic, in the few quiet moments after my daughter finally falls asleep, and before I do too. It is not photogenic.
But I think that’s the point. The disciples were never supposed to live in beautiful buildings. They had to live with us. In how we respond when a building, whatever our particular building is, catches fire.
Tassajara will be rebuilt. The community has already received a wave of support from around the world. The monks resumed their exercise schedule. Because the practice was never about the building. The building was right where they happened to be sitting.
And now somewhere someone is reading about impermanence for the first time. Maybe in the library. Maybe on the phone during a break at work that seems dead-end. And the words will seem interesting, maybe even beautiful, as ideas about life can seem beautiful from a safe distance.
But words are not practice. Practice is what happens afterwards. When the fire comes. If always comes. And you will know if what you learned in the silence was strong enough to keep you in the noise.
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