Zen temple fire reminds people that Buddhist teachings are to be practiced, not worshiped

Late at night on March 26, a fire broke out in the meditation hall at the Tassagalan Zen Mountain Center in the Ventana Wilderness in California. The entire wooden building is located in the Zen Hall at the center of the oldest Zen temple in the Western Hemisphere. burned to the ground. No one was injured. But cushions, altars, dinner bowls, a century-old Japanese clock and a 2,000-year-old Gandhara Buddha statue were all buried in the ruins.

Which makes the timing almost impossible to wax poetic about: Tassagala’s community is in the final stages of a three-month practice, an secluded, almost silent retreat. What is the theme they have been thinking about day in and day out for weeks? Impermanence.

I don’t know how you would react to such details. I sat with it by myself for a while, sipping my morning coffee in Saigon and scrolling through the news on my phone. The same thought kept coming to me. Not sympathy, although I feel that way. This is not sarcasm, although there is certainly some. I keep thinking: This is the real purpose of spiritual practice. Not a quiet morning. Not a beautiful hall. this.

When I discovered Buddhism in a Melbourne library as a teenager, I wasn’t looking for religion. I was looking for something to explain the fact that everything felt uncertain and a little out of control. The book I found (I can’t even remember the title now) talks about impermanence the way most people talk about gravity. Not as something to fear or resist, but as a basic condition for survival. Something happened. It’s over. Your job is not to stop this process. Your job is to stop pretending it didn’t happen.

This idea has always been somewhere in my heart and has never left. But understanding it intellectually and practicing it are completely different things. I know this because I spent many years learning the difference.

There is a version of Buddhist practice that can safely remain in the realm of the mind. You read the book. You nodded along with the instructions. You may find impermanence philosophically interesting. You can even sit on the mat for twenty minutes every morning and feel a pleasant sense of calm. None of these are bad things. But these are not the things themselves.

The thing itself is what happens when the Zen path burns down.

Or, in less dramatic terms: when plans fail. When a relationship ends. When testing returns an error. When you’re standing in a Melbourne warehouse stacking televisions at 6am, the gap between your psychology degree and your real life feels unbridgeable. That’s how I feel about fire. Smaller, quieter, and no one wrote a news article about it. But it burned away my long-held belief that if I did everything right, things would work out the way I expected.

They don’t. Buddhism, which I read about in library books, suddenly stopped being a philosophy. It was the only framework I had for understanding what was going on.

I think this is something that often gets lost in the way mindfulness and Buddhism are presented, honestly including by people like me who write about mindfulness and Buddhism for a living. We talk about presence, peace, and letting go as if they were lifestyle upgrades. It seems like Buddhism is a better way to tackle your to-do list. Sometimes it does. My daily meditation practice, whether it’s five minutes or thirty minutes, really helps me manage stress and stay focused. It’s true.

But that’s not its purpose. Or rather, this is the training wheel version. The real practice is for fire.

The monks of Tassagala did not just sit back and watch the buildings burn. They fight it. Crews and residents, many of whom had firefighting training from previous wildfire threats in the area, grabbed hoses and worked to contain the blaze, saving dozens of surrounding buildings. The local fire department praised their response. This is important because there is a lazy caricature of Buddhist practice that says that Buddhist practice is about passive acceptance, about sitting cross-legged while the world falls apart and saying with a calm smile that “everything is impermanent.”

This is not the case in Tassagala. What happens is that people spend months practicing awareness, focus, and calmness to respond to crises with clear and coordinated action. They did what needed to be done. Then, when the building disappeared, they were left feeling lost.

Both parts are important. Doing and sitting. Buddhism is not just about accepting what happens. It’s about reacting to what’s happening and not being overwhelmed by your own reactions. Show clarity amidst the chaos, and then face the grief honestly without shying away from any of it.

I think about this in my own life, which, while much less dramatic than the Abbey Fire, is still full of small losses and disruptions on any given day. My daughter woke up screaming at 3am, and any plans I had for a productive morning were wiped out. An article I spent several days writing turned out to go in the wrong direction. My brother and I disagreed on some things in the business and the conversation became tense until we found our way back.

None of this is tragedy. But everywhere is a small fire of Zen. In that moment, what I had counted on, the structure I had built in my mind of how things should be, met reality. In that moment, I either practice what I’ve learned or I don’t.

Most of the time, my practice isn’t perfect. I’m very frustrated. I resisted. I spent ten minutes wishing things were different, and then I remembered that wishing didn’t change anything. But then, I finally remembered. Remember, going back to what actually happened, not what I wanted to happen, is practice. Not a cushion. Not Zen. remember.

There’s one detail about the Tassagala fire that I can’t stop thinking about. Items buried in the ruins include a 2,000-year-old statue of the Gandhara Buddha, part of the ancient Indo-Aryan civilization in what is now northwest Pakistan. It had already survived a fire in Tassagala back in 1978. Someone saved it at that time. This time, no one can do it.

More than two thousand years. Civilizations rise and fall. The statue traveled from the Indian subcontinent to a valley in California. Surviving wars, centuries of weather, a fire. Then you won’t be able to survive.

If this isn’t a teaching on impermanence, I don’t know what is. This teaching does not come from books, lectures, or guided meditations. It comes from the happening of the thing itself.

I run through the streets of Saigon most mornings, and the heat makes the air feel like you have to walk through it rather than breathe it. Very uncomfortable. That’s part of the reason why I do this. Not because I enjoy suffering, but because learning to be present in the discomfort, to keep going when every part of you wants to stop, is a practice in those moments when discomfort is not an option.

It was no accident that those Tashagara monks became calm and capable in the fire. After years of practicing day in and day out, they become such that on any given morning it feels pointless. Sit still. Following. Notice the urge to get up, or check your phone, or start planning, and choose to stay here. It doesn’t look like much. But it builds something intangible, an ability to face reality without flinching.

I don’t live in a monastery. I live in one of the loudest, most chaotic cities on earth, have a kid, a business, and a coffee habit. My version of practice is confusing. It happens in five-minute gaps between meetings, while running in traffic, and in a few quiet moments after my daughter finally falls asleep and before I fall asleep too. It’s not photogenic.

But I think that’s the point. These teachings were never meant to exist in beautiful architecture. They are meant to live in us. When a building catches fire, no matter what our specific building is, how do we respond.

Tasajara will be rebuilt. The community has received an outpouring of support from around the world. The monks resumed their practice schedule. Because practice has never been about architecture. This was the building where they happened to be sitting.

Now, somewhere, someone is reading about impermanence for the first time. Maybe in the library. Maybe it’s a phone call during a break from work that feels like a dead end. The words seem interesting, maybe even beautiful, just as the ideas about life seem beautiful from a safe distance.

But words are not practice. Practice is what comes later. When the fire comes. When it always comes. You’ll find out if what you learn in the quiet is enough to sustain you in the noise.