When the Dalai Lama escaped from Tibet, many of the monks left behind were captured by the Chinese and subjected to imprisonment and torture. One such monk escaped and found his way to the Dalai Lama. In his conversation with the Dalai Lama, the monk confessed that he had been in very grave danger. The Dalai Lama nodding acknowledging the danger of the monk’s time of imprisonment. But the monk demurred saying that he had been in grave danger of hating his captors. The danger the monk spoke of was not to his life or his body but to the purity of his mind. He understood that hatred and anger only beget more hatred and anger and do grave harm to the individual who is captured by hatred and anger.
This is not new news. The great religions have all pointed to the vicious cycle of hatred and anger. We only have to read the news or history books to see how hatred and anger can be manipulated to cause whole peoples to annihilate or attempt to annihilate other peoples - usually of a different religion or ethnicity. This hatred is learned, passed on from generation to generation, transmitted through lies and manipulations from leaders to followers. If all ills are blamed on a certain group of people, if those people are belittled by slurs and comparisons to sub-human or non-human beings, if those people become perceived as threats to the dominant group, hatred and anger grow. Hatred and anger can be habitual, can become negative habits.
The Buddha called anger the poisoned arrow with the honeyed tip. The honey of anger is self-righteousness, being right, being better than other people. Maybe that translates into the momentary safety of belonging to a stronger or dominant group. Maybe it’s fueled by seeing something or someone cared for threatened or destroyed and blaming a certain group for the threat or destruction. But hatred or anger has a blindness to it, an unreasoning quality. It doesn’t stop to check the facts. It doesn’t stop to feel compassion for the individual caught in hatred or anger or the human beings who are its targets. In fact, it objectifies its human targets.
And to add insult to injury, it does not even make us happy. In fact, hatred and anger interfere with our attempts at happiness by perpetuating a deep restlessness upon us. Hatred and anger interfere with our peaceful meditations, with tranquility, joy, happiness, all the qualities that support our progress on the spiritual path, that support our concentration and insight. We know hatred and anger as one of the five hindrances along with desire, agitation, sloth and torpor, and doubt.
There is a corollary teaching related to the chain of dependent origination which shows us how ignorance takes us step by step to birth, death and all the misery that goes along with it. This teaching is Transcendental Origination or Dependent Libration. It starts at the end of the chain of dependent origination, at suffering, and shows how faith or confidence can arise out of suffering. That faith or confidence leads to gladdening which leads to joy which leads to tranquility which leads to happiness. It is often said that concentration is dependent on happiness. Many meditators understand this who have tried fruitlessly to bear down hard to concentrate. Concentration arises naturally when conditioned by happiness. Out of concentration comes insight, seeing things are they really are which leads to dis-enchantment with seeking happiness in worldly pleasures which leads to dispassion, freedom, and knowledge of the destruction of the taints.
Some of the teachings on Transcendental Origination place the beginning point on virtue rather than suffering and faith. This virtue gives rise to non-remorse and gladness and is developed by a life of non-harming, both in speech and action and also in our minds. This non-harming stands in direct opposition to hatred and anger.
So hatred and anger are important obstacles to our own happiness. Bhikkus Bramali in his tract “Dependent Liberation” (https://samita.be/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/dl.pdf) considers our habitual tendencies around hatred and anger to be a major area of our spiritual path to be considered. He says, “To overcome anger we need to ask ourselves how we can look at the world around us in a different way. Is there a way of looking at it so that these negative states don’t arise? You will find that if you put effort into such reflection then over time you will gradually change - you will start to see things in a new way; you will start to see the world with more compassion and kindness.”
He goes on to say, “Often people think that will-power is the way to deal with harmful mental qualities. They think they can force themselves to be kind, that they can crush the anger, crush the negativity. …But what the Buddha is really saying is that the best way to overcome negative states is to use wisdom (MN19).”
One of the most powerful tenets of wisdom we can use to soften anger is to see deeply and completely how destructive anger is to ourselves and to others, to everything we value on our spiritual path. Seeing through anger is a critical first step to weakening its influence in our lives.
Dr. Judson Brewer’s analysis of habit loops can be helpful here as well. If a habit is composed of a trigger, a behavior, and a result, one place we can begin to look to weaken the habit pattern is at the result. What are we getting out of this habit pattern? He found in his studies of smoking that when people took a long, intense, non-judgmental look at what the results of smoking were, they were surprised to find how completely negative the results were. It didn’t taste good, it didn’t smell good, it was disgusting to look at (imagine crushing out the cigarette in unfinished food as we used to in college). Basically there was a whole lot of Yuck! People quit smoking in much larger numbers and for longer periods of time when they looked closely and dispassionately at the results of the habit.
It wouldn’t be surprising if many of you have already seen many of the less pleasant results of hatred and anger in your own lives. Most of us don’t go around popping off at friends and neighbors, family and pets very often - because it doesn’t feel good, because we inevitably pile a greater wrong on top of the misdemeanor we were angry about in the first place, and because then we have to go through a very uncomfortable process of remorse and apology. Better to avoid it in the first place.
But these times have piled onto us circumstances that are dismaying, painful, heartbreaking. And sometimes our response is a reaction - anger and hatred at those who perpetuate the horrible conditions we are witnessing and hearing about.
What then?
First is to recognize that the anger and hatred we may be feeling are more destructive to ourselves than they are helpful to the situation. Not only can we ourselves see that the anger and hatred doesn’t make us happy, we can take heart that the Buddha’s teachings show us that these negative mental factors directly interfere with our happiness, our tranquillity, our ability to concentrate, in short, in our ability to meditate and regain a peaceful mind that we came to meditation for in the first place. Now, as well as supporting a happy and pure mind, we find that meditation depends on a happy, pure mind to begin with.
So we are turned and turned again to the task of investigating our anger and our hatred. We might understand that watching the news is the trigger, the behavior is the arising of anger and hatred and the result is angry thoughts, angry speech, angry actions. We are poisoning ourselves and the atmosphere around us when that habit pattern gets activated.
Mindfulness, clear seeing of what is happening is the first step. What are the results of our anger and hatred? Do we see deeply into the harmful nature of these mental states? Accessing, practicing, calling upon compassion and kindness are powerful solutions. As the Dalai Lama said, the religion I practice is kindness.
None of this is new. None of this is surprising. But the circumstances of our world have brought news of harm, images of harm, plans for continued harm closer to us, into our news feeds, into our conversations, into our plans for resistance.
Our task is to recognize the power of these harmful occurrences to corrupt our minds and to prevent us from accessing our usual sources for peace and tranquillity. As Joseph Goldstein said and I have quoted before, “Our practice is only as strong as the challenges we have met so far.”
And we can all understand and be inspired by the Dalai Lama’s monk who said he was in very grave danger of hating his captors. We also are in danger, and our task is to see anger and hatred, not as useful responses to circumstances, but as threats to our ability to combat these circumstances with compassion and kindness and to replace hatred with love and joy.