There Is No Greater Evil Than Anger

The First in a Three-Part Serie on Anger


Anger Is Always Unhealthy and Destructive

All the virtuous deeds and merit,

Such as giving and making offerings,

That we have accumulated over thousands of eons

Can be destroyed by just one moment of anger.

There is no evil greater than anger,

And no virtue greater than patience.

Therefore, I should strive in various ways

To become familiar with the practice of patience.

If I harbor painful thoughts of anger,

I shall not experience mental peace,

I shall find no joy or happiness,

And I shall be unsettled and unable to sleep.

––Excerpts from Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life by Shantideva

Anger and the Abrahamic Religions

From Genesis, where we see the first signs of the Abrahamic God becoming angry with Adam and Eve to Exodus, where God is raging, first at the Egyptians and then at his chosen people, through to Jesus tirade at the money-changers in the Temple to the command in Ephesians (4:26): “Be angry,” we see anger as godly and righteous, though both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures warn us against “worldly” or “manly” anger. The Quran shares many of these early references as well as references to Mohammed becoming angry and condoning righteous anger.

In the Abrahamic religions, there is good anger and bad anger. Good anger is the anger of God or his representatives (Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, et al), or anger at what one supposes would anger God or his representatives, or anger at perceived injustices. All other anger, worldly anger, is defined as bad anger. This understanding of anger, however, condones and encourages most forms of anger and ultimately justifies everything from the periodic slaughters and genocides of the early Hebrew Scriptures to the medieval Inquisition and Crusades to today’s violent Jihads.

Anger and Buddhism

Buddhist on the other hand views all anger as a defilement. In fact, anger is such a strong defilement that it is categorized, along with greed and delusion, as one of the three poisons. And one of the fundamental principles of Buddhism is that defiled behavior can only lead to more defiled behavior: being angry cannot make us peaceful, acting angrily does cannot make this a better world.

For Buddhists, anger is anger, anger is always a defilement, an afflicted emotion, and there is no such thing as righteous anger or righteous indignation. For Buddhists, “anger management” is an oxymoron. It is not about “managing” our anger, meaning making better use of our anger, it is about eliminating anger.

Anger is one of the most common and destructive defilements, it afflicts our minds almost all the time, whether it is in its least weighty forms, as uneasiness or irritability, or in its full-blown forms, as rage/fury and combat.

Ending Anger

To minimize and ultimately eliminate anger, we need to understand it and to develop wisdom, patience, and discipline

·       We need to recognize anger and how and when it arises in our mind.

·       We need to understand that for anger to arise, we must lack compassion for those who are suffering;

·       We need to understand then that developing compassion will reduce our anger.

·       We must acknowledge how anger is always harmful, never beneficial, to both us and others.

·       We need to see that patience is the antidote for anger, and

·       We need to understand the benefits of being patient in the face of difficulties.

·       We then need to apply practical methods in our daily life to reduce our anger (right speech, for example) and finally to prevent it from arising at all.

This is called leading a disciplined life.

Leading a disciplined life and avoiding negative actions and mind-states is what Buddhists understand as The Path.

Kinda-Sorta In Dependent Origination Terms

When there is aversion, anger arises. With the ceasing of anger, compassion and patience arise.

When there is compassion and patience, anger does not arise.

The wisdom piece: Anger can arise because we are not being compassionate and patient. Which begs the question, why aren’t we feeling compassionate and patient? It is because our stories (our fabrications about what is happening rather than what is happening dominate our thinking) are causing us to pull seeds of great aversion.

To insist on compassion, we must learn to understand, on progressively deeper and deeper practice levels, that everyone is suffering and that everything they do, however dysfunctional, is an attempt to relieve their suffering.

When we see this, deeply see this, we become compassionate not angry and seek way to help rather than retaliate.

Studying and contemplating the first noble truth, there is suffering, can be very beneficial in developing this aspect of wisdom.

The second in this three-part series will be posted in about two weeks.

What Happens To Me After I die?

Our eternal query, “What happens to me after I die?” has but three possible answers:

1. When your body dies, your soul lives on.

2. When your body dies, there is nothing more. 

3. When your body dies, you are reborn.

Numbers 1 and 2 are the answers offered by eternalists and materialists respectively. According to eternalists, including Western theistic religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, when you die, your soul goes to heaven––or somewhere else, and lives on forever. According to materialists, including nihilists and annihilationists, there is nothing beyond this corporal existence. When the body dies, that’s it.

These two ideas, eternal life versus nothingness, were discussed and debated in the time of the Buddha 2500 years ago, just as they are today. Both are ideas that the Buddha categorically rejected.

Eternalism is refuted by our own experience of reality. When, by practicing meditation, our minds are calm and clear we observe conditions accurately, we see that everything is permanent. Since nothing is permanent, there can be no such thing as an eternal soul, or any other eternal entity; there can be no eternal place, such as heaven, and no eternal God, either.

Materialism is also refuted by our experience of reality. Materialism says we are physical entities only. But, when we practice meditation, we notice that we have a consciousness as well as a body, even if it is sometimes hard to differentiate the two. Our own experience tells us that we are not just a body.

Furthermore, Buddha observed the result of these views in the lives of the human beings who held them.  He saw that eternalism led to mental laxity, and that materialism led to chaos and anarchy.  Both of these isms, he said, are wrong views, for the reasons just sited.  And both were wrong views because they were speculative views, and speculative views only serve to increase, rather than reduce, our suffering.

The Buddha’s answer to the question of what happens to us when we die is rebirth, answer number 3. Rebirth means that our present life is but a link in a chain of lives extending infinitely back in time and infinitely forward into the future––“from beginningless time to endless time,” as we say.

Without rebirth, there is no moral imperative to our actions, and autonomy and self-interest override any sense of ethics. After all, without rebirth, without consequences, why bother with anything other than autonomy and self-interest? The recent banking crisis perfectly illustrates how autonomy and self-interest trump ethical and moral values in a world without the consequences of rebirth.

It is rebirth that gives us consequences.  Rebirth strongly suggests to us that we avoid evil and do good for the sake of our own well being. With rebirth, morally good deeds bring agreeable results, and bad deeds bring disagreeable results, for the effects of our actions correspond to the moral quality of those deeds.  Therefore, when we behave immorally, amorally, or unethically we harm ourselves. We simply need to act in ways that lead to peace and happiness if we want to be peaceful and happy.

However, we clearly cannot find this kind of moral equilibrium within the limits of a single life. On the contrary, there are countless examples of evil people who live long, prosperous, luxurious lives. For example, King Leopold II of Belgian, whose forced labor camps resulted in the deaths of 3-5 million Congolese in the late 19^th century, lived a life of extravagance and luxury. His Villa Leopolda, a house he built in France for his mistress, was recently in the news when the Russian billionaire, Mikhail Prokhorov, defaulted on his agreement to buy the Villa.  The selling price was $736 million! America’s robber barons, our own exemplars of unabated, opportunistic venality and greed from the same time period, seem modest in comparison. Consider Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose summer “cottage” in Newport, Rhode Island is valued only at about $150 million!

The world is full of morally unscrupulous people who enjoy happiness, esteem, and success. On the other hand, we all know people who lead lives of utmost integrity, but who endure great suffering. One lifetime is just too short for the principle of moral equilibrium to reveal itself. Karma needs more time to work itself out.

The knowledge that our good and bad actions determine the quality of our future, in the nearterm and in future lives, affords us a powerful reason to avoid unwholesome conduct and to diligently pursue the good. Only when we realize that there is this moral equilibrium are we truly on the Path; only then is it a joy to be alive. Otherwise, the world is a dark and dangerous place, regardless of how successful we might be at any given moment.

Belief in rebirth and karma is fundamental to Buddhism. With these, we know our present living conditions, our dispositions and aptitudes, our virtues and faults, to be the results of our actions in the past, in this and in our previous lives.  With that understanding, we bequeath our present actions to our future lives. We know that our present actions of body, speech, and mind, if well-chosen, will advance us along our spiritual Path, ushering us to peace and liberation.

Finally, there is a deeper significance to karma and rebirth that bears mentioning, and which has profound implications for the cause of ethical conduct. That is, if we inherit our personal lives from our own karmic past, the universe itself must be intrinsically both ethical and meaningful.

Together rebirth and karma make the universe an orderly, integrated whole, with transcendent significance. A logical pattern is revealed, not only in the physical and biological domains, but also in the ethical domain.  We are able to discern the logic and see the pattern by virtue of knowing and practicing with the concepts of rebirth and karma.

Together rebirth and karma teach us that, beyond the range of normal perception, a moral law holds sway over our deeds, and, through our deeds, over our destiny. Karma, operating across the sum total of our lives, locks our volitional actions into the dynamics of the universe, thus making ethics an expression of the intrinsic orderliness of the cosmos.

How To Act Right, Making The Most of Every Moment

Make Every Moment Count

Impermanence is one of the cornerstones of Buddhism. Yet it is often confused and distorted by these two wrong views of its meaning:

Wrong View One: Insight tells us to embrace our experiences without clinging to them — to get the most out of what’s happening in the present moment by fully appreciating its intensity, knowing that we will soon have to let them go to embrace whatever comes next. This offers us false wisdom on how to consume the pleasures of the moment.

Wrong View Two: Insight into change gives us hope. No matter what the situation, anything is possible: we can do whatever we want to do, get whatever we want even if we don’t have it yet, create whatever world we want to live in, and become whatever we want to be. This offers us false wisdom on the results of our actions.

The questions that arises from these false views are

1) If experiences are impermanence and fleeting, how could they be worth the effort needed to engage them?

And 2), how can we find genuine hope in the prospect of positive change if we can't fully rest in the results when they arrive? Aren't we just setting ourselves up for disappointment?

The real wisdom of impermanence is that the effort which goes into making us more peaceful and happy is worthwhile only if the produces well-being and happiness that is largely resistant to change, largely stabilizing.

If all our experiences of the present are something fabricated or produced, moment-to-moment, from the raw material provided by our past actions, from our seeds, then in our desire to consume pleasure, we are producing and consuming pain, dukkha.

So what do we do with our stressful experiences? Buddhism suggests that we learn to use them to get beyond them. Buddhism suggests that our obligation in response to every moment, to every new experience, is to learn to use it in a way that furthers our spiritual growth. Types of actions that do this are labeled “the path.”

These activities include acts of wisdom, acts of virtue, and the practice of meditation. They include generosity, compassion and lovingkindness, patience, humility, moral disciple, right speech, dependability, and regret (When we act in a way that is seemingly appropriately but the outcome is not beneficial, then we use regret, very gently, to remind us to try another tactic next time.)

These activities produce a sense well-being and peace relatively stable and secure, relatively helpful. For this reason, they lead us further along the path, rather than obstructing our progress. So they are skills that need to be mastered. They are the basic set of tools we have making everyday decision-making. In any situation, our intention should be to choose one of them as the basis for our next action.

With that attitude, we make use of impermanence and the process of change to move us freedom, well-being, peace and happiness. And that's what Buddhist practice is all about.

Always Do What Is Appropriate, But What Is Appropriate?

How Buddhists Should Behave?

While many Buddhist are hesitant, some even loathe, to tell others how they should behave, or even to setup standards for themselves, Buddhism does give us some very strong guidelines. These are ways of behaving that skillfully use whatever is happening in our lives, good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, to facilitate the ending of our dukkha. The six paramitas, are an obvious example of these guidelines.

These recommended ways of behaving are activities that weaken our bonds of attachment and that produce the clarity of mind needed for progress along the path. They are The Path, which in essence is just a list of skills worth mastering. They're our basic set of tools, so we will want to keep them handy and in good shape.

These guidelines aren’t speculative (which would be wrong view). Nor are they absolutes (again, wrong view). They are simply ways of behaving that minimize our dukkha and lead us to a life of peace and happiness.
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Some of these are, of course, the already mentions paramitas (Generosity, Morality, Patience, Diligent Effort, Meditation and Wisdom), the five precepts (No Killing, No Stealing, No Sexual Misconduct, No Lying, No Intoxicants), and the eight aspects of the Noble Eightfold Path (Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration).

But here is another skillful means way of looking at the criteria for daily decision-making:

Always Act Appropriately

These can be used to guide our every decision:

1. Do no harm, then if possible
2. Be of benefit
3. If you can’t be of benefit, do nothing
4. Be morally upright (No killing, no stealing, no lying, no misuse of sexuality, no recreational drugs,etc) and follow the rules
5. Be meditative
6. Be wisdom-oreinted

Always Use Right Speech

Only speak when it will improve the silence.

1. Only speak when conditions suggest you should speak
2. Only speak when you have something to say that will be of benefit
3. Always speak in ways that can be heard
4. Only say it once
5. Never go on the battlefield; being of benefit isn’t about winning

Wrong speech, the Big Don'ts:
Harsh, mean-spirited or angry words
Falsehoods
Gossip and small talk
Belittling others to raise your own status

Default Mind-States

Whenever a negative mind-state arises, use Right Effort to replace it with one of these positive mind-states:

Generosity
Compassion and Lovingkindness
Patience
Humility and Modesty
Moral Restraint
Equanimity
Right Speech
Truthfulness
Dependability
Regret (When we act appropriately but the outcome is not beneficial, then we use regret, very gently, to remind us to try another tactic next time.)

Robert Frost and The Middle Path

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The Road Not Taken

by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that, the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

two roads diverged in a wood, and I–

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Environmentalists have absconded with this metaphor, the pop psychology, new age and gay communities have taken it for their own, usually mistakenly rewording it to The Road Less Traveled. So why not a Buddhist take on it?

Given a choice between doing something the easy way or the hard way, we must learn to do it the hard way. We must practice enough to see the two roads clearly and then take the one less travelled.

The road less traveled, the hard way, is the Middle Path. The easy way is the way of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, a path that leaves us never satisfied with who or where we are, never able to be present in the moment, never able to be peaceful and happy. The road less traveled, the path on which all our stress-producing story-telling ends, that Middle Path, that’s the harder of the two. That’s the one that can make all the difference.

It's Not Enough To Say "Never Again"

It’s Not Enough to Say, “Never Again”

This is an incomplete list of genocides since World War Two, since Hitler.

It’s not enough just to say Never Again. That Never Again button which has been on my backpack for years may have kept me aligned with my pacifism, but that just isn’t enough, as you can see from the list below. Look at these numbers. Another thirteen million people have been murdered in genocides, since World War Two alone.  If you add in the political genocides of Stalin and Mao, that number jumps to more than 93 million human beings!

If this is to end, we must realize that whenever a human being dies, we all die. We must understand that, whenever there is genocide in the world, we all have bloodstained hands. Only then, I suggest, will we take the necessary steps to end the wholesale slaughter of those with whom we differ. Only then will we do what it takes to end the greed and hatred that fuels our monstrous deeds. Only then, when we know that Mind is the source of  unwholesome actions as well as wholesome actions, will we take hold of our minds.  Only when our mindfulness has made us skillful in our actions, committed to non-violence, and dedicated to the cultivation of compassion, will this evil end.

Country and Dates	Estimated Number of Victims
Cambodia, 4/75-1/79	2,400,000
Pakistan, 3/71-12/71 – in 7 months	2,000,000
Sudan, 9/83-present -- 500 each day!	2,500,000
Afghanistan, 4/78-4/92	1,800,000
Indonesia, 11/65-7/66	750,000
Rwanda, 4/94-7/94 –in 3½  months!	750,000
China, 5/66-3/75	625,000
Sudan, 10/56-3/72	500,000
Angola, 11/75-2001	500,000
South Vietnam, 1/65-4/75	450,000
Uganda, 12/80-1/86	350,000
Uganda, 2/72-4/79	225,000
Bosnia, 5/92-11/95	225,000
Iraq, 3/88-6/91	180,000
Indonesia, 12/75-7/92	150,000
Burundi, 10/65-12/73	140,000
Guatemala, 7/78-12/96	130,000
China, 3/59-12/59	65,000
Philippines, 9/72-6/76	60,000
El. Salvador, 1/80-12/89	50,000
Burundi, 10/93-5/94	50,000
Iraq, 6/63-3/75	45,000
Somalia, 5/88-1/91	35,000
Algeria, 7/62-12/62	19,000
Syria, 4/81-2/82	18,000
Rwanda, 12/63-6/64	16,000
Iran, 6/81-12/92	15,000
Argentina, 3/76-12/80	14,000
Ethiopia, 7/76-12/79	10,000
Serbia, 12/98-7/99	10,000
Pakistan, 2/73-7/77	7500
Chile, 9/73-12/76	7500
Congo-K, 2/64-1/65	5,000
Burma, 1/78-12/78	5,000
Congo-K, 3/77-12/79	3,500

Our Worst Habit

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Our Worst Habit

Both formerly & now, it is only dukkha that I describe, and the cessation of dukkha. —SN 22.86

Our worst bad habit is seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. This behavior is so entrenched that we unquestioningly accept it as the sure path to happiness.  However, a life spent pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain leads, not to happiness, but to suffering, anxiety and dysfunction.

Here’s how this happens.  Whenever the senses encounter information, dukkha (anxiety) arises, whether the encounter is “real”, as in the ear making contact with a sound, or “imagined” as in the mind fabricating a thought of a “perceived injustice,” to use Bodhidharma’s phrase. Anxiety arises not from the contact itself, but from the way we process sensory information.

At the moment of contact, we add something extra to the encounter, something which occludes information and makes it misleading. That’s where the trouble begins.  At the moment of contact, we assign a positive or negative feeling-- in effect, an extra layer of information-- to sensory input, and it is from there, from that layer of feeling, from that moment of choosing good, bad, positive, negative, that our suffering, our dukkha, begins. *

Anxiety, which is another word for dukkha, arises when the brain’s alarm system malfunctions, causing it to overestimate danger or signal danger where there is none.  That is, when we misperceive conditions, the result is dukkha.

Psychologically, to use British Buddhist scholar Frances Story’s definition in Suffering: dukkha is the omnipresent sense of “disturbance, irritation, dejection, worry, despair, fear, dread, anguish, anxiety; vulnerability, injury, inability, inferiority; sickness, aging, decay of body and faculties, senility; pain/pleasure; excitement/boredom; deprivation/excess; desire/frustration, suppression; longing/aimlessness; hope/hopelessness; effort, activity, striving/repression; loss, want, insufficiency/satiety; love/lovelessness, friendlessness; dislike, aversion/attraction; parenthood/childlessness; submission/rebellion; [and] decision/indecisiveness, vacillation, uncertainty.”

Wow! That’s just the psychological aspect of dukkha. There is more.  Dukkha is also physical. We are always on edge as a result of our pleasure-seeking. Our bodies accumulate tension, creating a whole new layer of suffering, which includes increased heart rate and blood pressure, changes in the peripheral nervous system, sweating, body jolts, fatigue, nervous or excessive energy, palpitations, cooling of the skin, tightness in the chest, stiffness, soreness, spasms, jitteriness, tremors, muscle twitches, neuro-muscular pain, sweating, soreness, and even vomiting. Ugh. Horrible.

Clearly, stress is dangerous.  It doesn’t just make us miserable.  It makes us very sick, even sick unto death.  Fortunately, we have options.  We can greet every situation, not with stress, but much more effectively and efficiently, with simple awareness. When we see conditions clearly, there is no dukkha.  But, we can only see conditions clearly when we find our refuge in the middle path, the path that avoids the pitfall of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.

We have observed, over and over again in our lives, that the more we get, the more we want, and that this makes us perpetually dissatisfied, yet we remedy our dissatisfaction by means of the very thing that caused it. In fact, the sum total of our lives is this bad habit in action and the result is that we are never at ease, never satisfied, and never fully present in the moment. That is why we say, “When we stop seeking, the struggle is ended.” That is why we must break this habit.

My practice suggests that until we see how deeply ingrained this habitual behavior is, until we see how it dominates our every choice, until we understand the nature of dukkha, we will not be able to make a deep commitment to this next stage of our spiritual development and end suffering for good.

To end dukkha, we need to see our worst bad habit in everything we say, do or think, so that we can develop the new and crucial habit of using everything, every moment, all of our experiences, to improve our spiritual lot. And that, precisely, is our practice.  In every moment, we are training in transformation.  We are training to use the experience of this moment to improve our spiritual lot in the next moment.

* This is the first two of the five skandhas (or five aggregates).