MEDITATIONS: THE DHAMMAPADA, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Anger

Annoyance, frustration, anger, rage—they are all emotional signifiers of a desire for change, a change which is more often than not outside of an individual’s control. How do I know? Because one does not become angry when one gets his way. It is an encounter with an insurmountable obstacle which generates the unique synthesis of negative and positive affect. That is to say, when at first one fails to bend the world to his will, his instincts simultaneously wish to avert his gaze from the offending object AND to move toward it, to change or destroy it, whichever is in his power to obtain.

In this way, anger can be a useful, even necessary emotion. In the face of predators, whether they be beasts, pathogens, or sociopathic humans, the proper response is very often to purge them from the environment. There is health and virtue in a proportionate sensitivity to disgust.

But there is also vice. Just as anger is simultaneously painful and pleasurable—and I mean this technically; it is physiologically stressful and dopaminergic—it has its deficiencies and excesses. Too little engenders degeneracy, decadence, and cowardice. Too much, the more common of the two vicious afflictions, likewise drives one to counter-productive fixation and eventually to insatiable revenge.

This error of excess is the anger which Buddha advises against:

Give up anger, give up conceit,
Pass beyond every fetter.
There is no suffering for one who possesses nothing,
Who doesn’t cling to body-and-mind. (Buddha 55)

Here, anger is juxtaposed with conceit—with arrogance, a presumption of one’s own correctness—the precise error in application priorly described. One commits the sin of Satan when he assumes his will is right and that the world is what ought to be changed. He holds on to his anger, his will to revenge, and turns against God, the Tao, the world-as-it-is. Thus does he bind himself in fetters of endless suffering because he cannot escape the prison he built for himself. It is not his responsibility to adapt to reality but reality’s responsibility to adapt to him. One of such a mind cannot learn, cannot self-overcome. He wishes to be master of the universe, yet he cannot even master one—himself.

The one who keeps anger in check as it arises,
As one would a careening chariot,
I call a charioteer.
Others are merely rein-holders. (55)

This insinuation is delightful, for it draws the distinction between he who does and he who attempts. This is a rather useful distinction if one seeks to fulfill his purpose, to fill his niche. Intention and belief and not analogous with action and knowledge. While one may feel he is powerful while in the throes of anger, in reality, he is most often not. After all, anger is the emotion denoting frustration—a response to failure. But he who mistakes his rage for control? He is a proper analogue for the impotent man in the chariot who merely imagines himself to be a charioteer.

When one recognizes this, he becomes capable of forgiveness. Forgiveness in this sense is the letting go of the desire to mold another person’s perceptions of actions committed in opposition to your desires. The truth is, no man can truly control another. We have no absolute power over the choices and perceptions of others. We don’t even really have such powers over ourselves. We are limited beings, fallible, prone to error.

It is one such error when we become angry with others. We mistake their actions and those actions’ effects for the actor whom we cannot control. We blame them instead of focusing our energy on either preventing the aversive effect from happening again or else accepting its presence if prevention is beyond out power.

Better is it to learn to forgive through the realization that no one is bereft of blame—that all are in this sense blameless:

Ancient is this saying, O’ Atula,
It is not just of today:
They find fault in one sitting silently,
They find fault in one speaking much,
They find fault in one speaking moderately,
No one in this world is not found at fault.

No person can be found
Who has been, is, or will be
Only criticized
Or only praised. (56)

Thus should we conceive of our anger: it is signal from our unconscious that something is in need of change. That thing may be us—often is us. That thing may be without if indeed we have the power to make it different. Wisdom lies in knowing the difference. And the wise:

. . . are restrained in body,
Restrained in speech.
The wise are restrained in mind.
They are fully restrained. (57)

Buddha Siddhartha Gautama. The Dhammapada; Teachings of the Buddha, translated by Gil Fronsdal, Shambala Publications Inc, 2008.