‘Everything must burn,’ wrote my secret companion Thomas Merton, as he walked around his silent monastery in the dark, on

‘Everything must burn,’ wrote my secret companion Thomas Merton, as he walked around his silent monastery in the dark, on fire watch. ‘Everything must burn, my monks,’ the Buddha said in his 'Fire Sermon’; life itself is a burning house, and soon that body you’re holding will be bones, that face that so moves you a grinning skull. The main temple in Nara has burned and come back and burned and come back, three times over the centuries; the imperial compound, covering a sixth of all Kyoto, has had to be rebuilt fourteen times. What do we have to hold on to? Only the certainty that nothing will go according to design; our hopes are newly built wooden houses, sturdy until someone drops a cigarette or match.

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