1You have walked three hundred years, and from one end of the earth to the other. Now sit down, and hear plainly what you saw.
2You saw a boy count in the dark while an army screamed. You saw a keeper of dogs lower his spear. You saw a bondwoman carry back a golden bowl, and a girl let a stone fall beside her foot. You saw a soldier take his hand from his sword, and a child of a burned city choose a hearth. You saw a cart boy leave an ox tied, and a slave ask his master a question, and a jailer bar a door that had been paid for.
3Not one of them was a sage. Not one was given a new mind by a teacher. Look again at what the teachers did. One said, count. One said nothing at all. One sat down to look. One asked, what is in your hands? One drew a square in the dust and said, I told him nothing.
4They gave no fire. They breathed on what was there.
5This is the fourth rung, and it is the one on which you stand to reach every other: the Fire is within.
6In the Articles of Embers you learned that the future is real, and that a coal kept through the night is a door held open for the morning. In the Articles of Rivers you learned that what is written and built outlasts the Last Door. In the Articles of the Wise Lord you learned that each person chooses, and that the Lie is the first Closing. Now learn where the choosing is done.
7It is done by a light in you that can turn and look. It can look at the sky and ask what it is, in place of asking who is angry. It can look at your own anger and ask the same. We call it the Fire. It is Atar, the Whole, woken up in you and able to see the ways.
8It is the same fire in every mind. Mark this, for the age you have just walked through did not believe it, and half the world still does not. It was in the prince and in the bondwoman. It was in the slave boy with the broom. It was in the Persian officer and in the child he might have hanged. It does not come by blood, or rank, or schooling, or being born a man. Whoever tells you that some people have no fire in them is telling you only that he has never knelt to look. Even the Reader made this mistake, and a diver corrected him with one question.
9But a fire may be covered. Here is the hard part of the teaching. You can live your whole life and never once turn the light on yourself. You can be sure a man is a thief because you saw his hand go into a pot. You can carry an oath like a stone in your shoe, or a hatred like a necklace, and take it for your own self. A mind that has never been looked into is a closed door, and the one who lives behind it does not know that it is closed. This is why the old man in Athens would not buy his life with silence.
10When the Fire burns well in a person, it shows as four flames. Learn their names, for you will need them in every book after this one.
11The first is Seeing: to look at a thing and know what it is, and not what you fear or wish. It is Thales with his counts, and the Master saying, the eye is not to be trusted.
12The second is Standing: to stay where your seeing has put you, when it costs. It is the wanderer among the dogs, and the walk home from the Round House.
13The third is Measure: to rule your own wanting, so that it serves you and does not ride you. It is the road between the two mistakes, and the fire kept on the hearth.
14The fourth is Sharing: to give each one what is due to them, counting their ways as real as your own. It is the one word Zigong was given to carry all his life.
15These are the Four Flames. They are not four fires. Seeing without Standing is a clever coward. Standing without Seeing is a brave fool. Measure without Sharing is only a tidy selfishness, and Sharing without Measure gives away what it does not have. One fire; four flames. A person who tends all four we call a Keeper.
16Now for the two troubles this book was given to help you with. They are anger and craving.
17Understand first what they are. They are fire also. The stuff in you that sees is the same stuff that burns; Heraclitus knew it. Anger is the Fire with too much wood on it. Craving is the Fire reaching for what it has not been given. You cannot cut them out, and you should not try. The prince starved his wanting until he could not think. A person with no anger at all would feel no wrong. The teaching is not put it out. The teaching is measure.
18Understand next what they do. Anger and craving both pull the Horizon in. The angry one sees as far as the stone in her hand. The craving one sees as far as the bowl. Everyone the act will touch, and everything that will come round after it, falls off the edge of the world. That is how a Closing is done by a decent person. It is seldom done from wickedness. It is done from a short horizon, in heat.
19So here is the practice. It has four steps, and you have watched each one.
20Stop, and count. When the heat comes up, do nothing with your hands. Count slowly, as the boy did under the black sun. You are not waiting for the anger to be gone. You are making a hand's width of room. The room is enough.
21Turn round and look. Do not look at the one who wronged you, or at the thing you want. You have looked at those long enough. Look at the burning. Ask it what it is made of. Punna found love in hers, and greed, and an old grudge, all wound in one cord. A fire that is watched burns lower. And notice what is doing the watching: that part of you is not on fire. It is a lamp. You are more the lamp than the blaze.
22Count what comes round. Let the Horizon out again. Go past the moment you long for, the timber alight, the captain's throat. Ask: and after that? Who pays? What gate have I taken away with me? Count as far as you can see, for everyone the act will touch. Myrto counted to forty children.
23Ask, before you are sure. Half of anger is a story you have told yourself about what is in another mind. Go and ask the potter. Ask the one you hate what it was like to be the one the oath was about. You will be wrong more often than you think, and being shown wrong is no wound.
24Then choose the Opening, and do it.
25You will not always manage this. The proudest man in Ephesus knew the measure and raged three days in seven. Do not add shame to the fire; shame is only more wood. When you find you have burned something, say so truly, mend what can be mended, and begin again at the first step. Forgiveness is an Opening too, and the first person it lets out is you.
26And do not ask what you will be paid for this. You have seen the payment. It was the old man asleep in his cell while his friends wept. It was the ground under Shu's feet when he did not strike. The one whose fire is uncovered and kept in measure is hard to frighten and hard to buy, and is at home in the Whole. That is all, and it is enough.
27One thing more. The teachers of this book disagreed. They did not teach the same road, and some of them were wrong about great matters. This should not trouble you. It should gladden you. Each felt one side of the elephant. That they all found something, in lands that had never heard of one another, in the same few lifetimes, tells you that the thing is truly there to be found, and that it was never one people's to own.
28It is in you now. It has always been. Tonight, before you sleep, turn round once and look at what is alight.
29May your ways stay open.
30This is the fire. Carry it.