Fire: An Inquiry into Recurrent Experience

The Buddha cast his entire framework of liberation in the language of fire and its cessation. This essay traces that structure using what we now understand about how fire actually works.

“The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame” by French Baroque artist Georges de La Tour, created around 1640

Watch a candle flame. Notice that it is not a thing. You cannot pick it up, weigh it, set it on a shelf. It is the visible face of a process — excited atoms releasing energy as electrons fall between states. The glow is photon emission. The heat is molecular agitation. The shape is rising gas meeting oxygen. Take away any of the conditions that sustain it, and it does not move or hide. It simply ceases.

Twenty-six centuries ago, the Buddha reached for this same image when he needed a simile for consciousness:

“Just as fire is reckoned by the particular condition dependent upon which it burns — when fire burns dependent on logs, it is reckoned as a log fire; when fire burns dependent on woodchips, it is reckoned as a woodchip fire; when fire burns dependent on grass, it is reckoned as a grass fire… So too, consciousness is reckoned by the particular condition dependent upon which it arises.” — MN 38 ¶22

This was not a casual illustration. The word |Nibbāna::complete cooling, letting go of everything, deathless, freedom from calamity, the non-disintegrating; lit. blowing away [nibbāna]| itself derives from the extinguishing of a flame. The word upādāna, usually translated as “clinging,” literally means fuel — the |five aggregates that are subject to clinging::the physical and mental heaps that are appropriated, grasped at, or taken as self; the fivefold collection of form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness bound up with attachment [pañca + upādānakkhandha]| are, etymologically, the five fuel-aggregates, the bundles that sustain the burning. The entire framework of liberation is cast in the language of fire and its cessation.

We now understand what fire actually is. It is not a substance. It is not an element. It is a process that arises when conditions converge and ceases when they don’t. The Buddha already knew this about consciousness. Modern physics, arriving at the same pattern from the other side, gives us a language to see how precise his metaphor was.

What follows is an inquiry into recurrent experience using the Buddha’s own simile of fire: starting with the texture of a single moment, to the cascade of experience, across the terrain where consciousness takes root, and to the extinguishing that is Nibbāna. One metaphor, one process, one fire.

Part I: The Anatomy of a Flame

What experience is made of (MN 43)

The Inseparable Triad

Venerable Sāriputta was asked whether |felt experience::pleasant, neutral, or painful sensation, feeling, second of the five aggregates [vedanā]|, |perception::The mental process of recognizing and giving meaning to experience. It marks sensory information by signs, labels, or associations drawn from memory and the field of contact. Perception shapes how one experiences the world; third of the five aggregates [sañña]|, and consciousness can be separated — whether you can untangle them, lay them out side by side, and point to where one ends and the other begins.

His answer was unequivocal: No.

“Friend, felt experience, perception, and consciousness—these qualities are closely associated, not unassociated. And it is not possible to unpack them, unravel them, and explain their differences. For what one experiences, that one perceives; and what one perceives, that one distinguishes. That is why, these qualities are closely associated, not unassociated. And it is not possible to unpack them, unravel them, and explain their differences.” — MN 43 ¶19

Fire shows us what this looks like.

Consider the candle’s glow. It produces light — the sheer fact of illumination. That light has a color (warm amber). And it has an intensity (bright or dim). These are not three separate things produced in sequence. They are three aspects of a single event: photon emission from excited atoms.

Every photon carries three inseparable aspects. It has luminosity — the bare fact that it shines, that emission occurred at all. It has a wavelength (the distance between peaks), which determines its color: short wavelengths appear blue, long ones red. And it has an amplitude (the height of the peaks), which determines its intensity: tall peaks carry more force, shallow ones less. You can measure them separately, but they do not arrive separately.

The flame is the ongoing process. Each photon is a single moment of it. We can use this as an analogy for the three inseparable components of experience:

1. Consciousness is the luminosity — the quality of shining, the fact that knowing occurred at all. The mind’s bare distinguishing: “this is pleasant,” “this is painful,” “this is neither.”

2. Perception functions as the wavelength — the character of the experience: what marks it, labels it, gives it identity. “Blue.” “Red.” “The smell of jasmine.” “My mother’s voice.” Without perception, consciousness would be light without color — a signal carrying no information.

A wave can resolve only details larger than its own wavelength; anything finer slips through undetected. Coarse perception can be seen as having a long wavelength. So a headache registers as “I’m in pain.” Someone cutting you off in traffic registers as “that jerk.” A friend’s silence registers as “they don’t care.” What is actually happening — arising, shifting, conditioning — is below the resolution. Each stage of practice, as Part V will show, sharpens the resolution of perceiving. What looked solid begins to resolve into process.

3. Felt experience corresponds to the amplitude — the affective charge, how much force the experience carries. A tall wave hits hard (intense pleasure, sharp pain). A shallow wave barely registers (neutral feeling). You cannot have a photon without energy. You cannot have a moment of consciousness that distinguishes but does not feel.

The three arise together because they are together — three aspects of a single event, not three ingredients mixed into a cocktail. This is why venerable Sāriputta says they cannot be “unpacked.” You can measure a photon’s wavelength and amplitude separately, but the photon itself does not arrive in pieces.

Wisdom and the Flame

When wisdom (paññā) and consciousness are examined the same way, venerable Sāriputta gives the same answer — inseparable — but draws a crucial distinction:

“Wisdom should be developed, and consciousness should be fully understood.” — MN 43 ¶13

Put in terms of fire: consciousness is the flame. Wisdom is seeing the flame for what it is: a conditioned process, not a self, not a thing that wanders, not something you own. One burns. The other sees the burning clearly. They cannot be pried apart — “what one discerns, that one distinguishes; and what one distinguishes, that one discerns” — but their function is different. One is the event. The other is the clarity with which the event is known.

Venerable Sāriputta himself reaches for a fire simile to illustrate this mutual dependence:

“Just as in the case of a burning oil lamp, its radiance is seen in dependence on its flame and its flame is seen in dependence on its radiance.” — MN 43 ¶51

Flame requires fuel to produce radiance. Radiance is the proof that a flame burns. Neither precedes the other. They co-arise. This is the structure of all conditioned experience: mutually dependent, mutually defining. From within the process, no first cause can be discerned. You can only see the flame as it burns, sustained by conditions that are themselves conditioned.

Part II: The Fire Triangle

What keeps the flame burning (MN 38)

Three Conditions for Combustion

In fire science, three conditions must converge for combustion to occur — the fire triangle:

1. Fuel — something to burn
2. Heat — the energy that starts and sustains the reaction
3. Oxygen — a reactive medium that keeps it going

Remove any one, and the fire goes out. This is why you smother a grease fire (remove oxygen), why wet wood won’t catch fire (insufficient heat), and why a candle on a shelf eventually dies (fuel exhausted).

Dependent origination describes a strikingly parallel triad:

1. |Clinging::grasping, acquiring, appropriating, taking possession, identifying; fuel for fire; lit. taking near [upādāna]| — The fuel for fire. The five aggregates that are subject to clinging are the fuel-aggregates: |form::materiality, material existence, experience of the material world, i.e. encompassing both one’s body and external objects, whether near or far, gross or subtle, deficient or refined; first of the five aggregates [rūpa]|, |feeling::pleasant, neutral, or painful sensation, the experience felt on contact; second of the five aggregates [vedanā]|, |perception::The mental process of recognizing and giving meaning to experience. It marks sensory information by signs, labels, or associations drawn from memory and the field of contact. Perception shapes how one experiences the world; third of the five aggregates [sañña]|, |intentional constructs::intentions, volitions, and choices expressed as mental, verbal, and bodily activities; thought formations and constructed experiences (including proliferative tendencies); processes that produce kamma [saṅkhāra]|, and consciousness itself ^[1]^ ^[2]^ — when grasped at, held onto, or appropriated as a self — act as the fuel for the fire. So long as there is clinging, there is fuel. So long as there is fuel, there is something to burn.

2. |Name and form::mentality and materiality; the integrated structure of mental capacities (feeling, perception, intention, contact, attention) and physical form that together constitute and sustain an individual being [nāmarūpa]| — The heat. Feeling, perception, intention, contact, and attention, as well as the physical body — these are the kindling, the air flow, and the right arrangement of materials. Perception recognizes what is there. Intention gives it direction. Contact brings sense base and object together — the point where the flame meets its fuel. Felt experience registers the charge. Without this structure, nothing catches fire — there would be nowhere for the flame to take hold.

3. |Craving::wanting, yearning, longing, attachment, lit. thirst [taṇha]| — The oxygen. The reactive medium that sustains the whole process. Just as without oxygen, even a pile of fuel at temperature cannot sustain a flame and the reaction simply stops; so too, without craving, even when clinging and name-and-form are present, the process that is consciousness does not sustain.

   Consciousness has craving as its |source::foundation, cause [nidāna]|, craving as its |arising::appearance, origination [samudaya]|, craving as its |characteristic::nature, quality, type [jātika]|, and it |comes into being::is generated by [pabhava]| from craving. — MN 38 ¶59

Consciousness (the flame) is the visible face of this process — any moment of experience is only possible when all three conditions are present.

The triangle shows what sustains the flame — but what makes it appear, from the inside, as though nothing is burning at all? |Ignorance::The fundamental unawareness or misapprehension of the true nature of reality. This is not experientially seeing the process that burning is, how burning comes to be, how burning ends, and the practical steps to bring an end to burning. [avijjā]|.

This is the taking of what is shifting to be solid ground, the imagining that the next experience will bring lasting satisfaction, the looking out through identity and individuality — the “I,” the “me,” the “mine.” Under ignorance, clinging appears reasonable, name-and-form appears as a solid self acting, and craving appears as natural wanting. The triangle keeps burning because, from this vantage, it does not look like a triangle at all — it looks like “my life.”

A flame is not a static object but a rapid succession of emissions. A single photon — the moment examined in the previous section — is one instant of this larger process. Consciousness, likewise, is not a thing that endures but a stream of moments, each arising and ceasing as conditions permit.

Consciousness is not something traveling through the reaction. It is the reaction expressing itself at each moment. And just as fire is named by its fuel — a log fire, an oil lamp, a gas fire, a wildfire — so too, consciousness is to be reckoned by its condition: eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, tongue-consciousness, mind-consciousness.

The Sāti Error

This was precisely the wrong view the Buddha corrected in Bhikkhu Sāti, who believed “it is this same consciousness that runs and wanders through the round of rebirths, not another.” He was imagining an eternal pilot light — a single flame that moves from stove to stove, lamp to lamp, body to body.

The correction is devastating in its simplicity: fire does not “go” anywhere. A log fire ends. A grass fire arises. There is continuity of process — conditions giving rise to further conditions — but no entity traveling. The grass fire is not the log fire, but it is not unrelated to it either. It arose because heat, embers, and wind carried the process forward.

This is consciousness. This is rebirth. Not an entity migrating, but a process perpetuating — condition to condition, fuel to fuel — until the conditions for burning are no longer present.

Part III: The Cascade — From Spark to Wildfire

How a moment of experience unfolds (SN 14.9)

The Chain of Combustion

SN 14.9 describes a sequence that operates like the spread of fire through a landscape — each step igniting the next:

1. |Diversity of Elements::variety of foundational properties making up experience—earth, water, fire, air, space, and consciousness; basis for bodily and mental phenomena; multiplicity of conditioned building blocks mistaken for self [dhātunānatta]| — The Fuel Bed. The foundational properties of experience: earth, water, fire, air, space, and consciousness itself — along with everything conditioned from them: forms, sounds, odors, tastes, tangibles, mental objects. These are the raw materials, not yet burning, not yet “experience,” but the diverse conditions from which experience is assembled. In fire terms: the composition of the fuel bed. What lies on the ground — dry leaves, green wood, oily rags, paper — determines what kind of fire can arise. And new acquisitions are always being added to it.

2. |Diversity of Perceptions::variety of conceptions, manifold notions [saññānānatta]| — The Tinder. Not everything catches fire. Perception is the moment of recognition — the system “tuning” to a particular fuel. The dry leaf, not the stone. The attractive face, not the blank wall. What you perceive is shaped by past conditioning. An arsonist and a firefighter see the same pile of wood differently.

3. |Diversity of Intentions::variation in volitional aims and mental resolve; diversity in motivational tendencies, goals, or directed thoughts; multiplicity of intention-patterns shaping behavior [saṅkappanānatta]| — The Kindling. Once perception catches, intention arranges the conditions for full combustion. You lean toward it. You formulate a plan. You direct energy. This is the kindling being stacked — the alignment of fuel and airflow that determines whether the spark becomes a flame or dies.

4. |Diversity of Contacts::multiplicity of sensory encounters; variety of experiential junctions where sense faculty, object, and consciousness converge; conditioned points of experience giving rise to feeling [phassanānānatta]| — The Spark. Consciousness, sense base, and object converge. The fire triangle meets. Combustion begins.

5. |Diversity of Felt Experiences::pleasant, neutral, or painful sensations, feelings, second of the five aggregates [vedanānānatta]| — The Heat. The immediate product of combustion. Every fire produces warmth or burn. Every contact produces feeling — pleasant, painful, or neutral. Where there is flame, there is heat. Where there is contact, there is feeling.

6. |Diversity of Desires::motivational inclinations, goal-directed drives, wishful tendencies, aspiring interests, aims rooted in either craving or resolve [chandanānatta]| — The Flame Reaching. Watch a flame. It leans toward its fuel. It reaches. This is desire, not yet the fever of full craving, but the initial inclination. The flame extends toward what will sustain it. The mind extends toward what the feeling promises.

7. |Diversity of Fevers::emotional heat of passion and craving; burning impulses, obsessive attachments, infatuations, and restless desire-states [pariḷāhanānatta]| — The Flare-Up. The heat feeds back into the system, raising the temperature, accelerating the reaction. Restlessness, obsession, the body heating up. The fire has become self-reinforcing — generating enough heat to ignite new fuel.

8. |Diversity of Quests::variety in pursuits and searches; multiplicity of aims in seeking satisfaction or meaning—ranging from sensual gratification to liberation [pariyesanānānatta]| — The Fire Spreading. Having consumed the immediate fuel, the flame sends embers into the air, heats adjacent materials, extends its reach. The being, inflamed, now seeks — pursuits, plans, searches for the next source of satisfaction.

9. |Diversity of Acquisitions::variety of gains and attainments; forms of possession, advantage, or profit—material, social, or conceptual—sought or clung to as ‘mine’ [lābhanānatta]| — New Fuel Catching. The fire finds new fuel and the cycle resets. New material, new heat, new flames. Acquisition of objects, of status, of a new existence itself — the fire spreading to the next log. The process continues.

This entire sequence, from raw element to acquisition, is fire spreading through a landscape. Each step depends on the last. Remove a link, and the chain breaks.

The critical intervention point is between feeling and desire. This is the last moment heat can be recognized before it fans into wanting. In the Discourse on the Arrow (SN 36.6), the uninstructed person is pierced by two arrows: one of bodily feeling and another of reactive mental anguish. They do not understand the feeling’s nature, so they grieve and seek escape in sensual pleasure. The learned noble disciple, struck by the same feeling, experiences one arrow only — the bodily feeling — without producing the mental reaction. They remain disentangled. Consequently, the fever never arises and the quest never begins. It is because of this structure — because desire is the hinge on which the entire cascade turns — that the Buddha praises even one who lives the |spiritual life::a life of celibacy, contemplation, and ethical discipline lived for the sake of liberation; oriented toward inner development rather than sensual pleasures [brahmacariya]| with difficulty and through sheer resolve ^[3]^, over one who drifts with the current of desire.

Part IV: Where the Next Fire Catches

The geography of rebirth (AN 3.76)

Two Scales of the Same Process

The fire triangle and the cascade describe the chemistry of a single fire — what sustains it moment to moment, and how it spreads through the immediate terrain. But when one fire dies and another ignites somewhere else, what determines the character of the next fire?

In SN 44.9, the Buddha tells Vacchagotta: “I declare rebirth for one with fuel, not for one without fuel.” When Vacchagotta asks what fuels the flame that is flung by the wind across a gap, the Buddha answers: the wind itself. And when a being has laid down this body but has not yet arisen in another, |craving::wanting, yearning, longing, attachment, lit. thirst [taṇha]| is its fuel. Craving is the wind that carries the fire forward. Without it, the fire simply goes out. With it, the process catches again wherever conditions allow.

But to understand the landing — how consciousness takes root in a new existence and what determines its character — the Buddha shifts from fire to agriculture:

“For beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, kamma is the field, consciousness the seed, and craving the moisture for their consciousness to be established in an inferior realm… a middling realm… a sublime realm.” — AN 3.76 ¶5–¶11

Kamma is the field. Every intentional act, over a lifetime, shapes the terrain. Generous acts prepare clean, structured ground. Harmful acts leave dense, volatile undergrowth. The field is not a storehouse of points — it is the accumulated conditioning of the landscape itself, the invisible topography that determines what can grow here and what cannot.

Consciousness is the seed. At the moment of death, the last moment of consciousness in one life conditions the first moment of consciousness in the next. The seed does not choose its field. It falls where the wind carries it. But what it becomes is shaped by the soil it lands in and the moisture it receives.

Craving is the moisture. Without moisture, even viable seed in rich soil will not germinate. Craving allows the seed to take root, to bind to the field, to draw nutrients and begin growing. Remove the moisture, and nothing takes hold — no matter how rich the field or viable the seed.

This is conventional language: the Buddha uses noun-framing here — kamma as field, consciousness as seed, craving as moisture — just as he uses ‘I’ and ‘mine’ ^[4]^ in ordinary speech, without confusion. When consciousness itself is being examined ^[5]^ — he shifts to the process frame. The seed image is not an ontological claim. It is a practical teaching about where and how the process that is consciousness takes root.

The Three Terrains

The quality of the field shapes the character of what grows:

• Inferior realm (|Realm of sensual pleasures::domain of desire [kāmadhātu]|): dense, volatile terrain. The fire that catches here burns chaotically — intense, noxious, hard to control. A wildfire tearing through tangled undergrowth.

• Middling realm (|Realm of form::world of subtle materiality [rūpadhātu]|): cleaner, more structured terrain. The fire burns evenly — reasonable warmth, visible light, sustainable. A well-laid campfire in managed woodland: pleasant but still requiring tending, still consuming.

• Sublime realm (|Formless realm::states not rooted in materiality, including mental realms and meditative attainments beyond physical form [arūpadhātu]|): terrain so refined it is almost not material at all. A hydrogen flame — nearly invisible, extremely clean, enormous energy with barely any physical residue.

This is not poetic decoration. The quality of the fuel literally determines the character of the flame. A candle and a forest fire differ not in some mystical essence but in their conditions. A hell-realm existence and a brahma-realm existence differ not in the type of “soul” involved but in the field of accumulated kamma into which consciousness is established.

When the Fire Catches Again

Venerable Sāriputta describes the mechanism with economy:

“Through thorough enjoyment of this and that on the part of beings obstructed by ignorance and bound by craving, the production of renewed existence occurs in the future.” — MN 43 ¶33

And its cessation:

“Through the fading away of ignorance, through the arising of wisdom, and the ending of craving — thus, the production of renewed existence does not occur in the future.” — MN 43 ¶35

At the moment of death, these scales converge. A lifetime of intentional action has cultivated a field. The last moment of consciousness — shaped by that accumulated kamma — is the seed released. And craving, that “thorough enjoyment of this and that,” is the moisture that lets it take root. If moisture remains, the seed germinates in whatever field lies prepared — not the nearest field, not a random one, but the specific terrain that prior action has readied.

When ignorance fades, when wisdom arises, when craving ends — there is no moisture. However rich or poor the field, without moisture no seed germinates. The production of renewed existence does not occur.

Part V: The Spectrum of Flames

Jhāna, the formless abidings, and cessation (MN 26 ¶99–115)

Everyday Experience: The Campfire

Ordinary sensory experience is like an open campfire. Multiple fuels burn simultaneously. Wind blows the flame this way and that. Sparks fly. Smoke obscures. The fire warms and lights, but it is turbulent, unpredictable, always needing more wood.

The Buddha describes five specific winds that can disturb the flame. In the first jhāna, all five are guarded against:

“For one who has attained the first jhāna, |sensual desire::interest in sensual pleasure, sensual impulse [kāmacchanda]| is given up, |ill will::intentional act of mentally opposing or rejecting others; an intentional construct fueled by aversion, directed against kindness or compassion. It manifests as hostility of will, impeding goodwill and fostering internal or external conflict. [byāpāda]| is given up, |dullness and drowsiness::lack of mental clarity or alertness, mental sluggishness, lethargy, sleepiness lit. stiffness (of mind/body due to tiredness) [thinamiddha]| are given up, |restlessness and worry::agitation and edginess, distraction, fidgeting, fiddling, uneasiness [uddhaccakukkucca]| are given up, and |doubt::uncertainty, indecisiveness wrt suffering, its arising, its ending, and the way of practice leading to the end of suffering [vicikiccha]| is given up.” — MN 43 ¶41

First Jhāna: The Sheltered Flame

A wind-guard goes up around the campfire. No longer battered by the five winds, the flame becomes steady, burning clean fuel — seclusion from the |unwholesome::unhealthy, unskillful, unbeneficial, or karmically unprofitable [akusala]|. The fire produces reliable warmth and bright, visible light. The process still involves active tending: reflection arranges the fuel, examination adjusts the draft. The turbulence is gone, but the fire is not yet self-sustaining. Five factors of disturbance have been replaced by five factors of stability: |reflection::pondering, thought [vitakka]|, |examination::consideration, exploring; lit. causing to move around [vicāra]|, |uplifting joy::mental exhilaration; it ranges from a gentle delight to overwhelming rapture [pīti]|, |pleasure::comfort, contentedness, happiness, ease [sukha]|, and |unification of mind::oneness of mind [cittekaggatā]|.

Second Jhāna: Self-Sustaining Combustion

The fire reaches the temperature where tending falls away. In chemistry, this is a self-sustaining reaction: the heat of combustion alone vaporizes the fuel. Reflection and examination settle. The reaction drives itself. Internal |tranquility::calming, settling, confidence [sampasādana]| replaces deliberate effort. The flame is |unified::integrated, with singleness [ekodibhāva]|, imbued with uplifting joy.

Third Jhāna: The Settled Flame

The visible flare of uplifting joy subsides. The tall, bright flame settles to a low, steady burn — less spectacle, but the warmth deepens and pervades. A well-established fire no longer needs to leap and flicker to produce heat. Equanimity appears: the stability of a flame that has stopped reaching. |Mindful and clearly aware::attentive and completely comprehending [sata + sampajāna]|, the process settles in a state that the Noble Ones describe as “equanimous, mindful, and at ease.”

Fourth Jhāna: The Flame in Equipoise

The flame reaches an even balance as distortions are removed. No smoke. No flicker. No reaching. The felt experience is neither painful nor pleasant. A flame no longer pressured from any direction. Nothing pulling it sideways, nothing smothering it, nothing making it leap.

MN 43 describes this state as: “purification of mindfulness through |equanimity::mental poise, mental balance, equipoise, non-reactivity, composure [upekkhā]|.”

On Earth, gravity distorts a flame — hot gas rises, pulling the fire into a teardrop, creating turbulence and flicker. Absent gravity, with that distortion removed, a candle flame forms a perfect sphere ↗. No convection currents. No asymmetry. Just a quiet, even orb of light radiating uniformly in all directions.

This is the shape fire takes when nothing disturbs it. The campfire battered by five winds, the sheltered flame, the self-sustaining reaction, the settled burn — each stage removes a distortion. By the fourth jhāna, all that remains is a sphere of perfectly even luminosity. The mind in this state is described as “bright, unblemished, rid of imperfection, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability.”

Each jhāna shortens the wavelength of perception — resolving finer structure in experience. In the first, the coarse winds stop battering, the flame steadies, and the flicker resolves. In the second, deliberate tending drops away, and what remains is seen without effort. In the third, the flare of excitement subsides, and subtler textures come into view — warmth without spectacle. By the fourth, perception has reached a resolution where the felt experience is neither painful nor pleasant: equanimity. The mood that once felt like “just the way things are” is now seen as weather. The ache that felt like “my bad knee” is now a shifting field of pressure and heat. What looked solid has resolved into process.

The formless abidings push further still — beyond form, beyond the objects perception once fixed on, into the territory where perception itself becomes the thing being resolved.

The Formless Abidings: Beyond Visible Fire

With the fourth jhāna, the mind is described as “purified mind-consciousness, released from the five faculties”. The five sense faculties are set aside. The fire has moved past ordinary combustion.

What changes is not the fire but what it illuminates:

• |Base of boundless space::field of boundless expanse, sometimes translated as dimension of infinite space [ākāsānañcāyatana]|: With the surpassing of all that the flame illuminates, with the disappearance of the perception of contact — the drag of the wick, the fuel being consumed — and non-attention to the diversity of what it once lit up, what remains is the open space in which the flame burns. Unbounded, without obstruction.

• |Base of boundless consciousness::field of limitless awareness [viññāṇañcāyatana]|: The illumination that was lighting up boundless space now turns back on itself — the light present in every moment of burning. Not the space, not what once filled it, but the luminosity itself, found to be without limit.

• |Base of nothingness::field of awareness centered on the absence of any distinct “something” to grasp or hold onto [ākiñcaññāyatana]|: Having surpassed the base of boundless consciousness, the field of illumination centers on the absence of any distinct fuel — no object, no form, no residue of anything that could catch or sustain a flame.

  How does the fire arrive at having nothing left to burn? In MN 106, the Buddha describes three ways to strip the “fire” (process that is consciousness) of its reliance on any kind of “fuel” (clinging):

  1. Sensual pleasures and the perception of sensuality. Forms and the perception of form. Even the perception of the imperturbable — across this life and the next. All of these are perceptions. What looked like fuel turns out to have been tinder all along — perception burning perception. Where it all ceases without remainder is peaceful.

  2. The illumination reveals that neither the flame, nor the wick, nor the fuel, nor the conditions for combustion contain a burner. The burning happens — but nothing within it directs or possesses the process.

  3. Or the illumination settles on this: the flame belongs to no hearth, no fuel, no keeper — and no hearth, no fuel, no keeper belongs to the flame. Not here, not anywhere.

  Each approach strips the fire of what has been sustaining it. What remains is luminosity itself — light persisting without anything left to light up.

• |Base of neither perception nor non-perception::field of awareness of subtle mental activity that do not arise to the level of forming a perception [nevasaññānāsaññāyatana]|: The flame becomes so subtle it can barely be called burning. Is there still combustion? The reaction is so refined, so faint, that it exists at the threshold of burning and non-burning.

Cessation of Perception and What Is Felt

In MN 43, venerable Sāriputta draws a sharp distinction between the cessation of perception and what is felt, and death:

“In the case of one who is dead, his vitality is exhausted, his heat has been dissipated, and his faculties are broken. In the case of a bhikkhu who has entered upon the cessation of perception and what is felt, his vitality is not exhausted, his heat has not been dissipated, and his faculties become tranquil.” — MN 43 ¶57

The fire has gone out. The flame has ceased. But the embers remain hot and the fuel is unspent. Not a dead fire — the hearth still holds its heat, and the conditions for re-combustion are preserved. The bhikkhu emerges from cessation because the embers are still glowing. The dead person does not emerge because the embers have gone cold and the fuel has disintegrated.

The |vital formations::life force, life-sustaining conditions [āyusaṅkhāra]| are specifically said to not be things that are felt. If they were, cessation would be impossible — you would need to end the conditions for life in order to end felt experience, and that would be death, not an attainment. Instead, the life-sustaining conditions persist, unseen and unfelt, like residual heat in the coals, holding open the possibility of the flame’s return.

The Cascade Revisited

Recall the cascade from Part III: elements → perception → intention → contact → feeling → desire. The critical intervention point was between feeling and desire — recognizing heat before it fans into wanting. But the jhānas and the formless abidings push the intervention progressively deeper:

The cascade is the same process throughout. What changes is where the fire is met. Cut it at feeling, and desire does not arise. Refine the feelings through jhāna, and the heat no longer scalds. Surpass contact in the formless abidings, and the spark barely registers. Still intention, and no kindling is arranged. Cease perception, and no tinder remains.

Each of these intervention points is Nibbāna “in a |provisional sense::qualified sense, in a certain respect [pariyāyena]|” (AN 9.47) — a progressively deeper taste of quenching. But only with the cessation of perception and what is felt, on having seen with wisdom, is Nibbāna spoken of in the |definitive sense::literal sense, ultimate sense [nippariyāyena]|.

Part VI: Nibbāna — The Extinguishing

The fire goes out (MN 72)

The word |Nibbāna::complete cooling, letting go of everything, deathless, freedom from calamity, the non-disintegrating; lit. blowing away [nibbāna]| (Skt. Nirvāṇa) means the extinguishing or “blowing out” of a flame. This etymology is not decorative. It is the teaching.

When a candle flame goes out, we do not ask “Where did the fire go?” The question does not apply. The fire did not go anywhere. The conditions for burning ceased to converge. The process stopped — not because it was destroyed, but because it was unbound: released from the conditions that sustained it.

“With the complete fading away and ending of ignorance comes the ending of intentional constructs; with the ending of intentional constructs comes the ending of consciousness.” — MN 38 ¶91

Clinging ends — fuel is exhausted. Name-and-form ceases — heating is not possible. Craving fades — no reactive medium remains. The flame goes out.

This is not annihilation. Annihilation would require a thing that is destroyed. But the fire was never a thing. It was a process. When the process ceases, what is there to annihilate?

The Tathāgata After Death

This is why the Buddha says the |Tathāgata::one who has arrived at the truth, an epithet of a perfectly Awakened One [tathāgata]| after death cannot be described as existing, not existing, both, or neither. “When the campfire went out last night, where is it now?” In conventional language, we can say it “went out” or “doesn’t exist anymore.” But push the question: where is the fire now? Has it relocated? Is it hiding?

The question breaks down, because fire was never a thing located in space. It was an event sustained by conditions. Events do not relocate when they end. They simply cease. The categories of “existing somewhere” and “not existing somewhere” apply to things. A process that has run its course is not a thing that has gone missing.

SN 12.64 offers a complementary image. The Buddha asks: when a sunbeam enters a peaked house through a window, where does it become established? On the western wall. Remove the wall — it lands on the ground. Remove the ground — on the water. Remove the water — it does not become established. The sunbeam has not changed. It is not a different kind of light. But without a surface, it has nowhere to land. So too with consciousness: when there is no lust, no delight, no craving, consciousness does not become established and does not come to growth. Not a special kind of consciousness — just what happens when one side of the fire triangle is removed. Without craving to act as the reactive medium, the process simply does not sustain.

The Unshakeable Release

In MN 43, venerable Sāriputta describes the |unshakeable release of the mind::unassailable, unwavering and indisputable liberation of the mind [akuppa + cetovimutti]| as the best among all releases — empty of passion, empty of aversion, empty of delusion:

“|Passion::intense desire, strong emotion, infatuation, obsession, lust [rāga]| is a maker of limitation, |aversion::hatred, hostility, mental attitude of rejection, fault-finding, resentful disapproval [dosa]| is a maker of limitation, and |delusion::illusion, misperception, erroneous belief, false idea, misapprehension; a fundamental distortion of reality that sustains confusion, clouds discernment, and fuels further doubt [moha]| is a maker of limitation.” — MN 43 ¶75

Every fire you have ever seen was limited — by its fuel, its container, its airflow. A candle flame is confined to the wick. A furnace fire is shaped by its chamber. Even a wildfire follows terrain and wind. The shape, reach, and character of every fire are not intrinsic to the fire itself — they are the limits imposed on it.

Passion, aversion, and delusion are the limits imposed on consciousness. They constrain every moment of burning to a particular shape, a particular reach. When they are abandoned — “cut off at the root, made like a palm stump, obliterated, no more subject to future arising” — the constraints are gone. The flame is unbound.

The Great Relief

These defilements do not just limit the mind. They agitate it. They force it to move.

The glow of a flame comes from excited electrons emitting photons as they drop between energy levels. An electron that has been kicked above its stable configuration holds surplus energy it cannot keep. It must discharge, leaping from level to level, emitting light at each drop. The excited state is not freedom — it is compulsion. The electron jumps because it is out of place, taut with energy it has no choice but to release.

This is the situation of a being caught in the cycle. Ignorance creates the instability — a fundamental misapprehension that kicks the system into an excited state. That instability compels action (saṅkhāra). Action produces consciousness-events. Those events generate feeling, craving, more action, more instability. The system vibrates, emits, leaps, binds — not because it wants to, but because it must.

But the simile does not end with a stable flame. It ends with no flame. When the conditions for combustion cease to converge, there is no excited state, no photon emitted, no glow, no fire. Not because something was destroyed, but because there is nothing left to sustain the process.

That is the great relief. Cool. Unbound. Ceased.

Epilogue: The Limits of the Simile

A simile is a raft, not a shore.

Fire is a physical process operating in the domain of matter and energy. Consciousness is not physical. The fire simile does not claim that consciousness is fire, or that perception is merely a wavelength. It claims that the pattern is the same: both are conditioned processes that arise when factors converge; both exhibit qualities inseparable from the event itself; both perpetuate through self-reinforcing feedback; and both cease completely when their conditions are removed.

The match is structural, not metaphysical. And that structural correspondence — a process, not a thing; named by its condition, not possessing an essence; sustaining through feedback, not through self; ceasing through removal of conditions, not through destruction — is itself the insight.

The Buddha chose fire because fire makes this pattern visible. Twenty-six centuries later, we understand the physics well enough to see how precisely the pattern holds. It is the kind of thing that happens when someone sees the structure of reality clearly and reaches for the most faithful simile available.

The fire does not explain consciousness. But if you have ever watched a flame and understood that it is not a thing but a happening — arising, persisting, and ceasing, moment to moment, never the same twice, yet recognizably continuous — then you have seen dependent origination with your own eyes.

That is the beginning of wisdom.

Key Sources