UNWHOLESOME MENTAL FACTORS
The First Zone and the Three Main Mental Afflictions
The main mental afflictions are said to be the root disturbance within the mind that leads to the manifest agitation in our consciousness. Our fundamental confusion triggers the very basic afflictions like aversion and attachment, which then lead to deep-seated emotions like anger and desire. From this root, all the other disturbing emotions arise.
If we try to deal only with our overt problems, it is very difficult to see this. But if we look deeply, we will discover the three basic causes of our present problems: ignorance, attachment, and aversion. These three main mental afflictions are also called the three poisons, because everything contaminated by them brings suffering in its wake. Attachment refers to clinging to things that support our sense of permanence. Aversion refers to pushing away things that harm our sense of permanence. Ignorance is that very sense of permanence and, although listed with the other two as an equal, can also be seen as their main cause.
<��p height="1em" width="1em" align="justify">Traditionally there are six main mental afflictions, the other three being self-importance, afflicted view, and afflicted indecision, but as these all stem in some way from ignorance, we can set them aside at present.14 Ignorance, attachment, and aversion, in one way or another, nourish all the other unwholesome mental factors in our mental continuum.
If you look at the first zone in the chart, you will see that the fundamental confusion about the way self, things, and events exist creates ignorance of the most subtle relationship of the law of cause and effect. From this ignorance grows self-centeredness. We see self as permanent and concrete, and feel compelled to defend it as such. This happens in three ways. If something seems to support our sense of permanence, the mind it is attracted to it. So from self-centeredness in the chart, an arrow goes to attachment. Alternatively, the mind rejects anything that does not support its sense of permanence. This manifests as a subtle rejection of the object, which is aversion in the chart. If the object or event neither supports nor threatens the sense of permanence, then the mind simply ignores it.
The minds in the first zone are extremely deep-rooted, functioning well below the conscious level. All unenlightened beings experience these minds, even those in the formless realm, who lack a physical body.
In our studies of Buddhist philosophy, we hear the statement that ignorance is the root of all suffering so often that we could be tempted to accept it without really seeking out its meaning. The four noble truths explains ignorance in the presentation of the truth of the origin of suffering, and it is divided into two kinds: innate and (intellectually) acquired.
Intellectually acquired ignorance, as the name implies, is ignorance that arises from the influence of our culture, environment, religion, or training. Among the two forms of ignorance, this form is coarser and more easily overcome.
Innate ignorance is akin to the fundamental confusion at the top of the chart above. It has been part of our experience since beginningless times, prompting us to act in unskillful ways. This is the mind that innately misapprehends the self as existing independently or inherently. It is also called the false view of the transitory collection. In fact, we are nothing more than our five aggregates—form, feeling, discrimination, compositional factors, and consciousness—and this collection is ever-changing. Our grasping at the innate wrong view that perceives the opposite of this is the root of cyclic existence.
Seeing things as permanent and independent, we build a strong distinction between ourselves and the outside world, a distinction that does not in fact exist. This is basic ignorance, and holding this to be true, the mind defends itself by clinging to things that reinforce this position and rejecting things that harm it. It is from this perspective that ignorance is considered the cause of attachment and aversion.
Simply attaining an intellectual understanding of the term ignorance is a challenge, but setting about overcoming it in our own minds is a much larger task. Within the two aspects of the path to enlightenment, method and wisdom, practices for prevailing over ignorance are encompassed within the category of wisdom. Wisdom refers to the unmistaken understanding of how things exist, and ignorance is the primary hindrance to wisdom.
Innate ignorance arises on the basis of the mistaken notion that our “self” is a unitary “thing” that exists in an objective and independent way. This immensely powerful propensity to see things as independent and intrinsic carries on in our minds from one life to another and is the main reason that we are not enlightened.
Innate ignorance is the immediate cause of the next most subtle affliction, the ignorance of the most subtle relationship of the law of cause and effect. This is the ignorance that is referred to in the first link of the twelve links of dependent origination, the teaching that explains the succession of causes and effects that compose cyclic existence. In this teaching, ignorance creates karma, the second link, which leads to consciousness and so on through the formation of feeling and clinging to birth, which is the immediate cause of aging and death.15 To eliminate death, we need to eliminate birth, and to do that we need to eliminate clinging and all of its preceding links. Even then, as arhats, we are still not enlightened because the first link of ignorance remains. This means that the subtle residue of the afflictions has yet to be purified.
Attachment can arise in relation to any object and manifests in all three zones. It is a pervasive aspect of our mental experiences. Some levels of attachment are deeply unconscious and influence our actions in ways we do not comprehend; other levels are easily recognizable. Attachment exaggerates the quality of the object and moves the mind toward that object. In order for attachment to be present, the object need not be attractive intrinsically. The mind can be attracted to any object, from a gun to a Van Gogh painting.
Because of its characteristic exaggeration of the object’s appeal, attachment is an agent for discontent. Before we possess the object, the mind is agitated with desire; once we have the object, the desirable qualities of the object seem to fade (although in reality they were never there in the first place), or we live with the fear of losing it. Look honestly at the possessions and relationships that define your life and explore whether this is true. Is that desire for your car as strong now as when you first bought it? Does your cassette player continue to give you satisfaction now that there are CD and MP3 players?
The same thing tends to be true for everyone. Due to our fundamental state of discontent, we grasp at a new object, anticipating that it will be the source of happiness, and we desire it. We get it, and sooner or later, because the happiness it brings is only partial and temporary, we lose interest. Then we focus on the next object down the line that seems to be the answer to our prayers. In this way, we establish a pattern in our lives of ever-increasing discontent and ever-increasing craving. The source of this cycle of discontent is the attachment that exaggerates the qualities of objects, which is in turn caused by our fundamental ignorance of the way that ourselves and the objects we interact with really exist.
AVERSION
Aversion is also an exaggeration of an object that arises from the fundamental ignorance of the way self and things exist. This time, however, because the object harms the self’s notion of permanence, the mind exaggerates its negative qualities. Again, this mind of aversion can range from very gross to very subtle, spanning all three zones of negative mental factors.
Discontent becomes att��nt achment when the object appears attractive. Aversion or anger arises when something thwarts our desire or otherwise threatens our self-image. At an unconscious level, the threat to our innate sense of self is best understood as a subtle but pervasive sense of dissatisfaction, a nagging feeling that something is not quite right. When aggravated, this underlying dissatisfaction gives rise to frustration, an increase in aversion, and overt outbursts of anger. Such outbursts invariably plant particularly heavy karmic propensities in our minds, and thus understanding how to defuse aversion before it escalates is crucial.
The Second Zone
Closer to the conscious world we inhabit but still deeply buried in our unconscious are mental factors that affect our conscious feelings and emotions more directly. These are the mindstates I have placed in the second zone, the bridge between the main causes and the surface afflictions. You will see in the chart that these mental factors are more gross in their existence and functions than corresponding ones in the first zone. It is possible for ordinary people to recognize them, but not without investigation; they are generally still too subtle and deep to be overtly noticeable.
Again, each zone relates to a different level of subtlety of the mind. In the third zone, the law of cause and effect becomes apparent based on outward appearances alone. We see somebody who is rich and living a happy life and we can trace the cause back to their good job and pleasant personality. We see this life’s immediate causes and conditions but are unable to see the causes of those things.
The mental factors of the second zone are subtler, and so is the understanding of the law of cause and effect that corresponds to them. From the perspective of the second zone, we can see that the rich lifestyle and pleasant personality of a fortunate person has been caused by habits such as generosity in previous lives. Thorough analysis will bring us an understanding of the subtle laws of cause and effect that operate here. In contrast, the cause and effect that is perceived by the mental factors of the first zone is incredibly subtle. It is said that only buddhas can understand it at this level.
There are three groups of mental factors in the second zone: (1) selfish concern, (2) grasping and discontentment, and (3) agitation and anger. These mental factors are similar to those in the first zone but grosser. Conversely, they are much more subtle than those in the third zone.
The mindstates of the second zone occur spontaneously in our lives. We do not have to be taught to grasp at something, nor are we taught to be unhappy when things go wrong or to have self-concern and fear. Whereas the mental factors in the first zone are far too subtle for us to be aware of, we can observe the second-zone ones at work by paying careful attention to our mental processes.
Without a thorough understanding of past and future lives, it is impossible to see beyond our most superficial mental states—those of this lifetime that arise as a result of external circumstances such as our environment, friends, or culture. Investigating these alone will not help us understand the origin of mental factors whose root causes are not the events of this life but the propensities in our mindstream from countless previous lives. Because of the habits of grasping, discontent, and selfish concern, these mindstates have developed and deepened over lifetimes.
Grasping and discontent are caused by selfish concern, which in turn is a product of ignorance of the subtle�� relationship of the law of cause and effect. Thus, grasping and discontent are linked to the attachment in the first zone. In the same way, agitation and anger are linked to first-zone aversion.
Selfish concern can be considered from the point of view of the following divisions:
1. extreme view 2. view of superiority 3. views that regard unsatisfactory moral and spiritual disciplines as supreme 4. mistaken views
These four are wrong views that can easily arise if we are ignorant of the subtle relationship between cause and effect. They pervade our lives in many ways and color our reactions and emotions. These views are wrong precisely because they are driven by selfish concern.
The first of these views, extreme view, is linked with the other views in this category, but particularly with the last one, wrong view. For this, a person not only holds some kind of wrong view, but moreover holds it to be absolute in some way. The various concepts of what the “I” is reflect this. On the one hand, someone might feel the “I” to be completely separate from the mind/body aggregates, which from a Buddhist perspective is a wrong view, but superimposed on that is the sense that this independent “I” is somehow eternal and divine—that through life after life, the “I” remains unchanging. Conversely, the view of the “I” might be that it exists only for this lifetime, again a wrong view, but deemed extreme here because it is linked to a national or racial identity, in that it will cease to exist when that nation or race ceases.
This, of course, comes from attempts by early Buddhist philosophers to disprove the views of the non-Buddhist schools, but we can see the same thing happening in the modern world. National or racial identity is an important issue for many people, and it has been used to create incredibly powerful prejudice where groups of people feel themselves to be uniquely superior to others. Right-wing dictatorships work on the idea that the followers of that particular group have some divine right and therefore can subjugate and even murder entire groups not belonging to their group. This is taking a fundamental wrong view and acting in an extreme way.
We may not be overtly elitist, but we may still possess the view of superiority—instinctively considering some to be inferior to us and others to be superior. Even a seemingly positive emotion like pity can come from a sense of superiority. So we must be careful.
Views that regard unsatisfactory moral and spiritual disciplines as supreme are powerful influences in our world today, as we can see in the growth of fanaticism and religious intolerance. There are many spiritual practitioners who feel that their path is the only true path and that all others are inferior or wrong. I see this in a secular context, too. Living in England, which is not a religious country, I come across many who feel that people with religious convictions are brainwashed, stupid, and superstitious. Some circles consider a cynical and irreligious perspective uniquely superior.
Many people who have a corporate job, wear a suit, carry a briefcase, and drive a car feel that their lifestyle is superior to others and that those trying to follow a spiritual path are only doing so because they cannot succeed in business. This view ��ss.is very persuasive because it pervades our culture, but really, it is just a secular version of regarding unsatisfactory ethics as supreme.
From a Buddhist perspective, wrong view is either believing nonexistent things to exist, or conversely believing that existent things don’t exist. For example, a person might have strong anger at either himself or others, but feel that it is reasonable because no negative consequences will result from that anger, or if they do they will be negligible. That person will have no thought of long-term consequences at all, their wrong view based on the assumption that nothing exists beyond the surface world of sensory consciousness. Conversely, a person might perceive something to exist that does not, such as someone who hallucinates from taking drugs feeling that the hallucination is real.
Within Buddhism, the big debate focuses not around anger or hallucinations, but the sense of “I” or self. Those who feel the “I” does not exist at all, or that it does exist, but intrinsically, independent of the mind/body aggregates, are said to hold wrong views.
True awareness of the relationship between cause and effect is the antidote to these views. Even if we meet very charismatic people who try to convince us that their philosophy is superior to all others, or that the views of others are completely mistaken, with an understanding of cause and effect we will be able to differentiate for ourselves what is right and wrong. Any practice that helps us decrease selfish concern will lead to more skillful and accurate views.
The Third Zone
The derivative mental afflictions in the third zone arise in dependence on our physical nervous system and our social situation—meaning the society we are brought up in or the environment around us. While the mental factors of the second zone are said to be more gross than those in the first zone, those of the third zone are said to be very gross in their expression and function compared with the other zones. However, they might still be too subtle to distinguish without investigation.
In the third zone, we find mindstates with which most of us are familiar. In the chart they are arranged in the five traditional groups,16 although I have added some that are not traditionally included within the fifty-one mental factors. I am sure you could extent this list indefinitely!
Categorizing these factors into five groups is mostly to enhance our grasp of the factors; the categories are not rigid and are in fact very much interrelated. A mental factor from one group can trigger one from another. Vengeful feelings could arise from the anger we feel when somebody hurts us, but it might equally arise from attachment or from jealousy. This example should remind us that our emotions are complex and messy, and their classification is a very indefinite science.
LOOKING AT INDIVIDUAL MENTAL FACTORS
The five boxes in the third zone merely show the immediate causes of our strongest delusions in a very general way. For instance, self-satisfaction and excitement arise from attachment—that is fairly obvious—but so too do anxiety and fear of loss. It is worth investigating these patterns in your own lives to see if they hold true for you.
Some of the mental factors labeled derived from all three main mental afflictions are interesting to look at. What is the ��difference between pretension and shamelessness? Pretension arises from a strong sense of ego. It is a sense of superiority that discounts other people’s feelings, which is one of the main obstacles to developing compassion. Shamelessness, on the other hand, is of lack of consideration for ourselves. This is a very dangerous mental factor. With shamelessness, we follow whatever arises in our mental continuum without concern for the consequences. This makes us capable of great harm. Some modern Abhidharma scholars use Hitler to exemplify this point.
Among the mental factors caused by attachment and ignorance, prejudice, for example, contains an element of anger, but its main components are ignorance and attachment. It is ignorance because it sees another as intrinsically inferior or separate. It is attachment because someone with prejudice fears losing his or her identity or some perceived advantage. Racial prejudice can be caused by many different factors and itself can trigger other minds, such as disrespect, hatred, and cruelty. Pride, self-grasping, and self-hatred can also fuel racism.
In some ways the minds derived from ignorance alone are the most difficult to handle. These mental factors—such as dullness, forgetfulness, and laziness—cause the mind to lose its energy, clarity, and intensity, without which we are incapable of the action necessary to deal with the problem. Pride and anger, in contrast, do not lack intensity. While still destructive, they can be more easily transformed because they are active mindstates analyzed by active mindstates. We can see not only how they are negative but also (hopefully) how we can eliminate them.
Grief is included within the minds that are deadening and therefore difficult to counteract because of their lack of intensity. This might seem strange to you, for isn’t grief a powerful mind? It can be. On the one hand, the fundamental emotions that underlie grief are confusion and pointlessness, which are linked to dullness. When the World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists, many people said they felt “flat” and directionless for days. Only later did the many other complex emotions arise. That flatness is grief. On the other hand, grief is often closely linked to attachment. We were attached to someone or something that is now gone. These examples demonstrate the complexity of the mental factors and how they function in our minds.
HOW THE DERIVATIVE MENTAL AFFLICTIONS ARISE
Although the mental events that we are experiencing now derive from the gross afflictions charted in the third zone, they are also related to previous causes. On one level, these afflictions are conditioned by our environment, family situation, and education. Someone from a dysfunctional family or someone with no education is less likely to be able to control the anger and frustrations that arise in everyday life. If we examine with an understanding of the Dharma, however, we can see that the conditions of our environment, family, and education are themselves products of the actions we performed in previous lives.
Stress and depression are related to the pressures of modern society, but ignorance is the root cause. If we work so hard that there is not enough time to relax, we may well become stressed and depressed. We think affluence is the route to happiness, but obtaining it can be so stressful that we make ourselves totally depressed and unhappy. To me, this reflects a gross level of ignorance. If we were free of ignorance, however, we could work all day and all night and never become stressed out. So the main cause of stress is ignorance.
It is the same with other forms of ign��r forance. Tobacco addiction combines a physical addiction with a gross mental longing. Despite knowing the damage being done, a heavy smoker continues to smoke. In fact, most of us have addictions of some kind. My addiction is watching television, despite knowing that it is a waste of time and bad for my eyes. But these examples are very gross, and these obsessions—these mental events—do not arise from our previous lives; my bad habits were not built up from lifetimes of watching television!
Why does an alcoholic, for example, continue to drink even though he intellectually understands that drinking causes him to make a mess of his life and destroy his body? Something, some mental factor, pushes him to keep drinking. Perhaps if this person’s intellectual understanding penetrated in a deep, heartfelt way, he might develop the conviction to make a lasting change. It is the same with samsara in general—only when we truly see the defects of contaminated happiness on a gut level can we develop the will to seek complete liberation.
Every action of body, speech, or mind leaves an imprint on our mindstream and has the potential to create a habit. Small habits grow into large ones—social drinking can lead to alcoholism, disregard for small lives, such as insects, can lead to abuse and even homicide. These things come from not understanding the gross level of cause and effect. When a person is already an alcoholic, the addiction is very difficult to break; so habitual tendencies need to be detected and addressed as early as possible.
At the moment we might not have strong anger or racial prejudice, but this does not mean we are totally free of the problems listed under the heading of ignorance of the gross relationship of the law of cause and effect. Perhaps our lives look very good at present—we are not depressed, we have a new job and plenty of money in the bank. However, as long as we have this fundamental ignorance (first zone), we have the potential to develop selfish concern (second zone). With selfish concern it is all too easy to experience the disappointment, anger, and frustration that will then lead to depression. It is wise to not be complacent, but analyze the states of mind we experience and trace them back to their causes.
One important thing that will arise from this kind of analysis is the understanding that our states of mind are not primarily caused by external conditions. We might feel hopeless that our lives are a mess, or we might feel great grief because of the death of a loved one, but these external events are just conditions that have triggered our state of mind; the main cause is internal.
In our lives, we continually misconceive reality—we take to heart everything that society considers important and feel either that we are not getting enough, or that what we have is not good enough. We easily become jealous or competitive. It is not difficult to get wrapped up in this kind of vicious circle. Look around you at all those people who are obsessed with status and possessions—the big house, the expensive car. Health is also important, but so many people now spend huge sums of money to work out in expensive gyms. When we misconceive reality it is very easy to become obsessed. And then, when our obsession lets us down, which will definitely happen sooner or later, we will experience anger and depression.
4
DEALING WITH NEGATIVE EMOTIONS
IN DEALING WITH THE DISTURBING MENTAL FACTORS that bring us suffering, we may encounter a seemingly unbridgeable gap between theory and p��ractice, especially with overwhelming emotions like anger or depression. We might see the wisdom in looking deep within our minds for the answer to our problems, but we may also feel totally overwhelmed by emotion. Then we may think, “My anger at that person now is all I can really deal with.” In fact, this is the very state of mind with which we should begin. For ultimately, only our internal resources—our love, patience, tolerance, and understanding—will lift us from our negative states and bring us deep and lasting happiness.
We can begin by examining whatever afflictive emotion is plaguing us right now and seeing it for what it is. I will use anger as my primary example, because it is a very common negative mental state and one of the most damaging. What follows, however, can apply to any mental affliction.17
Anger is a negative emotion. It is unhealthy and causes so many problems. Therefore, the first thing to do is convince yourself deeply that anger is undesirable by contemplating the faults of anger. If you are not firmly convinced that anger is a problem, you won’t apply yourself to getting rid of it. You do this is by reviewing all the ways that anger destroys your mental health, your physical well-being, and your sleep, on the one hand, and how it leads to harmful actions of body and speech on the other hand, endangering the safety and welfare of those around you and bringing intense suffering in future lives. Once you see how devastating the effects of anger are, then you need to find ways to reduce and finally eliminate it.
Anger is actually fairly easy to get rid of because its negative effects are so obvious. The afflictive emotions that come from attachment are more insidious, because they can appear to make us happy. Thus, the analysis of their drawbacks is crucial. We have to see precisely how craving, for instance, leads to negative actions, harming ourselves and those around us, and blocking us from liberation. If you truly grasp the drawbacks of the mental afflictions on a deep level, then abandoning them becomes relatively easy. They will appear to you, as Lama Zopa says, like used toilet paper.
It is important to recognize that all mental events, from niggling irritation to all-consuming hatred, are impermanent. It might seem that they are a permanent aspect of our psyche because they have accompanied us for so long, but there is nothing eternal about them. Anger, for instance, may be so ingrained and operating on so many levels of our mind that eliminating it seems hopeless. While there is no shortcut, there is a definite route to liberation from our negative states of mind—provided we are persistent and apply the right effort to right method.
Whatever negative mindset we have, the key is to view it as nothing more than an internal emotion. If we do that, we shift the focus from the external object that seems to be causing the anger onto the internal problem. Rather than destroying the object of anger—our “enemy”—we target and finally eliminate the mind of anger. That transformative dimension is paramount in Buddhism and is what gives Buddhism an edge over many other philosophies. For if a problem is within our own mind, then we have the power to change it. We don’t need to rely on anyone else or on some external change.
When we are lost in our anger, we need to broaden our minds. It only seems the worst thing that has ever happened because we are fused with it. If we step back, we can see our pattern, and realize that our anger is related more to our mind’s habits than to the actual person or event causing this particular incident. We c��incan never stop external things from happening, but we can change the way we react to them by looking beyond the external causes—the thoughtless boss, the noisy neighbor—and examine why anger arises when such circumstances are present.
In the fifth chapter of Guide to a Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, the eighth-century Indian yogi Shantideva says:
Where would I possibly find enough leather
With which to cover the surface of the earth?
But (wearing) leather just on the soles of my shoes
Is equivalent to covering the earth with it.18
Of course it is ridiculous to think that we can render the earth harmless by covering it with leather. And yet this is exactly what we attempt to do in relation to our external environment—manipulate it in order to bring about out own happiness, which is impossible. As in Shantideva’s example, the best we can do to protect our feet is cover them with shoes, and the best we can do to protect our own happiness is change our minds so that we no longer perceive a particular set of circumstances as a problem. Controlling our minds in this way is like buying it a pair of shoes—protecting it from the sharp thorns of our external conditions.
There is no way we can force all beings to be our friends, nor can we demand that everyone be sweet and generous. However, by transforming our minds, we can free ourselves from dependence on external conditions. That freedom, in turn, allows us to assess other peoples’ situations honestly, and compassion toward them will naturally arise. We will see them as friends, regardless of how they treat us. Therefore, if we address the anger and aversion within ourselves, our problems will diminish and slowly disappear. Let us look at this process more closely.
THE CAUSE OF ANGER
Imagine a difficult situation that you are likely to encounter in the near future, one that involves a person who knows just how to push your buttons. Then, imagine the probable consequence—you get angry. From the safe distance of your imagination, explore the effects of this anger. It is not too difficult to see that it is much better to avoid losing your temper and find other ways of handling the situation. Of course, confronting a troublesome situation in the imagination is much easier than in real life, but with practice, over time, your reaction to a recurring difficult situation can change, and you can start to manage it skillfully.
With awareness and a bit of distance, you can look objectively at why anger arises in the first place. This means looking beyond the immediate conditions to the main cause. Perhaps your teenage son has taken the car without permission and crashed it. It’s difficult not to get angry! But that situation is not the cause of your anger. If car crashes involving teenagers truly caused you anger, you would be angry on countless occasions every day. The accident is not the cause of your anger, but it is one of the conditions that has triggered it. First, he is your son, and the situation exposes the complexities of your parent-child relationship. You may ha��ve observed your son’s behavior becoming more and more out of control in the last few months, and you feel that his friends are a bad influence. You may be thinking of the expense and inconvenience of repairing the car. You may be in shock about the injury he could have sustained. These are all conditions, but the root cause is much more profound.
Abhidharma texts cite three conditions that trigger an afflictive emotion:
1. We have not abandoned afflictive emotions. 2. We remain close to the object of our afflictive emotion. 3. We still have distorted emotions.
Not having abandoned afflictive emotions, their seeds are always present in us, ready to ripen. In this vulnerable state, we get too close to whatever conditions cause them to arise. Without any distance from the object disturbing us, we have no way to explore the causes objectively. The last condition, distorted emotion, is the simple fact that we have little control over our emotions and we superimpose these distortions onto reality. When these three conditions come together, there is no way we can stop anger, or jealousy, or whatever afflictive emotion is poised to arise in our minds.
Sooner or later we must skillfully confront each of these three conditions. Perhaps at this stage it is impossible to address our distorted emotion directly—that negative mind is bubbling away no matter what we do—and of course the root cause is too deep. So maybe we need to distance ourselves from the object of the afflicted emotion—the person who brings out our bad side or the substance we’re addicted to. Without that distance, we may have no opportunity to penetrate the emotional smokescreen and get at the actual causes of our negativity.
Ultimately, what we will find is that the cause of our problems is not our boss, the government, or our partner, but the deep-seated discontent in our minds. Anger is not something external, out there—it is an internal state of mind, and so we should seek its causes inside ourselves.
Based on discontent, which itself arises from our fundamental confusion, anger breeds further confusion. This is why Buddhism says that anger is always negative—because its long-term results are always suffering. Although we may feel that anger can bring short-term satisfaction, in reality an outburst of anger leaves an imprint on our mindstream that puts us in grave danger. And once it arises, that makes it more likely to arise again, until a habit is formed. The more angry we get, the more habituated to anger we become.
When we confront anger, we should keep in mind that the anger we feel is not the entire sum of our consciousness but is in fact only a part of our mindstream. True, it might be dominant at the moment, and it might seem that we are nothing more than our anger, but was it there yesterday? Will that same anger relating to that same object be present next week? If we are honest, the answer is no. Separating our sense of self from the transient and partial emotion we call anger, we gain distance and are better able to confront it.
ANGER AND LOGIC
At the moment, rather than addressing the main cause of anger, most of us are continuously caught up in its contributing factors. In this situation, logic can be dangerous. Often we use logic to reason out a justifiable (but incorrect) prem��ise for our anger, sit on it for days, review the scenario repeatedly, and talk ourselves into a true state of hatred. I am not suggesting that negative things do not happen and that everything is all just a projection. People do act negatively toward us. However, we should be very wary of black-and-white interpretations. Whenever we feel we are completely in the right and the other person is completely in the wrong, we should be aware that that is probably a very biased interpretation.
Although the faulty logic we use to justify our anger should be avoided, if we are skillful we can use logic as a tool for getting out of our negative emotion. On the one hand, anger is an emotion that is very difficult to handle. On the other hand, the intellectual justifications we dream up are cognitive constructs, and these can be analyzed intellectually with success. By observing the fundamental irrationality of blaming the other person, the mind that seeks to justify our anger is defused. When anger about the situation arises again, we use that same logic to counteract our habitual story. Over and over again, we repeatedly use the skillful logic to counteract the logic of the afflictive emotion. Starved of its justification, our anger will diminish over time.
We should be aware of the role that intellectual justification plays in developing, sustaining, and increasing anger. We may think that anger is just pure emotion, but anger always has a cognitive aspect—a rhetoric that drives it. On a collective level, groups—even whole nations—can be roused to hatred by argument. Racial prejudice, and at its worst, ethnic cleansing, are fueled by rhetoric. On a much smaller scale, we fuel our own anger when we replay the soap opera of the argument again and again, justifying ourselves as right and our enemy as wrong.
Anger never consists of pure emotion devoid of logic. It is never just “I hate you!” but always “I hate you because…” We interpret every situation we confront. If incorrect interpretation is possible, which is what happens we are really angry, then the possibility for correct interpretation should also exist. We cannot transform the blind emotion of anger, but we can work on the mistaken concepts that fuel and justify it. We can begin this transformation right now, while we have some distance from that emotion and the constructs that accompany it.
MEDITATING ON ANGER
Suppressing anger, or any other afflictive emotion, only leads to an explosion down the road. We need to defuse it so that it does not arise again. This is best done in meditation when we are feeling calm and rational.
When I was in the monastery we had no alarm clocks. Rising late was awful—not just because we would have to enter the hall in the middle of prayers, but more crucially because we would miss out on that very important morning cup of tea! Very early on we all trained ourselves to awaken at the proper time by repeating the hour over and over again to ourselves. It’s amazing how you can habituate your mind to anything. Effective meditation is powerful because it creates an ideal laboratory for rewiring our mental processes.
You only become convinced of the disadvantages of anger when you explore them repeatedly. Then your attitude begins to change. This process can only occur within the framework of meditation. Hearing or reading about the disadvantages of anger might convince you intellectually, but it will have little effect on your ability to actually confront it. Only when you are deeply convinced that anger itself, not external forces, is your enemy, will you be motivated to actually turn things around.�� With a really strong conviction, it is surprisingly easy to avoid the outer manifestations of anger and, in time, the actual angry mind.
Eventually, the awareness of the disadvantages of anger you are building up in moments of calm will slowly seep down into your emotional life. Things that previously would trigger your anger instead trigger a caution that anger might arise, and you will be on guard against it. In Tibetan we say, “Build the dike before the water comes.” If you know the river will flood, prepare your defenses beforehand.
Another way to meditate on anger is to replay scenes in which you have been angry before, using the distance and clarity of a calm, meditative mind. This does not mean replaying the movie and getting angry all over again! You are not doing this to convince yourselves how unjust that other person was. You are recollecting the suffering that anger has brought you. You can also ponder how you might have handled the situation had anger not dictated your behavior. In the laboratory of the meditative mind, make various experiments and find out what is best for you and for others.
As with an addiction, when you have overcome an afflictive emotion like anger, you will see the destruction it has brought into your life and how it has enslaved you.
DEVELOPING EQUANIMITY
An important aspect of our current negative mindset is our lack of equanimity. We judge people all the time, putting them in our “friend” or our “enemy” box, or simply ignoring them because they have nothing to offer us. We all see things from a fairly narrow perspective; life is too busy and complex to have the space to take everything in, and our minds become selective. We tend to undervalue people. We see them not as they really are but in terms of how they relate to us and serve—or thwart—our needs. Therefore, when someone hinders us in some way—say they cut us off in traffic or criticize us in public—we see that person as a hindrance. Stuck in that perception, we condemn a person on the basis of this or that bad personality trait—the trait that blocks them from seeing how important we are. Of course, they wouldn’t see it that way!
If we never perceive people as more than objects in the game of making “me” happy, then we will always have huge problems. We need not know all other people in their entirety to progress from this narrow worldview. In Buddhism we do this by cultivating equanimity.
Beneath the surface, everyone is motivated by a wish to be happy and to avoid suffering. In this sense, all are equal. This equality goes beyond color, race, sex, or personality to the actual inner life of beings. There is no difference whatsoever between any of us at this deeper level.
If we can cultivate this understanding of the basic equality of all beings, then we can start to see potential problems more objectively. Not only is my enemy’s opinion equally valid, but also his needs and rights are equally valid. I am angry because he is blocking my happiness in some way, but isn’t that the same for him? And he has exactly the same right to happiness as I have.
We don’t usually feel compassion for people on a holiday, do we? When others are going to the beach, sailing a big yacht, and working on a suntan, it can be hard to feel any sympathy for them—in fact we might feel quite envious. This shows that we have not understood that all people, in time, experience the full range of physical and mental suffering. In fact, someone on a tropical beach may be sufferi��ng more on a mental level than someone on an assembly line.
Only with the impartial compassion that arises from equanimity can we collapse our “friend,” “enemy,” and “stranger” boxes forever. This is the mind that we must try to develop.
OFFERING THE VICTORY TO OTHERS
We can take this even further. Rather than just observe that others have an equal right to happiness, we can take the next step and actually put our own happiness aside for their sakes. Actually, this method is the only way we will ever achieve true happiness.
Imagine that someone has done me great harm for no apparent reason. How should I handle this situation? Normally, I might take revenge—I might plot to harm him back. What result does that bring? I suffer even more and so does he.
But perhaps I can see the disadvantages of retaliation, so I stop myself. Instead, I silently hate him. That is a better solution but still inadequate. Perhaps I come to forgive him but still do not understand him. This is better still, but a long way from turning the situation into a positive one.
One profound Buddhist technique is to offer the victory to your enemy. This may seem very unnatural, but it is possible and can bring amazing results. This practice has nothing to do with being a doormat. What it means is that instead of trying to cause harm to someone who has harmed you, you do completely the opposite and actually try to help that person. This is the victory, because it becomes the cause of happiness for both of you.
In Guide to a Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, Shantideva says:
The victorious warriors are those
Who, having disregarded all suffering,
Vanquish the foes of hatred and so forth;
(Common warriors) slay only corpses.19
This is an amazing way to look at things, isn’t it? In a normal battle, we have to sacrifice many things and suffer a great deal to gain victory over our external enemies. Here, Shantideva reveals our real enemies—anger, vengeance, vindictiveness, and so on—and instructs us to destroy these minds, not the external enemy. If we manage this, we will naturally help both ourselves and the person causing us problems.
