The fire of a Zen monastery is a reminder that Buddhist teachings are to be lived, not admired.

Late on March 26, a fire broke out in the zendo at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California’s Ventana Wilderness. The entire wooden building, the meditation hall in the heart of the oldest Zen monastery in the Western Hemisphere, burned to the ground. No one was injured. But the cushions, altar, Oryoki bowls used for formal meals, a century-old Japanese bell and a 2,000-year-old Gandharan Buddha statue are all buried in the rubble.

Here’s what makes the timing almost impossible to be poetic: the Tassajara community was in the final stages of a three-month exercise, a monastic, mostly silent retreat. The topic that they have been sitting with every day for weeks? Constancy.

I don’t know how you react to such a detail. I sat with him myself for a while, drinking my morning coffee in Saigon and scrolling through the news on my phone. And I kept coming back to the same thought. Not sympathy, although I felt it. It’s not irony, although there are certainly some. I kept thinking: this is actually what Buddhist practice is for. Not on quiet mornings. Not the beautiful halls. This.

When I discovered Buddhism as a teenager in a library in Melbourne, I wasn’t looking for a religion. I was looking for something that made sense of how everything felt uncertain and a little out of control. The book I found (I can’t remember the title) talked about impermanence the way most people talk about gravity. Not as something to fear or resist, but as a basic condition for survival. Things come up. Things pass. It is not your job to stop this process. It’s your job not to pretend it never happened.

This idea stuck somewhere in me and never left. But intellectually understanding and experiencing it is a completely different thing. I know this because I spent years learning the difference.

There is a version of Buddhist practice that remains safe in the realm of ideas. You read the books. You nod along with the teachings. You find impermanence philosophically interesting. You may even find yourself sitting on a pillow for twenty minutes each morning and feeling a pleasant sense of calm. Neither is bad. But neither is the thing itself.

The thing is what happens when the zendo burns down.

Or, less dramatically, when the plan falls apart. When the relationship ends. When the test comes back wrong. When you’re standing in a warehouse in Melbourne at 6am, stacking televisions, the gap between your psychology degree and your actual life seems unbridgeable. This was my version of fire. Smaller, quieter, no one wrote about it. But it burned something that I had been sitting in until then, namely the belief that if I do everything right, things will turn out as I expected.

They didn’t. And the Buddhism I read about in that library book suddenly wasn’t a philosophy anymore. It was the only framework I could use to understand what was going on.

I think this is the part that gets lost in how mindfulness and Buddhism are often presented, including by people like me who write about it for a living. We talk about presence and stillness and letting go as if they were lifestyle improvements. As if Buddhism is a nicer way to manage your to-do list. And sometimes it is. My daily meditation practice, whether it’s five or thirty minutes, helps me manage stress and focus. That’s true.

But that’s not what it’s for. Or rather, this training wheels version. The real practice is fire.

The Tassajara monks didn’t just sit and look at the building. They dealt with it. Crews and residents, many of whom received firefighting training due to previous wildfire threats in the area, grabbed hoses and worked to contain the fire, saving dozens of surrounding structures. The local fire department praised their response. This is important because there is a lazy caricature of Buddhist practice that says it is about passive acceptance, sitting cross-legged while the world falls apart and saying with a bright smile that “everything is impermanent.”

This is not what happened in Tassajara. What happened was that people who had spent months practicing awareness, attention, and poise responded to the crisis with clarity and concerted action. They did what had to be done. Then when the building disappeared, they were at a loss.

Both parts count. The action and sitting with it. Buddhism is not just about accepting what happens. It’s about responding to what’s happening without being overwhelmed by your own reactions. Acting cleanly in the midst of chaos, then speaking honestly with grief without turning away from either.

I think about this in my own life, which is considerably less dramatic than a convent fire, but still full of minor losses and disruptions every day. My daughter wakes up screaming at 3am and whatever plans I had for a productive morning evaporate. A piece of writing I’ve been working on for days turns out to be headed in the wrong direction. My brother and I disagree about something in the business and the conversation becomes tense before we find our way back.

None of this is a tragedy. But each one is a tiny zendo fire. A moment when the thing I expected, the structure I built in my mind about how things should go, meets reality. And at that moment I either practice what I learned or I don’t.

I mostly practice imperfectly. I’m desperate. I resist. I spend ten minutes wishing things were different before I remember that wishing doesn’t change anything. But eventually I remember. And this remembering, turning back to what is actually happening instead of what I wanted to happen, is the practice. Not the pillow. Not the zendo. The memory.

There is a part of the fire in Tassajara that I couldn’t stop thinking about. Among the objects buried in the ruins was a 2,000-year-old Gandharan Buddha statue from the ancient Indo-Aryan civilization of what is now northwestern Pakistan. In 1978, he already survived a fire at Tassajara. Then someone saved him. This time, no one knew.

Two thousand years. Rising and declining civilizations. The sculpture travels from the Indian subcontinent to a mountain valley in California. Surviving wars, centuries of weather, a single fire. Then he doesn’t survive the next one.

If that’s not a teaching about impermanence, I don’t know what is. And it’s a teaching that doesn’t come from a book, a lecture, or a guided meditation. This comes from the event itself.

Most mornings I run through the streets of Saigon in a heat that makes the air feel like something you have to push through rather than breathe. This is uncomfortable. That’s part of why I do it. Not because I enjoy suffering, but because learning to be present with discomfort, to keep going when every part of you wants to stop, is practice for those moments when discomfort is optional.

Those Tassajara monks did not become calm and talented in the middle of the fire by chance. That’s what they’ve become over the years of showing up day after day for a practice that feels pointless every morning. Sitting quietly. Attention. You notice the urge to get up, check your phone, or drift off into planning, preferring to stay with what’s here. It seems nothing. But it builds something invisible, the ability to face reality without flinching.

I don’t live in a monastery. I live in one of the noisiest, most chaotic cities on earth, with a baby, a business, and a coffee habit. My practice is messy. It happens in the five-minute breaks between seats, in traffic, in the few quiet moments after my daughter finally falls asleep, and before I fall asleep. Not photogenic.

But I think that’s the point. The teachings were never meant to live in beautiful buildings. They had to live in us. In the way we react when the building, whatever our building is, catches fire.

Tassajara is being rebuilt. The community has already received a lot of support from all over the world. The monks continued their practice. Because the practice was never about the building. The building was right where they happened to be sitting.

And now, somewhere, someone is reading about impermanence for the first time. Maybe in a library. Maybe on their phone during a break at a seemingly dead-end job. And the words will seem interesting, perhaps even beautiful, just as ideas about life can seem beautiful from a safe distance.

But words are not practice. Practice is what happens later. When the fire comes. When it always comes. And you find out if what you learned in the silence was strong enough to hold you in the noise.