Know all things to be like this
Living in an ever-changing world: Fire-fighting horses, Coal-fired ovens and dreams
There is a quote from Buddha that I’ve been reflecting on a lot recently.
Each of the stanzas is a different metaphor for reality and the underlying nature of change. The purpose of the metaphors is to help you reflect on the images and through them find the deeper truth.
Here it goes:
Know all things to be like this:
A mirage, a cloud castle,
A dream, an apparition,
Without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.
Know all things to be like this:
As the moon in a bright sky
In some clear lake reflected,
Though to that lake the moon has never moved.
Know all things to be like this:
As an echo that derives
From music, sounds, and weeping,
Yet in that echo is no melody.
Know all things to be like this:
As a magician makes illusions
Of horses, oxen, carts and other things,
Nothing is as it appears.
The most striking thing to me about this quote is the “all things” part…
“Know all things to be like this: A mirage, a cloud castle, A dream, an apparition.”
Wait a minute - my mind tells me…. “ALL THINGS”? When Buddha says “Know all things to be like this… nothing is as it appears?” - he means, everything?
Yes. Yes he does…
A more radical statement is hard to find…
When I go on walks with my kids I like to sometimes point out all the things that didn’t exist:
“You see that tree?” I tell them, “well it’s only been around for about a hundred million years! It’s a relative newcomer to earth.”
“And you see that grass? Brand new! Most of the time on earth, no grass existed.”
“Oh, and that mountain? It didn’t exist! You see the layers in the rock?… But it gets even crazier - the continents also used to be completely different. There was no thing called North America! What we are standing on now used to be in a completely different part of the earth.”
“And viruses? Yeah, they’ve been fighting bacteria in incessant warfare for about 1.5 billion years. Way before humans or mammals were close to evolving…”
“And the air we breathe? Well, it too didn’t exist like this for billions of years. Little creatures had to evolve and then poo oxygen…”
…
While sometimes these mini-classes receive puzzled looks more often it’s complete disbelief in what I’m saying. “What do you mean this didn’t exist? How can that be possible?”
We will then change the topic and move onto stories about vampires. Reality is too weird.
One of the biggest ongoing debates in my part of the world is all about artificial intelligence. Some people (myself included) spend a lot of time thinking about it… Writing in 2023, it looks like a lot of things in the world are about to change very quickly - maybe too quickly for most.
I imagine this is what it must have looked like for older generations to see technologies transform the world around them. It doesn’t take much digging to see that there is almost always really strong resistance to things I take for granted and am grateful for each day.
One example I happened upon recently was “When Coal First Arrived, Americans Said ‘No Thanks’”:
“Until the early 1800s, Americans burned very little coal. The country was thickly forested, and wood was cheap. Most houses had one or more wood fireplaces. The country didn’t have many factories that required serious energy, and coal was a niche fuel used, for example, by blacksmiths who needed high heat for their work.
But as cities grew rapidly and demanded ever more fuel, choppers quickly deforested surrounding areas. Firewood became scarce and expensive.
[But] America was sitting right atop the answer to this fuel crisis, in the form of massive piles of coal, particularly Pennsylvania’s lodes of anthracite, a dense, rocklike form of the stuff. […] No longer simply the provenance of blacksmiths, coal became a hot commodity, and mining ramped up: Companies began increasingly ambitious anthracite digs, then began building canals and railroads to distribute the fuel to the East and South.
But convincing Americans to use the new fuel proved tricky. […] In an 1864 essay, Harriet Beecher Stowe fulminated: “Would our Revolutionary fathers have gone barefooted and bleeding over snows to defend air-tight stoves and cooking-ranges? I trow [believe] not.” In his 1843 short story Fire Worship, Nathaniel Hawthorne argued that gathering before a flickering hearth was crucial to bringing families and citizens together.
“Social intercourse cannot long continue what it has been, now that we have subtracted from it so important...an element as firelight,” Hawthorne fretted. “While a man was true to the fireside, so long would he be true to country and law.”
Reading these impassioned pleas for wood-fired ovens, I have to imagine that we lost a lot when we traded it for coal. While of course it had a number of drawbacks, gathering with my family around a “flickering hearth” each night was probably an amazing experience with tons of social and familial cohesion.
But everything changes…
It was an emotional day when the last firefighter horses in New York were put to pasture. From “The Day the Horse Lost its job”:
[People] turned out to pay tribute to Engine 205’s last “faithful and true” fire horses – Eamybeg, Buck, Penrod, Waterboy and Bellgriffin – for their years of service.
It was an emotional moment for the station’s usually stoic crew. They were “a hard, two-fisted gang of firemen, afraid of nothing, as they have proven time and again, and they are not given to sentimentalities. But, under cover of banter and joking, their attachment for their equine co-laborers could easily be seen. The animals were polished until their sleek fur fairly shone.”
[Firemen] lovingly watered, groomed, and draped the five horses with wreaths of flowers. It would be the team’s final call – and the final run for all fire horses in New York City. After more than 50 years of service, the fire horse had lost its job.
While putting the fabled fire horse out to pasture was a practical matter, progress, as the Brooklyn Eagle wrote, had a profound impact on the city’s culture. “To the small boys of three generations the fire horse has been a delight as the fireman has been an inspiration. Today the fire horse vanishes in New York City, probably forever.”
I feel sad just reading about the last horses… It must have been wonderful seeing them in the streets and being able to spend time with them every day.
But yet again, it wasn’t always like this. When horses were first enlisted to help firefighting, people didn’t like this change either:
The introduction of horses in the firehouse was itself a controversial innovation that had been fought tooth-and-nail by traditionalists. Originally, fire engines had been pulled by volunteer teams of men and boys. But in 1832, when the Fire Department’s force was depleted by the city’s cholera epidemic, horsepower came to the rescue. “Not enough men, nor even supernumeraries, boys, and youths who loved to linger in the shadow of the engine house and be permitted to mingle with the hardy fire fighters, could be mustered to drag the engine to the scene of the conflagration.” Necessity, being the mother of invention, forced the FDNY to spend a hefty $864 on a fleet of horses to replace the sick and dying fire men.
It wasn’t until the 1860s that manpower was officially swapped for horsepower in firehouses. But the transition wasn’t easy. One obstacle was the fire fighters’ pride in their work as haulers. Abraham B. Purdy, “one of the oldest living firemen” when interviewed in 1887, recalled, “The first company that ever had a horse to run was Hook and Ladder No. 1. The introduction of horse power was owing to a squabble in the company, which resulted in the resignation of so many members that not enough remained to draw the truck to a fire. No. 11 (Purdy’s company) was the means of killing that horse. There was a fire up in Broadway, and we and Hook and Ladder No. 1 ran side by side. Going up the hill at Canal Street was the proudest moment of my life. We beat the horse, and No. 1 did not get to the fire till sometime after us.”
But advances in equipment and in the firehouse itself, including sliding poles, electric alarms and quick hitch horse collars, eventually allowed horses to relieve volunteers of their duties hauling hoses by hand. By 1869, well-trained horses and men could exit a firehouse in 30 seconds flat.
As horses were introduced to more and more parts of the US economy, by the late 1800s the whole country had changed:
It’s difficult to overestimate the degree to which the American economy and broader society revolved around horses. As one historian has commented, “every family in the United States in 1870 was directly or indirectly dependent on the horse.” In rural areas, farmers prospered in no small measure by growing hay to feed the nation’s 8.6 million horses, or one horse for every five people. (And each horse ate a lot more than a person.)
In urban areas, the reliance was even more striking. This dependence hit home in the fall of 1872, when a serious strain of horse flu spread throughout the northeast U.S. and for some weeks horses could not be used. City life ground to a halt as streetcars stopped running, urban goods stopped moving, and construction sites stopped operating.[10] Consumers suddenly confronted shortages when buying groceries. Perhaps even more disturbing for some, saloons ran out of beer. There was nothing like the horses’ illness to demonstrate that such a large part of the American economy and its jobs revolved around horses.
In a time of seemingly heightened change, it’s hard to not get lost in the myopia of the present.
I have to constantly remind myself that what I see as permanent reality, is no more real than a dream.
Know all things to be like this:
As the moon in a bright sky
In some clear lake reflected,
Though to that lake the moon has never moved.
🙏🏼
That was good; thanks for the perspective.