Sunday, July 12, 2026
Adittapariyaya Sutta: The Fire Sermon
SN 35.28
PTS: S iv 19
CDB ii 1143
Adittapariyaya Sutta: The Fire Sermon
translated from the Pali by
Ñanamoli Thera
Alternate translation: Thanissaro
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Thus I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was living at Gaya, at Gayasisa, together with a thousand bhikkhus. There he addressed the bhikkhus.
"Bhikkhus, 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.
"The ear is burning, sounds are burning...
"The nose is burning, odors are burning...
"The tongue is burning, flavors are burning...
"The body is burning, tangibles are burning...
"The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with mind-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.
"Bhikkhus, when a noble follower who has heard (the truth) sees thus, he finds estrangement in the eye, finds estrangement in forms, finds estrangement in eye-consciousness, finds estrangement in eye-contact, and whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful- nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, in that too he finds estrangement.
"He finds estrangement in the ear... in sounds...
"He finds estrangement in the nose... in odors...
"He finds estrangement in the tongue... in flavors...
"He finds estrangement in the body... in tangibles...
"He finds estrangement in the mind, finds estrangement in ideas, finds estrangement in mind-consciousness, finds estrangement in mind-contact, and whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with mind-contact for its indispensable condition, in that too he finds estrangement.
"When he finds estrangement, passion fades out. With the fading of passion, he is liberated. When liberated, there is knowledge that he is liberated. He understands: 'Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived out, what can be done is done, of this there is no more beyond.'"
That is what the Blessed One said. The bhikkhus were glad, and they approved his words.
Now during his utterance, the hearts of those thousand bhikkhus were liberated from taints through clinging no more.
©1981 Buddhist Publication Society.
You may copy, reformat, reprint, republish, and redistribute this work in any medium whatsoever, provided that: (1) you only make such copies, etc. available free of charge and, in the case of reprinting, only in quantities of no more than 50 copies; (2) you clearly indicate that any derivatives of this work (including translations) are derived from this source document; and (3) you include the full text of this license in any copies or derivatives of this work. Otherwise, all rights reserved. Documents linked from this page may be subject to other restrictions. From Three Cardinal Discourses of the Buddha (WH 17), translated from the Pali by Ñanamoli Thera (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1981). Copyright © 1981 Buddhist Publication Society. Used with permission. Last revised for Access to Insight on 13 June 2010.
How to cite this document (a suggested style): "Adittapariyaya Sutta: The Fire Sermon" (SN 35.28), translated from the Pali by Ñanamoli Thera. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 13 June 2010, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn35/sn35.028.nymo.html .
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Via White Crane Institute \\\ HENRY DAVID THOREAU
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| This Day in Gay History | |||
July 12 | |||
1817 -
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, American writer, philosopher born (d: 1862); In the fall of 1856, when he was thirty-nine years old, the author of Walden found “a rare and remarkable fungus, such as I have heard of but never seen before. The whole length [is] six and three quarter inches. It may be divided into three parts, picus, stem and base, -- or scrotum, for it is a perfect phallus. One of those fungi named impudicus, I think. In all respects, [it is] a most disgusting object, yet very suggestive. It was as offensive to the eye as to the scent, the cap rapidly melting and defiling what it touched with a fetid, olivaceous, semi-liquid matter. In an hour or two the plant scented the whole house wherever placed, so that it could not be endured.
"I was afraid to sleep in my chamber where it had lain until the room had been well ventilated. It smelled like a dead rat in the ceiling, in all the ceilings of the house. Pray, what was Nature thinking of when she made this? She almost puts herself on a level with those who draw in privies.”
Both Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. credited Thoreau with inspiring their nonviolent activism with his 1849 essay now called “Civil Disobedience.”
“Thoreau was a great writer, philosopher, poet,” wrote Gandhi, “and withal a most practical man, that is, he taught nothing he was not prepared to practice in himself. He was one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced.” Dr. King insisted that “Civil Disobedience,” which he first read as a student at Morehouse College, was his “first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance... Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I re-read the work several times...The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement.”
Thoreau's sexuality has long been a subject of speculation; even his contemporaries commented on his apparent lack of interest in conventional romance. The most exhaustive examination of the evidence on both sides of this question is Walter Harding's article, "Thoreau's Sexuality," published in the Journal of Homosexuality (1991). Basing his conclusions mostly on evidence from Thoreau's Journal, Harding suggests that Thoreau's affectional orientation was probably homosexual, though there is no evidence that he was physically intimate with either men or women.
Although Thoreau proposed marriage to one woman (and was proposed to by another), Harding concludes that the preponderance of the evidence indicates that he had a fundamental attraction to other men, an attraction sublimated through his writing and his passion for nature.
It's fascinating that his journals never mention women and some of whose essays express his thoughts on the relations of men. His essay "Chastity and Sensuality," and the long discourse on "Friendship" in A Week are prolific expressions of the beauty, and the agony, of love between men.
Some of these discussions are said to refer to his brother or to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Others clearly refer to two men whom Thoreau found particularly attractive: Tom Fowler, whom Thoreau chose as a guide on a trip to the Maine woods; and Alek Therien, the Canadian wood-chopper who visited Thoreau at Walden Pond (more on that in a bit).
In 1991, a quarter of a century after publishing his biography of Thoreau, his biographer Walter Harding, added an important postscript to his analysis of his subject: an essay in the Journal of Homosexuality arguing that Thoreau had “a specific sexual interest in members of his own sex.” This aspect of Thoreau’s sensibility has remained strangely quarantined from mainstream Thoreau scholarship, despite Harding and scholars such as Henry Abelove, Jonathan Ned Katz, and Michael Warner.
Another Thoreau biographer, Robert Richardson, has consistently downplayed it and is so allergic to all things Freudian that he took the precaution of omitting Thoreau’s childhood and adolescence from his biography. Telling.
Of course, Thoreau could not have thought of himself as a homosexual as we understand the term, but as a careful reader of Darwin and a close observer of nature, Thoreau wondered what it meant that he dispersed no seed of his own. (He half-asserted, half-speculated in his journal that “The end of marriage is not the propagation of the species— If you & I succeed there will have been men enough—any more than the object of the blossom is to mature the seed.”) He also knew that in his relationships with men, his emotions were often more turbulent and demanding than his partners: “Methinks that I carry into friendship the tenderness & nicety of a lover,” he admitted in his diary.
Most touchingly in 1854 Thoreau wrote in Walden of a visit paid him by a wandering French-Canadian wood-chopper Alex Therien. So taken was Thoreau with this rugged laborer--"a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man," as he put it in his journal--and so eager was he "to fasten [him]self like a blood-sucker... to any full-blooded man that [came his] way," that he indulged in a moment of "Homerotic" fantasy: he asked the woodsman to read to him from the Iliad, and in particular "Achilles' reproof to Patroclus for his sad countenance."
Throughout his life Thoreau was falling in and out of love with his male acquaintances. He meditated on the higher meaning of male friendship in his notebooks. He never married.
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BHNN Guest Podcast – Ep. 263 – Dharma Lessons from 50 Years of Buddhist Practice with Gil Fronsdal
July 10, 2026
Sharing meaningful stories from a life of practice, Gil Fronsdal chats about the impact of spiritual community, simplicity, and generosity. Today’s podcast is brought...
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation \\\ Words of Wisdom - July 12, 2026 🌞
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