The Fire Kasiṇa

5. Anyone who wants to develop the fire kasiṇa should apprehend the sign in fire. Herein, when someone with merit, having had previous practice, is apprehending the sign, it arises in him in any sort of fire, not made up, as he looks at the fiery combustion in a lamp’s flame or in a furnace or in a place for baking bowls or in a forest conflagration, as in the Elder Cittagutta’s case. The sign arose in that elder as he was looking at a lamp’s flame while he was in the Uposatha house on the day of preaching the Dhamma.

6. Anyone else should make one up. Here are the directions for making it. He should split up some damp heartwood, dry it, and break it up into short lengths. He should go to a suitable tree root or to a shed and there make a pile in the way done for baking bowls, and have it lit. He should make a hole a span and four fingers wide in a rush mat or a piece of leather or a cloth, and after hanging it in front of the fire, he should sit down in the way already described. Instead of giving attention to the grass and sticks below or the smoke above, he should apprehend the sign in the dense combustion in the middle.

7. He should not review the colour as blue or yellow, etc., or give attention to its characteristic as heat, etc., but taking the colour as belonging to its physical support, and setting his mind on the [name] concept as the most outstanding mental datum, and using any among the names for fire (tejo) such as “the Bright One” (pāvaka), “the Leaver of the Black Trail” (kaṇhavattani), “the Knower of Creatures” (jātaveda), “the Altar of Sacrifice” (hutāsana), etc., he should develop [the kasiṇa] by using [preferably] the obvious “fire, fire.”

8. As he develops it in this way the two signs eventually arise in him as already described. Herein, the learning sign appears like [the fire to keep] sinking down as the flame keeps detaching itself. [172] But when someone apprehends it in a kasiṇa that is not made up, any fault in the kasiṇa is evident [in the learning sign], and any firebrand, or pile of embers or ashes, or smoke appears in it. The counterpart sign appears motionless like a piece of red cloth set in space, like a gold fan, like a gold column. With its appearance he reaches access jhāna and the jhāna tetrad and pentad in the way already described.