Chapter 3.6
The fire and the firewood
A name constrains by treating a person as a log of firewood.
The fire that passes from log to log
knows not their exhaustion.
* * * * *
A key to nourishing life: Identify with the fire, rather than the firewood.
~
Firewood and fire.
I see my friend and, pointing her out to you, I say, ‘That’s Chloe. See her slender figure and green-grey eyes. Eyes like a sunrise over a tea-tree lake.’ Depending on your patience, on and on I could go, itemising her character traits, her loves and hates. In doing so I’m describing a log of firewood. A thing amid the world of things.
The consciousness and life energy that looks out from behind those tea-tree-lake eyes is not this log of firewood. She’s the fire alight on this log.
A name constrains by treating a person as a log of firewood.
Old Longears’s wailing disciples (previous section) had identified Old Longears with a physical body, a log of firewood. The log was exhausted (he died), and so they wailed.
But look, not a single log. At one point this log, and at another, that, for his body was not a single log from birth through to death. It was a series of logs. At one point the body of an infant. And then, a teenager. And then, an adult. And then, an old person. Again and again one log was exhausted and the fire moved on to the next.
Over the years Old Longears’s disciples had pointed out their venerable teacher. Pointing to his body, they’d said, There’s Old Longears. And then there they were with the latest log: a corpse. No fire alight on that log, to be sure. Just a cold cinder. But because they’d never been aware of the fire, because they’d constrained him to being this and that log, there they now were with the sadness that their beloved Old Longears had been reduced to this cold cinder.
As Chuang Tzu says in Chapter 2.2, ‘If you identify with your body, you condemn yourself to await its exhaustion.’ Likewise in regard to others. If you identify your friend with their body, you condemn yourself to watch on in despair as this body, this log of firewood, is exhausted.
The fire that passes from log to log knows not their exhaustion.
If the fire is never exhausted, where is Old Longears’s consciousness and life energy now that his body is a corpse?
Well, where is the flame when you blow out a candle?
But Chuang Tzu says that the fire isn’t exhausted.
No. He says that the fire doesn’t know, doesn’t experience, the exhaustion that the firewood does. Your body changes, like a series of burning logs, each in turn breaking apart and dissolving to ash. Your consciousness and life energy exhaust now this log, now this log, and aren’t themselves exhausted. They’re always present and whole, aflame.
Yes, a time comes in the series of logs when a log isn’t able to support a flame. Then the fire goes out, is exhausted. But this vanishing of the fire is not something the fire experiences. Where there’s no fire, there’s no fire. Fire is not present where it is absent. Fire exists in a cosmos in which fire is ever present.
Yes, Old Longears died. The flame went out. But from the point of view of Old Longears, he never died. He arrived with the season and resided on the current. Was forever alight on now this log, now this log, never knowing their exhaustion. He was the mythical charioteer of Chapter 1.3: He mounted the isness of heaven-and-earth and took the reins of the disputing six energies, and thereby wandered without constraint.