As the founder and senior teacher of the Israel Insight Society (Tovana), a leading organization teaching mindfulness, Vipassana, and dharma in Israel and beyond, Stephen Fulder has been called upon by numerous organizations over the past few week to deliver wisdom and insight during a time of great uncertainty. While his ecologically minded home village of over 1,000 inhabitants is usually teaming with young people, today that is not the case. Many, including Fulder’s own family, have fled to safer regions following the Hamas attack on Saturday, October 7th and subsequent Israeli retaliation that has left thousands dead.

With war at his doorstep and rage flaring across the political spectrum, Fulder is remarkably calm and composed. As a Buddhist author, teacher, and practitioner, he is involved with peace work in the Middle East. He was a founding member of MiddleWay, an organization that used to hold peace walks across the country. Fulder talked with Tricycle about the role of the Engaged Buddhist during times of political strife, how to generate compassion when it seems like the last thing the mind wants to do, and why some of the Buddha’s last words remain more relevant today than ever before. 

Are there Buddhist passages or sutras [Pali, suttas] you turn to in times of despair, confusion, and fear? I personally don’t turn to passages to shift my inner world because I move straight into practice, but I think some really important Buddhist texts can help all of us. I’ll mention one or two. 

One sutra is a discourse of the Buddha close to his death, when he told his monks, “be an island to yourself.” “Be an island to yourself” is a beautiful statement on autonomy despite the stormy seas. What’s important in that text is that [when the Buddha was asked], “OK, how do you do that,” he told his monks, “Go back to your basic truth.” When there’s a breath, there’s just breathing; when there is seeing, there’s just seeing; when there’s thinking, there’s just thinking; go back to some basics of our life experience. That truth will ground you in times of crisis and despair. 

A second group of sutras that might be relevant are the Angulimala Sutra and the story of Patacara. Both of those talk about a situation of extreme violence. In the case of Angulimala, he killed a large number of people, and in the case of Patacara, she lost all her family in sudden accidents. Both tell us in such a beautiful way that karma can shift radically, that there’s nothing fixed in stone, that there’s somewhere bigger than us that can take us in another direction, and we just need to be open to it. 

The third set of sutras remind us of nonduality like the Heart Sutra. They tell us, “What you feel as solid is also empty.” The Heart Sutra expresses the emptiness of form and feeling, and perception and samskaras (formations) as constructions in the mind and consciousness. It’s such a beautiful reminder that if we see what’s happening now as being transparent, empty, and passing, [we can shift into] a totally different perspective.

What do you see as an Engaged Buddhist’s role during times of war and crisis? All Buddhism is engaged. There isn’t such a thing as nonengaged Buddhism. It’s an oxymoron. Maybe we need to change the word Buddhism to Buddhist practice, or Buddhist-inspired practice. Then it has to be engaged, because it’s about our meeting with the world and in the world and our embodiment [of] the world, and what that means. I’ve done years of Engaged Buddhist work with Palestinians and Israelis, and I’ve often been asked, “What’s the point?” One point is to keep a small flame burning that shows another way of doing things, like a candle that brings a little light into total darkness. You don’t know where it will go, but that’s what you can do. 

But today, in this critical situation, where people are dying as we speak and there’s huge destruction and rage, Engaged Buddhism may need to be different. It might need to be a kind of first aid, bringing qualities of kindness, love, and care to replace fear. It may need deep listening. Or demonstrating that equanimity and steadiness are possible. 

How do we process anger without losing our goodwill, and without diminishing the imperative nature of the outrage? Sometimes, we need righteous anger against injustice and cruelty. It’s needed at times by people who have no other tools. But it’s our responsibility to replace righteous anger with more effective and helpful Buddhist tools. There are better ways of dealing with violence, oppression, and injustice. 

One way is more trust, our readiness to meet and see the other, putting ourselves in the other’s shoes. For example, people often report that they go on a demonstration, but are full of anger against the right wing and the far right who are creating so much destruction and fear. How can they be in a demonstration and call for change from a place of deep compassion and joy within? It can come from feeling the energy of being together with others, and acting from trust. This doesn’t mean that we assume that things are going to be better because we are demonstrating—it means we are ready to see things as they are. We wish to make a change here, but not on the basis of trying to control or fight the demons. It’s a different use of energy, of joy and kindness, but still a source of action.

Have you been working on generating compassion and helping others to generate compassion over the past week? I have to say something personal. When the invasion of Hamas first happened on Saturday morning, I heard about it quite early in the morning. When I realized there was so much killing going on for two days, I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I had no interest in being in a public situation. My heart was heavy, a deep heaviness inside, a pain. All I could do was spend two days quietly beaming compassion. I needed this sense of quiet, holding in my heart the pain of others, and just letting it move into compassion. Sometimes, we need to make sure that we have space for this, that we give space to our compassion. It’s quite difficult to call up compassion in an automatic way in the middle of difficulty and crisis. After the first two days, I started to give lots of Zoom meetings. 

A second [point to consider] is not to try too hard to be abstract about compassion. Sometimes, it needs a very specific address. I remember a Mahatma Gandhi quote that says that if you’re not sure what to do, “think of the poorest and weakest person you have seen and ask if the step you are contemplating will be of any use to him.” If [general compassion feels too] abstract, go to someone specific. Often, it can be [for] ourselves. For example, if we don’t feel compassion in our hearts, we can feel compassion that we don’t feel compassionate. That’s also a source of compassion. Or if we hear blame and anger and rage, it can trigger sadness which moves to compassion. 

What are some Buddhist tools that we can use to create a more balanced and productive dialogue? For dialogue, firstly, I think you need to go into [the other person’s] shoes. Shantideva in the Bodhicharyavatara says it’s sacred to go into someone else’s shoes. The main tool here is listening, deep listening. The dialogue needs to really feel the other, giving respect to the other, a sense that the other is valuable, and a precious human being. Sometimes, dialogue is impossible. We can’t expect it to work all the time. Today, I met a woman in a local town. I felt pain in my heart when I heard [her call for violence]. I felt the impossibility of changing that view. I hadn’t the power to change that view. But I could do two things. I could express compassion to her. Secondly, I could ask some questions. I said, “This war in Gaza is the fourth or fifth time [this violence has] been going round. Every few years, it happens again. So if there is more violence and punishment and destruction and death, isn’t that [just] preparing the ground for the next one?” I also mentioned that there are children growing up now under the bombs [and seeing death], and they will grow up to be violent, because that’s the language that they learn. So I asked her, “What are the consequences of this view?” 

There’s a very nice sutra about that. The Buddha said, if someone has strong views and strong hate or anger, you can’t really talk to them or change anything. But never forget the power of equanimity. Your equanimity can help. And equanimity is one of the [tools] that you can bring into a dialogue, to show that it’s possible to stand, to be an island [onto yourself], [to] be steady, and [to] show another way. The other side [also] needs to feel safe. [To have a balanced dialogue you need to create a] safe space [through] friendliness and equanimity and kindness and a sense that we are equal. Then dialogue can start. One direction of dialogue that works is to share pain. Because sharing our personal pain and difficulty is, I would say, a deep place of honesty and listening, where something radically changes; you can’t really be an enemy anymore if you’re listening to each other’s pain.

As Buddhists, how do we combat violence? And are there any particular passages or sutras or anecdotes from the canons about Buddha’s penchant for nonviolence that you’d like to call on during times like these? From the Dhammapada: “For not by hatred do hatreds cease at any time in this place, they only cease with nonhatred, this truth is surely eternal.” I think that’s the core sentence, the core teaching here. It’s very simple and very direct. In a way, it’s what I said to that woman that I mentioned just now—that more violence doesn’t solve the problem. And any of the Buddha’s teachings that teach on causes and conditions would be in that realm [as well]. Because one of the problems is that if you’re acting from instant reactivity, it doesn’t give space to understand causes and conditions, pratītyasamutpāda, dependent arising, that things happen because of the conditions. The conditions create the result. What are the conditions that you’re creating now? This is not a question that’s asked by politicians very often. They’re just reacting and responding, often emotionally, sometimes increasing anxiety and fear. So anything that helps us to see causes and conditions here, pratītyasamutpāda, I consider to be very helpful.

What steps can everyone take to support their own personal healing and integration at this moment? Firstly, we really do need to forgive ourselves. If we feel anger and blame and primal emotions like that, we need to not blame ourselves, because we’re beings born in these bodies. Survival mind is very strong, and samsara is very strong. So do not take it personally but say, this is the nature of things. This is what’s arrived in my existence right now. 

Secondly, remember all the joy and well-being that we’ve experienced in our life, all the practice we’ve done in our life, which is needed now. We can remember: I’ve experienced joy in myself and my tissues and my breath and my being. And here it is, again, I’m going to go reconnect with the joy that I already know. 

And one final point, as much as we can connect with our ultimate nature, our buddhanature, we also connect with perfection. We are fundamentally perfect. Life hasn’t made a mistake; Dzogchen, the Natural Great Perfection, says it beautifully, that in the ultimate place, there aren’t mistakes. There is completion, perfection, if we look at things inclusively, in a nonpersonal way. The nature of existence is bigger than us, we need to allow life to take us, to have a life point of view instead of a personal point of view. That gives a lot of healing and support from a more nondual and ultimate place.

The post ‘Keep A Small Flame Burning’ appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The ring of a bell signaled it was my turn for dokusan, an interview to discuss my practice with the Soto Zen Master at this five-hundred-year-old training monastery in Japan.

I picked up a small mallet and struck the cast iron bell in front of me: one time, letting it ring, then a second time. I rose and hurried down a long hall of tatami mats, the woven straw flooring in traditional Japanese living spaces, passing through the Ihai-do, a narrow room lined on both sides with rows of individual altars for deceased sangha community members. They silently witnessed the swish of cloth as my long black priest robe rubbed back and forth around my ankles with each quick step.

At the end of the hall, three steps rose up. I stopped at the bottom and performed a short gassho, bowing with palms touching and elbows out. Then in one swift motion, I grabbed the end of my zagu, or priest bowing cloth, laid it down on the tatami, and folded it into a square. I dropped down and started my full prostrations as quickly as possible—body crouched in child’s pose, both hands outstretched and palms placed up on the floor, then, with symmetrical precision, hands raised past the ears and down again before rising to stand. I did this three times quickly, as is the custom, after which I refolded and slid the zagu back over my left wrist. One more quick gassho and then I headed up those three stairs to my dokusan with Sekkei Harada Roshi, the Abbot of Hosshinji monastery in Obama, Japan. I entered the room ready to ask the central question of my life.

I had come to Japan after leaving the predominantly white convert Soto Zen Buddhist monastery in central California where I had thought I would spend the rest of my life. When I had asked to be ordained after more than eight years of meditative Buddhist practice, I had felt a deep calling to live as a Buddhist monastic. But this did not come to be. I left the California monastery after three and a half years there, heartbroken and confused about the racism I had experienced on both a personal and structural level. The persistent white supremacy culture of the monastery made it unsafe and did not support me as a Vietnamese American practitioner. This was true for many other people of color staying there as well. The experience was a huge shock to my understanding of Buddhism, Buddhist practice, and my sense of place in the world.

As I made plans to leave that California monastery and figure out how to practice as a newly ordained priest, I was contacted by someone who studied under Sekkei Harada Roshi in Japan. They urged me to study with him as he was acknowledged as an enlightened Zen Master. I had only practiced Soto Zen in predominantly white convert settings in the United States, and I felt drawn to practice in Japan, the birthplace of this sect of Buddhism.

I had been at Hosshinji for three weeks, trying to process my despair from having to leave California due to the racism at my home monastery. Entering the room for dokusan with Sekkei Harada Roshi, I barely sat down before blurting out the quintessential question of my existence up to that moment. “Why does hatred seem to follow me wherever I go?” I asked.

Sekkei Harada didn’t hesitate. “Know hatred completely,” he answered. Then he grabbed the handbell to his right and rang it vigorously, signaling the end to my interview.

I scrambled out of the room, doing the prostrations and bows in reverse order.

My mind raced to make meaning of what had just happened.

Nothing came.

My mind had stopped.

A  koan in Zen practice is a story assigned by a teacher for you to work with. Various traditions have different ways of practicing with koans, but giving an answer to the teacher as part of the process is a commonality across sects. How the teacher accepts or rejects the answer is part of the mythology of this practice. A well-known koan is, “At this very moment, what is your original face before your parents were born?”

Many people think koans are paradoxes, but really they’re stories to stop your mind, to bump it off its loop of incessant and well-worn patterns of thinking, planning, and processing. Koans open us to an understanding that’s beyond habitual thinking.

Life also gives us koans.

For me, racism has been a koan I’ve turned over and over. Studying race theory was one of my answers to this koan. Other answers from my life have included activism and various jobs as a social worker focused on addressing the harmful results of racism.

All of these were good answers.

In Zen, we like to say, “The question is more important than the answer.” Why? Because questions often come up at uncomfortable moments. Deep questions arise when we’re faced with circumstances in which our coping mechanisms aren’t working anymore. At such moments, transformational change is possible if we stay open to all answers, especially unexpected ones.

The system of white supremacy centers whiteness while juxtaposing people of color as “other,” fragmenting us all into the delusion of separateness. Aware of this dynamic and its harm to people of color, I had to be careful to not simply search outside myself for answers. Like many Asian Americans and other people of color, at some point I had to learn to value myself, reclaiming the validity of my own experience in any moment and in any condition. Buddhist practice over many years has supported me to return to knowing and trusting my wholeness.

“Know hatred completely.” That moment with Roshi stopped my mind from its habitual looping to try to “understand” racism. All my intellectual theories and years of antiracist work didn’t address my suffering in a useful way at this crucial point of my life. That moment stopped my frantic search to find some reason why hatred kept following me. What I needed was to attend to the hurt and harm from being the target of racism.

In Buddhism, we practice to be able to find settledness and clarity that’s not dependent on the conditions of the world. To find such settledness and clarity, we have to attend to our suffering in body, heart, and mind. The koan of racism was not just something that I wanted to understand. What I really want, even now, is to heal from the hurt and pain I’ve carried.

In both activist and Buddhist practice realms, I felt that I had to choose between a rock and a hard place. For example, in feminist spaces, white women were most often touted as leaders, negating the many ways women of color brought groundbreaking exploration and transformation to gender oppression. Or in racial justice groups, male-identified BIPOCs often take up the most space, including leadership ones. Or, in many of the convert-based meditation groups I’ve taught at, I am thought to be “too religious,” especially as Buddhism-based practices have been appropriated into secularized popular “mindfulness” apps and health and self-care industries.

Similarly, I noticed that in predominantly white convert Buddhist centers, people of color were often told that race was not part of practice because “there’s no self.” When I tried to address racist incidents, I was told that this was to reify “a false sense of self.” If antiracism work was acknowledged by white leaders, then it was “just a relative stepping stone” on the way to an “absolute.” By default, given the predominantly white and mostly male teachers within convert Buddhism in North America, this “absolute” felt patriarchal, white-defined, and white-centered.

I needed a way to practice that started from the premise that there is racism in the world and that there are intense manifestations of it in the United States of America. Racism impacts us on the cushion, in meditation halls, in practice communities, in our places of work, in conversations with friends, at the doctor’s office, and everywhere we go. This is true whether we are people of color or white-identified. I needed a way to practice Buddhism that moved from only an individual focus to one that recognized the power and privilege embedded in our structures and systems and how we are impacted by them in different ways. In doing so, I hoped to discover how to heal from systemic hurts and harms.

The day after that mind-stopping meeting in Japan, Sekkei Harada Roshi offered me another chance for a dokusan interview. I rang the bell, did my bows, and went into the practice discussion room, ready to share my insights about how his answer had affected me. Before I could open my mouth, Roshi launched into a lengthy story of Shakyamuni Buddha’s life and enlightenment along with the histories of other early Buddhist ancestors. Then, once again, he rang me out of the room.

We never spoke about my question again.

This event impacted me deeply, and I continued to turn it over for many years afterward. When I remember my dokusans with Sekkei Harada Roshi, this last part has always puzzled me. I often wondered, What was his point about it all? In writing this now, I have an understanding of what he was teaching me. The Buddha and ancestors were searching for the same things as you and me: an end to suffering.

I think Roshi was saying that there can’t be spiritual bypass. He realized—and after that initial exchange I, too, realized—that I was looking for a way to explain away the hurt and pain by wanting to discuss it. Discussion isn’t wrong. Theory isn’t wrong. Activism isn’t wrong. But we can’t use these things for spiritual bypass. We can’t use Buddhist practice, or any methods such as race theory or activism, as a way to skip over the human condition inherent in the first noble truth—experiencing the hurts and pains of our lives. Trying to get away from them via any method is to try and skip over, or bypass, fully experiencing our life as it is. Our practice is to get closer and closer to “know it completely” because, in doing so, we can actually then have more clarity on how we can heal. In Pali, the first recorded language of Buddhism, the term yoniso manasikara is usually translated as “wise attention.” It can also be translated as “attention that takes the whole into account.” This is what Sekkei Harada Roshi was pointing me toward: the practice of investigating dukkha (suffering), which sees it in context, in totality, and not just the hurt and pain of the moment.

Then, the rest of the four noble truths offer us descriptions and practices for how to connect or reconnect to the wholeness of life—that our existence is seen, relevant, healable, and valued—when we remember and access the contexts that validate us and support us to thrive. Additionally, we need to remember that all beings want the same thing: to be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. This is what connects us all.

Denying that systems of oppression exist is to deny reality as it is. Learning to negotiate these systems with self- and collective-determined agency is the practice of engaged liberation. In practicing collective liberation, this is what I wish for us: that we may come home to a sense of wholeness grounded in what is safe and of value to all. May we then aspire to spread that out, to work together to strengthen safety and care for each other. This is the work, and the liberation, of understanding, practicing, and developing the four noble truths.

⧫

From Home Is Here: Practicing Antiracism with the Engaged Eightfold Path by Rev. Liên Shutt, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2023 by Rev. Liên Shutt. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books.

The post ‘Know Hatred Completely’ appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When writer Kai Cheng Thom felt like the world was collapsing, she posed a question to herself: What happens when we imagine loving the people—and the parts of ourselves—that we do not believe are worthy of love?

Over the course of her career, Thom has worked as an activist, sex worker, psychotherapist, conflict mediator, and community healer. In each of these roles, she has witnessed both our essential goodness and the violence that we are capable of.

As a way of reckoning with our sacredness and our potential to cause harm, she began writing love letters—to ancestors and exes, to her past and future selves, to those who have harmed her and those she has harmed, and to everyone she believed was beyond saving. “I needed to know that I could love them,” she writes, “because that meant I could still love myself—as hopeless and lost as I had become.”

The result, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls, is Thom’s “act of prayer in a collapsing world”—a spell to summon the language to help her fall back in love with herself and the people around her. Tricycle sat down with Thom to discuss the Buddhist rituals that inform her work, how writing helps her to hold seemingly contradictory truths, and what it means to choose love as a daily practice.

To start, what drew you to the form of love letters? I love a love letter. It’s my favorite type of letter to receive and my favorite literary format as well. We don’t see too many love letters in the world anymore—it’s rare to receive handwritten notes these days. On a societal level, political polarization and the toxic aspects of capitalism make it harder to take the time to explore what it might mean to love another human being in language. We’re also less inclined to love one another because we’re so full of anger and hatred.

I think it’s important to explore what it means to send love to a person who is acting in a way we might consider harmful. If we all did that, then we might be living in a different paradigm. Part of the project of this book is to trust that there is some goodness and sacredness in every human being, even in the midst of reprehensible behavior. For me, this is what it looks like to have faith.

Throughout the book, you explore what it means to love others and the parts of ourselves that we might consider monstrous, and you define a monster as a creature made of the truth that no one else dares to speak. How did you come to this notion of what it means to be a monster, and how have you reclaimed the monstrous? In the Western psychological tradition, Carl Jung wrote about the monsters within us, and he took a lot of inspiration from Buddhism and Hinduism. In thinking about the monstrous, I draw from Jung’s work, as well as different understandings of demons in Buddhist spirituality, especially practices of looking for the demons inside ourselves and learning to sit with them.

On a more personal level, I was raised evangelical Christian, and like many queer and trans people, I grew up being told that I was full of sin and that queer people were sinful monsters. Homophobia and transphobia were really present in my day-to-day. I was trying to repress the sin inside of me, and at the same time, I loved and longed for the sin outside me. I think this happens to us often: we desire the monstrous even as we fear it.

This can be complicated. Queerness is something beautiful that has been labeled as monstrous, but some things classified as monstrous are truly dangerous, like anger and rage. Our monsters need space to live and breathe, and if we’re not careful with them, they can result in harm and abuse.

You’ve mentioned your evangelical upbringing, and many of the letters in the book have a liturgical rhythm to them. How have you reclaimed liturgies and practices from a tradition that harmed you? There’s beauty in every monster and wisdom in every beast. The beast of evangelical Christianity is full of beauty, and its liturgy is something that I love, and Jesus is actually someone that I love. The part of Christianity that has stuck with me, beyond all of the pageantry, is the concept of grace. In Christianity, grace is the idea that we are all full of sin, but we can receive divine love anyway. I just love that. I don’t know if there is a God out there, but I think that human beings can offer one another divine love even in light of all that we’ve done wrong. I want to keep that idea around forever.

Are there any Buddhist rituals or practices that have particularly influenced you? There is a Tibetan Buddhist meditation about sitting and visualizing our demons and just being there and saying hello. That’s a practice that I will always love. But the Buddhist worldview that informs my life the most is the idea that paradox is where enlightenment is born—it’s not about resolving or conquering paradox by choosing one side; rather, it’s in the tension of more than one truth being true that a new wisdom arises. I think it’s so important to allow more than one thing to be true, especially when we’re talking about the nature of good and evil and people who may have harmed us.

Does writing help you to hold multiple truths? Definitely. In writing, I get to put both truths onto the page and then see if there is any new wisdom that arises, and then that wisdom becomes the basis of the poem. Language allows me to be in the chaos of competing truths and to give that chaos form, which is another paradox. Language gives form to the chaos of our internal experience and then somehow makes it more beautiful and bearable.

Do you have any rituals in your process of writing? Oh, yes. I sit in the dark and wait for the self-loathing to emerge. [laughs] I have a spot on the couch, and I sit there at night and order takeout, and then I wait, and the unbearable part of me actually does start to speak. Then I write.

These days, I’m able to fall back in love with the unbearable parts of myself through the process of writing. When I was younger, I was just expressing self-loathing. It’s a fine line to walk between expressing trauma and transmuting trauma, and these days, I feel much clearer on the difference between the two.

So that’s really the ritual: I sit in the dark, eat a McDouble, and wait for the self-loathing to come out—and then I love it.

It’s like you’re enacting your mission in the writing process itself: you’re learning to love the parts of yourself that you find unbearable. Yes, exactly.

In the final letter, you write about your practice of choosing love. So what does it look like to choose love on a daily basis? There are many spiritual practices centered on choosing love, like lovingkindness meditation. But I think on the day-to-day level, choosing love is about resisting the spirit of panic and fear. One thing I’ve learned from my work in mediation and dialogue facilitation is that we need to be very careful about our tendency toward othering and monster-making. When we’re in groups, it can be so easy to get caught up in the spirit of panic. At the heart of panic is deep fear, and this fear can lead to toxic and possibly dangerous situations.

It can be so scary to live in the world. Choosing love is about choosing courage: the courage to take a relational risk that is meaningful. Maybe there’s someone in your community that you’re irritated by or that you disagree with. Actually choosing love might mean starting a conversation with them. I often think about the tragedies that occur when we say that our fear and our right to feel comfortable legitimizes or strengthens the call for the restriction on others’ freedom of others. Choosing love is about saying that it’s OK for me to be a little bit scared or uncomfortable so that we can all be free.

What are you hoping readers will take away from the book? I hope that people who read the book might feel inspired to put it into practice. One important lesson from Buddhist practice is that falling back in love doesn’t really work if we are trying to fall back in love with other people first. Generally, it’s more sustainable if we start with ourselves. If we just try to love the oppressor without loving ourselves first, then we run the risk of internalizing our own oppression or gaslighting ourselves. It must begin with self-love, falling back in love with ourselves, and then we can fall back in love with others. Of course, it’s not linear—it’s a cycle we go through over and over again.

A lot of people react to my work with fear, and I get that. But holding two truths is not just about holding someone else’s truth that you don’t like; it’s about knowing we also have a truth, and we get to hold that, too. It takes discipline and practice to be able to hold both truths without needing an answer—and without losing ourselves along the way.

The post Writing Love Letters to Monsters appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Adhitthāna, que aquí traduzco como determinación, significa el compromiso con la superación de los impedimentos que obstruyen la liberación. Este compromiso implica aprender a reconocer los impedimentos, entenderlos a fondo, amistarnos con ellos y saber cómo trabajarlos. La presencia de los impedimentos o estados malsanos es muy desagradable e implica enorme energía y determinación para permanecer presente de manera sabia y no reactiva. 

Esta es una contemplación de la presencia de la ira en la que surgió la determinación de no huirle, no actuarla, sino simplemente sentarse a conocerla. La práctica nos ofrece una manera muy limpia de trabajar con las impurezas internas. Es limpia porque nos pide no solo enfrentar lo que es honestamente, sino también purificar nuestra mente/corazón sin dañar a nadie, incluyéndonos a nosotros mismos.

Anatomía de la ira

Con determinación
me senté a conocerte, ira
atajo de hierbas encendidas
al centro del pecho ardiendo;
ropas sofocantes
ímpetu de protestar, juzgar, lamentar,
huir, este suplicio.

Con determinación
me senté a conocerte, ira
sobre el tiempo, sentarse
hasta que de la quietud
mirarte pueda sin rechazo
y como fiera domada
de mi mano comas.

Con determinación
me senté a conocerte, ira
envuelta por la áspera oscuridad
y el grávido silencio.
Se arrastraron las horas
se endureció más y más el asiento
severo y doloroso como la comprensión
que la ira, el conflicto, la guerra
serán siempre parte de la existencia.

Con determinación
me senté a conocerte, ira
al fin te encaro sin repudiarte,
dispuesta a generar benevolencia. 

El cuerpo endurecido
inicia su viaje al equilibrio:
lazos que constriñen, ceden
la primera inhalación
se desliza titubeante
a las profundidades del abdomen.

Con determinación
me senté a conocerte, ira
hasta que del atajo de hierbas encendidas
cenizas tibias quedaran;
movimientos involuntarios
sacuden el cuerpo
tirón tras tirón
liberando asfixiantes ataduras.

Con determinación
me senté a conocerte, ira
pero antes, tuve que ser cocinada
guisada
sopa a fuego lento,
hierbas olorosas exhalaron coplas;
coro aromático celebrando
perseveré
no dañé
supe, soy capaz de enfrentar
tu fuerza, temida, portentosa.

Con determinación
me senté a conocerte, ira
esa noche dormí tranquila
el cuerpo suave, inocente
cobijado por la benevolencia.

Al amanecer
un abrazo surgió
sin cálculo
para el objeto de la ira:
amainada la tormenta 
atmósfera lavada, despejada,
límpida, fulgente.

***

Adhitthāna, which I translate here as determination, refers to the commitment to overcome the impediments that obstruct liberation. This commitment includes recognizing said impediments, understanding them deeply, making friends with them, and knowing how to work with them. The presence of impediments or unwholesome states is highly disagreeable, and it requires enormous amounts of energy and determination to help us remain wisely present and non-reactive.

This is a contemplation on anger in which the determination to not flee from it or act it out arose, and in its place was the wish to simply sit with and get to know it. Practice offers a very clean way for working with internal impurities. It’s clean because it asks us, not only to honestly face what is, but also to purify our heart/mind without hurting anyone, ourselves included.

Anger Anatomy

With determination
I sat down to know you, anger
bundle of flaming grasses
burning at the center of the chest;
suffocating clothing
impetus to protest, judge, lament
flee, this torment.

With determination
I sat down to know you, anger
braced on time
until out of quiescence
without rejection

I may see you
and like a tame beast
from my hand you eat.

With determination
I sat down to know you, anger
enveloped by dense darkness
and heavy silence.

Hours dragged
the seat hardened more and more
severe and painful as the realization
that anger, conflict, war
will always be part of existence.

With determination
I sat down to know you, anger
At last, I face and not deny you
willing to generate benevolence.

The hardened body
commences its journey towards balance:
constraining ties, yield
the first breath
glides hesitantly
toward the abdomen’s depth.

With determination
I sat down to know you, anger
until from the burning grasses
tepid ashes remain;
involuntary movements
jolt the body
tug after tug
liberating stifling bindings.

With determination
I sat down to know you, anger
but first, I had to be cooked
stewed, simmered like a soup
aromatic herbs
exhaled their couplets;
fragrant choir celebrating
I persevered,
didn’t harm;
and knew, I’m able to face
your mighty, daunting force.

With determination
I sat down to know you, anger
and that night I slept untroubled
the body soft, innocent
swaddled by benevolence.
Embrace at dawn
without any calculation
object of anger:
the storm abated
the atmosphere washed, clear
limpid, fulgent.

The post Adhitthāna y la anatomía de la ira appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

According to the recently released COVID Response Tracking Study, Americans are the unhappiest they’ve been in fifty years. With the pandemic, mass shootings, and ongoing environmental catastrophes, it can be easy to feel like we’re always in crisis—and to believe that the world is coming to an end. But journalist Emma Varvaloucas believes that this pessimism runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, and if we want to build a better future, we have to change how we relate to the news.

Previously the executive editor at Tricycle, Varvaloucas now serves as the executive director of the Progress Network, a nonprofit media organization dedicated to countering the negativity of the mainstream news cycle. Through amplifying stories and statistics that often go unnoticed, the Progress Network aims to serve as an antidote to doomscrolling and to offer a more constructive take on current events.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Varvaloucas to discuss the dangers of cynicism, how her Buddhist practice informs how she engages with the news, and what can happen when we actually pay attention to what’s going right.

James Shaheen (JS): You currently work as the executive director of the Progress Network. Can you tell us more about the organization?

Emma Varvaloucas (EV): The Progress Network is a nonprofit media organization focused on paying more attention to what’s going right. It launched in October 2020 in the lead-up to the 2020 election and in the midst of the acute part of the pandemic. It might seem like a strange time to launch such an organization. But we felt that this was exactly when the United States needed something like the Progress Network.

We’re locked in a zeitgeist of negativity and cynicism right now. There are certainly many reasons for us to feel that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But there’s actually a lot of evidence for the opposite. There are many indicators that we’re building a world that’s going in a constructive direction, and a lot of people just don’t know about them. The media isn’t giving us a lot of opportunity to pay attention to these stories.

JS: The mission statement for the Progress Network states that pessimism “can focus the mind, but it can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading people to detach and despair rather than galvanizing us.” Can you say more about the dangers of pessimism and the feedback loops it creates?

EV: It’s similar to the Buddha’s teachings on anger: holding on to anger is like holding on to a hot coal; you end up burning yourself. This is true of anger that inspires activism. At a certain point, the anger is going to burn out. Like anger, pessimism can be a really strong force. It can push people to action in the short term. But it’s not going to bring us to the future that we want to see. It’s just too easy to drop from pessimism into cynicism. Often pessimism is built on us-versus-them arguments rather than arguments for creating a better society that make sure that we’re not going to give up along the way.

JS: How does the feeling that we’re constantly in crisis change how we perceive the world and relate to the people around us?

EV: Feeling like we’re constantly in crisis makes everything seem urgent. When everything seems urgent, it flattens the distinction between urgency and importance. Everything gets mixed up because everything seems equally terrible. This prevents dialogue from happening—and it prevents us from thinking through important questions. Are we choosing a way that’s going to lead to more problems down the road? Are we choosing a cure that is worse than the disease?

JS: Before working at the Progress Network, you were steeped in the Buddhist world. How does your Buddhist practice inform how you relate to these questions and to this cycle of pessimism?

EV: I believe that the mindset with which you approach something completely changes how you react to something: how you see it, how you understand it, and how you digest it. This is why focusing our attention is so important. If you continually focus on everything that’s going wrong, all you’re going to do is gather more evidence for why that’s correct. This is going to feed into the cycle of cynicism. And then when you do encounter something that actually might be more neutral or even good, it doesn’t even enter your awareness.

But if you’re coming at it from a fundamentally different framework, then you’re opening up your field of inquiry. You’re allowing reality to come to you. You’re seeing what’s out there rather than imposing a preassumed story about what’s going on. I see this as a fundamentally Buddhist mindset. It’s an inquiry: you’re looking, you’re paying attention, and you’re asking. Every day when I wake up and I read the news, I want to prevent myself from falling into thinking, “Here we go again, the same old stuff.” That Buddhist mindset of keeping nonreactive open awareness definitely helps. This mindset is embedded in the framework of the Progress Network.

JS: People might be surprised to know that the Progress Network tends to avoid headlines that focus on hope. Why is that?

EV: We try to avoid the term “hope” altogether. We’re not trying to convince you that everything is fine. Not everything is fine. We’re not even trying to tell you that the scales are tipped toward better and not tipped toward worse. No one really knows. What we’re trying to put out there instead is that there are facts that we’re just not paying attention to. At the end of the day, you can decide if you think the scales are tipped in one direction or the other. We’re just here to show you some stories you hadn’t heard about and to offer a different way of approaching things.

We’re focused less on seeing the glass as half full and more on ditching the arrogance and the surety that we know the outcome of the future—and that we know that the future is going to be bad. Our attitude is that we try to remain with what is going on rather than being absolutely positive that things will turn out badly. Because we just don’t know. It’s a humble optimism.

JS: The mission statement of the Progress Network states that “the present feels almost unbearably messy, but these are the times to reshape the world.” Can you say more about this? Why are these the times to reshape the world?

EV: If you’re not going to do it now, when are you going to do it? I think that people sometimes are waiting around for things to be simpler or easier to understand. They probably won’t be. We’re living in an age where there’s information coming at us from left, right, and center. We’re dealing with things that we’ve never had to deal with before. We have to be willing to dive into the mess. You can’t look at the mess and be intimidated and just say no. If we don’t jump in, someone else is going to jump in for us, and we’re going to end up in a future that we haven’t taken part in at all.

♦

Listen to the full conversation here.

The post An Antidote to Doomscrolling appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

One of the Buddha’s most important insights was that what we experience in the present moment is not entirely caused by the past. Some of our experiences do come from past karma. But the important part is how we shape the raw material coming in from the past through our present intentions. The Buddha calls this process of shaping sankhara, or fabrication. 

There are three kinds of sankhara. There is a bodily fabrication, which is the in- and out-breath. There is a verbal fabrication, which the texts call directed thought and evaluation. It’s basically how you talk to yourself, the questions you ask, and the judgments you pass on things. And then there’s a mental fabrication, which is felt as perceptions. Feelings here are not emotions; they are more feeling tones: a tone of pleasure, a tone of pain, or a tone of neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions are the labels you apply to things. If you were to compare verbal fabrication with perceptions, verbal fabrication would be full sentences or questions; perceptions are individual words or images.

The way you identify things is through these three processes. We shape the raw material coming in from the past and turn it into our experience of the present moment. The problem is that we tend to do this in ignorance. This is why instead of creating the happiness that we want, we end up creating stress and suffering. The Buddha tells us to do these processes with knowledge, and they can turn into the path to the end of suffering. 

Anger is a case in point. All three of these fabrications go into creating a sense of anger. Say that you have witnessed a situation that you don’t like, one you’d like to see changed, and you’re upset about it. The way you breathe is going to aggravate the anger. You tend to breathe in a tight, tense way. You can talk to yourself, both about the situation and about anger itself, in ways that aggravate it. You can focus more and more on how horrible the situation is and how quickly it needs to be changed. You can also talk to yourself about anger and think your anger is justified. It’s your way of showing that you can influence the world and that you can get things done through your anger. 

And then there are the perceptions and feelings. The feelings, in this case, would be feelings of discomfort because the breath is uncomfortable and the way you’re talking to yourself is uncomfortable. And then there are the perceptions: your perceptions about the situation—the person who has done or said something horrible is either a monster or a pig—and your perception of anger as being your way of showing your power in the world and being a warrior in the world. Now, the problem is many times we act on our anger thinking that we’re doing something skillful, something that’s to our benefit or the benefit of those we love. We find out later that this is not the case and that we’ve actually created trouble for ourselves. This is where the Buddha says we have to bring knowledge to these processes. 

First, we have to understand the anger in terms of these types of fabrication so we can take it apart and replace it with better fabrications. The techniques you learn with breath meditation help you right here so that you can reflect on what you’re doing as you focus on the breath. Of course, you have bodily fabrication in the breath itself. You have verbal fabrication in the questions you’re asking about how to breathe comfortably, how to let those comfortable breath sensations spread through the body, and how to keep the mind with the breath. Then there are mental fabrications, your perceptions you have of the breath as being a whole body process, the feelings of ease that you can create by the way you breathe. You have hands-on experience in these types of fabrication. You see how they can be used to create a sense of well-being right here, right now. And then you can bring that knowledge to the rest of your life. 

The techniques we learn on the meditation cushion are not meant just for the cushion. After all, we’re not creating suffering for ourselves only on the cushion. We go through life. So we’re going to take those techniques and use them on a day-to-day basis. 

The first thing to take is bodily fabrication. As you talk to yourself, remind yourself of all the stupid things you’ve done under the power of anger. It might be good to step back from the anger. See what you can do to take it apart. And then you focus on verbal fabrication. How are you breathing? Can you breathe in a way that calms you down? Think of the breath going all the way down to the feet, nourishing every part of the body. That sense that you have to get it out of your system begins to dissolve away. For the most part, we think that we have only two choices: either we get it out of our system by acting on the anger or we bottle it up. Neither way is helpful. If we bottle anger up, it becomes a thing that goes underground and shows its tentacles someplace else. If we act on anger, we end up creating trouble for ourselves. 

Here the Buddha is giving you an alternative to that sense of tightness. You have a body, and you can breathe through it. Dissolve it with good breath sensations. This may take time because that first burst of anger probably released some hormones into your bloodstream, and they’re still having their effect. And sometimes we read those signs as signs that we still are angry even though the actual anger may have passed. We stir it up again. Just remind yourself that it may take some time, but you can breathe in a way that calms down the sense of tension, tightness, and irritability in the body. This process allows you to look at the anger more objectively, more calmly, and to look at the situation more calmly and see what needs to be done.

This is where you bring in verbal fabrication. Ask yourself: Is that person or that situation as bad as you think it is? Is it as unbearable as you think it is? Here the Buddha gives you some ways of talking to yourself when someone has said something unpleasant or hurtful. He recommends two ways of depersonalizing the issue. One is just to tell yourself that the unpleasant sound has made contact with the ear. It’s there because of the contact, and when the contact goes, that’s the end of that unpleasant sound. How many times have you thought that when someone curses you or when someone says something harsh and vile? It’s not the first thing that occurs to you. But it’s useful because you realize that from that point on, once the contract has ended, the fact that it’s reverberating around in your mind is based on what you’re doing now. The action of the other person is over and done with. Do you want to keep on stabbing yourself with those words? It’s your choice. 

The second way of depersonalizing words is to remind yourself that human speech has all kinds. The nature of human speech is that there’s kind speech and unkind speech, true speech and untrue speech, where it’s said with an attitude that means well to you and where it’s said with an attitude that doesn’t mean well to you. This is the nature of human speech everywhere. The fact that you’re subjected to that kind of unkind or untrue or ill-intentioned speech is nothing out of the ordinary. All too often we find a situation horrible or totally unbearable. Everything is so extraordinary that we have extraordinary rights to react in a way. It’s not all that skillful. But when you realize this is the nature of the human world, this is the nature of human speech, you back off. You realize that the action was not extraordinary, so your rights are not extraordinary either. 

These are some ways of helping you pull yourself out of the unskillful verbal fabrication that finds the situation unbearable.

⧫

Learn more about the three kinds of sankhara in Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s Dharma Talk, “Skillful Approaches to Anger”, from which this excerpt was adapted. 

The post The Buddha’s Alternative to Acting out in Anger appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Led by meditation teacher Thanissaro Bhikkhu, this Dharma Talk discusses how to use the Buddha’s teaching on the three fabrications (sankhara)—bodily, verbal, and mental—to break down anger and replace it with a perspective that’s more conducive to dealing skillfully with the situation that provoked the anger to begin with.

Thanissaro Bikkhu is an American Theravada Buddhist monk trained in the Thai Forest Tradition. He currently serves as abbot of the Metta Forest Monastery in San Diego County, California and is a frequent contributor to Tricycle. His latest book is Good Heart, Good Mind: The Practice of the Ten Perfections. Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s talks, writings, and translations are all freely available at his website, dhammatalks.org.

The post Skillful Approaches to Anger appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Anger is in vogue right now. As the saying goes, if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. But widespread destructive anger is promoting a culture of divisiveness and fostering uncharitable and judgmental attitudes toward our neighbors, colleagues, relatives, and fellow global citizens. While there is the temptation to say things like “Never before has society been so divided” and to blame the rhetoric of political leaders, social media, viral misinformation campaigns, or other by-products of this internet age, divisive tribalism is nothing new. The conditions for contemporary manifestations may be a unique and unprecedented concoction, but the result is a familiar set of human emotions. Yet it is for this very reason that looking to the Buddhist text tradition on timeless problems such as destructive anger may offer valuable resources for healing contemporary divisions.

Here I will provide an overview of some conceptual resources from the Mahayana Buddhist philosophical tradition for thinking about and dealing with anger, focusing primarily on the Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life (Bodhicaryavatara) by the 8th-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Shantideva. From a literary perspective, Shantideva’s Guide is commonly regarded as one of the greatest works of poetry ever composed in the Sanskrit language. But it is also a theoretical-cum-practical text that is intended to effect a shift in how we view ourselves and the world, moving from a default state of metaphysical confusion and selfishness to one characterized by wisdom and compassion—the state of the bodhisattva. And since anger is viewed as a by-product of metaphysical confusion, as a part of this program, Shantideva argues against both the utility and the rationality of anger.

One way of summing up Shantideva’s approach to defusing the so-called mental affliction of anger in the form of a slogan would be to say “It’s complicated.” In other words, whatever it is that prompts an episode of reactive anger, one thing we can count on is that the situation is always more complex than it seems. Anger tends to latch on to an overly simplistic view that filters our experience through a distorted lens of divisive dichotomies of good and bad, right and wrong, friend and enemy, us and them. According to Shantideva, the more we appreciate the complexity of a situation, the less extreme our views and emotions will be. Specifically, he advises that by analyzing the complex causal history of harmful actions, we can at once defuse our anger while also developing an empathetic understanding that is an ideal guide for responding constructively to perceived wrongs.

What’s wrong with anger from a Buddhist perspective? Why should we think that anger is worth defusing to begin with? After all, according to the American Psychological Association, for instance, anger is (usually) a healthy human emotion. Indeed, anger is commonly regarded as not only healthy but helpful in motivating us to right wrongs and to avoid being victimized or taken advantage of. And it is a widespread opinion that anger in the form of moral outrage is not just morally permissible but morally obligatory in the face of injustice.

According to Buddhist thought, however, anger is classified as a moral vice (papam, apunya). And Shantideva takes it for granted that his intended audience—fellow Buddhist monks—will agree with him that anger is morally wrong, but he sets out to persuade his readers that anger is also bad for one’s welfare, and that any attempt to valorize anger derives from confusion about its nature and function. To see why, let’s take a closer look at how anger is understood in this tradition.

Whatever anger promises to do for us, compassion can do better.

Buddhist Abhidharma texts set out detailed taxonomies of mental states, with two of the most important classifications being wholesome (kushala) and unwholesome (akushala) mental states. These categories connote both welfare and moral value. Unwholesome mental states are mental afflictions (klesha) in the sense that they are themselves forms of suffering, and they are also morally bad insofar as they act as causes for harm to oneself and others. Anger (dvesha) is classified among these unwholesome mental states and is, in fact, singled out as one of the fundamental unwholesome mental states, or three poisons, together with ignorance (moha) and attachment (raga), which are identified as the central causes of the cyclical suffering (samsara) of the sentient condition as depicted in the bhavacakra, the Tibetan “wheel of life” paintings. In this role, anger is represented in the center of the wheel by a snake, a creature that is easily incited to strike at the slightest disturbance. And it’s little wonder that anger, as the inciter of retaliation and vengeance, is viewed as fueling cycles of suffering.

Now, the central project of Buddhism as articulated in the Buddha’s most fundamental teaching, the four noble truths, is to bring an end to this cycle of suffering by eliminating its causes. And since anger is among those causes, we might say that one of the central aims of the Buddhist path is to eliminate anger.

The 4th-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Asanga defines anger in his Compendium of Abhidharma (Abhidharma-samuccaya) as follows:

What is anger (krodha)? It is mental aggression that is a form of enmity occasioned by a present offense. Its function is to serve as a basis for violence, the taking up of arms, weapons, etc.

Anger thus involves (1) the perception of a wrong and (2) aggression toward the perceived wrongdoer, which we might cash out as the notion that it would be good if they suffered some bad consequence, which the contemporary American philosopher Martha Nussbaum refers to as the “payback wish.” As such, anger also (3) functions as a condition for harmful actions.

And as indicated in Asanga’s definition, anger is a species of the mental affliction enmity, together with other related mental states, such as resentment, malice, and cruelty. Asanga explains enmity as follows:

What is enmity? It is aggression toward sentient beings, toward suffering itself, or toward painful circumstances. Its function is to provide a basis for unpleasant states of being and bad actions.

We can now add to our list of essential characteristics of anger that as a mental affliction (4) it is painful by nature, and as a form of enmity (5) it functions as a condition for unhappiness.

One final dimension of the Buddhist account of anger is its relation to ignorance. That anger is accompanied by a distorted view of things in many ways accords with our commonsense notions. When someone is in a rage, we say that they’re “seeing red,” they have “tunnel vision,” or that they’re so upset that they “can’t be reasoned with.” According to Buddhists like Shantideva and Asanga, not only does (6) anger invariably co-occur with ignorance, but (7) ignorance also is a necessary condition for the arising of anger in the first place, owing to anger’s status as a “specific afflicted mental state” (paritta-klesha-bhumika).

Thus, anger is both prompted and attended by a form of confusion that exaggerates and solidifies bad qualities in others and imagines them to intrinsically belong to fixed, value-laden categories—conceiving them to be a rival, a jerk, irritating, or the like, by their very nature—when in fact these kinds of categories are contingent, relative, and conceptually imputed.

With the Buddhist conception of anger in place, we are now in a position to assess its value. In general, if we think that something is good for our welfare, then we think that either it is intrinsically good—that is, it makes a direct contribution to our welfare—or it is instrumentally good—that is, it’s good as a means to something that is itself intrinsically good. Shantideva argues that anger does not contribute to our welfare in either of these ways. That anger is not intrinsically good might be seen to follow from the claim that anger is painful by nature, and that anger is not instrumentally good may be taken to follow from the claim that it is a condition for unhappiness and harmful actions.

Shantideva describes anger as diametrically opposed to happiness and well-being, saying:

The mind does not find peace, nor does it enjoy pleasure and joy, nor does it find sleep or fortitude when the thorn of hatred dwells in the heart.

. . .

In brief, there is nothing that can make an angry person happy. (BCA 6.3, 6.5cd; trans. V. Wallace and A. Wallace)

As Shantideva sees it, anger cannot coexist with mental peace or genuine happiness. When disturbed by anger, food loses its flavor, our favorite pastimes seem empty. Thus, anger is not only painful by nature, but it also inhibits happiness. It does not, therefore, directly contribute to our welfare.

But one might think, anger may not be pleasant, but it’s useful; it’s instrumentally good. Shantideva recognizes the seductive sway of anger, which presents itself as a righteous champion of justice and defender of our self-respect. Anger purports to help us seek what is good for us, though perhaps at the expense of another’s welfare. But in this, anger is a deceiver, Shantideva tells us, who masquerades as a friend but is in fact an enemy whose sole function is to harm us. (BCA 6.8, 6.45) With a famous piece of advice, Shantideva argues against the utility of anger, saying:

If there is a remedy, then what is the use of irritation? If there is no remedy, then what is the use of irritation? (BCA 6.10)

In other words, if there is something you can do to address a problem or right a wrong, then just do it; anger will not assist you in executing it. And anger is no more helpful if there is nothing that can be done; instead, it will only make the situation more painful, or, as Shantideva puts it, “the distress becomes greater.” (BCA 6.16) In sum, he argues that anger is not just unproductive at bringing about our welfare—it’s counterproductive.

Nevertheless, advocates of the virtues of moral outrage may insist that anger is instrumentally good for its indispensable role in both detecting and responding to wrongs.

Shantideva would insist that whatever anger promises to do for us, compassion can do better. As a Buddhist conception, compassion involves sensitivity to the suffering of someone together with the wish that they be freed from that suffering. And given that anger is a form of aggression that prompts harmful actions, it should come as no surprise that compassion is standardly cited as an antidote to the poison of anger. And, to use Nussbaum’s terminology, compassion is also the “substitute attitude” for anger. To see how compassion is an adequate replacement for anger in this view, let’s consider the roles of detecting and responding to wrongs.

Anger is commonly viewed as a moral sentiment necessary for identifying wrongs, a kind of moral antenna for detecting injustice. Though tracing back to Aristotle’s view that the passions enable one to perceive moral value, versions of this claim were developed by British moral sentimentalists of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as the Earl of Shaftesbury, Frances Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith. However, in the Buddhist view, not only is anger unnecessary for discerning the moral value of actions, but since anger is invariably attended by ignorance, which distorts the nature of its object, it’s also an unreliable guide to diagnosing wrongs. By contrast, compassion might be thought of as the affective attendant of right view. Moreover, the mental state that signals wrongs like instances of social injustice ought to be attuned not just to one’s own pain but also to the suffering of others. Compassion—which definitionally involves sensitivity to someone’s suffering—is, therefore, perfectly suited to the task.

Still, even if anger is not necessary for detecting wrongs, surely, one may think, it’s a necessary motivating force for confronting them. After all, if we are to “fight” against injustice, then some form of aggression would seem an appropriate attitude for the job. Yet Shantideva would also dismiss the motivational utility of anger, instead recognizing compassion as a more efficacious impetus for corrective action. That’s because, unlike anger, compassion is untainted by aggression and thus will not perpetuate a cycle of harm, and, once again, since compassion is compatible with a correct view, it can yield a more reliable roadmap for responding to wrong. And anyone who doubts the power of compassion as a motivating force need only reflect on the extraordinary lengths that a parent will go to in order to alleviate the suffering of their child. Indeed, in Mahayana Buddhist texts, one natural consequence of the training in compassion that is the way of the bodhisattva is the development of a so-called “special aspiration” (adhyashaya) that cannot bear the suffering of others and idly sit by, but feels compelled to take personal responsibility for others’ welfare.

If metaphysical ignorance is a necessary condition for and concomitant of anger, then correcting this misunderstanding ought to defuse any present anger and prevent its arising in the future. To this end, Shantideva runs a reductio argument on a familiar intuition that says: If an agent who wronged me acted autonomously, it is appropriate to be angry at that agent. (BCA 6.25, 6.31) In other words, autonomy, the thought goes, is a necessary condition for appropriately directed anger. After all, if it turns out that someone was coerced into wronging us, we’d ordinarily redirect our anger to the coercer. However, Shantideva argues that this autonomy condition is never satisfied. No human action is free of the influence of extrinsic conditions; nothing takes place in a vacuum. Instead, every action occurs in dependence on a complex multitude of causes and conditions, which may include anything from the wrongdoer’s education, socio-economic circumstances, how they were treated by their parents and peers, and so on and so forth. Thus, even if this intuition were right and it were rational, appropriate, and justified to direct our anger toward the agent who is independently responsible for wronging us, upon analysis, there is no such autonomous agent to be found. As Shantideva says:

I am not angered at bile and the like even though they cause great suffering. Why be angry at sentient beings, who are also provoked to anger by conditions?

. . .

All offenses and vices of various kinds arise under the influence of conditions, and they do not arise independently.

. . .

Thus, everything is dependent on something else, and even that on which something is dependent is not autonomous. Hence, why would one get angry at things that are inactive, like apparitions? (BCA 6.22, 6.25, 6.31)

So, through analysis of the causal history of some wrong, as the agential responsibility is continually deferred and distributed among the countless causes and conditions that led to the act, one’s anger finds no target, no cognitive terminus or resting place, and is thereby defused. Importantly, the outcome of this analysis is not the absolution of moral responsibility. Nor is the affective result a cold, clinical detachment or apathetic indifference. To the contrary, by contemplating the suffering involved in the causal process that results in some harmful action, an empathetic understanding automatically arises. According to Shantideva, just as ignorance promotes anger, the inverse is also true: wisdom promotes compassion.

“Everything is dependent on something else.”

Shantideva reasons that the perceived wrongdoer is, in a sense, a victim of their own destructive emotions just as they may be a victim of external circumstances. And in the same way that compassion, and not anger, is an appropriate response to someone suffering from a physical illness, likewise, compassion and not anger is the appropriate response to someone suffering from mental afflictions such as anger, hatred, or ignorance. He says,

Just as sharp pain arises although one does not desire it, so anger forcibly arises although one does not desire it.

A person does not intentionally become angry, thinking, “I shall get angry,” nor does anger originate, thinking, “I shall arise.” (BCA 6.23–24)

Something may strike you as inconsistent about this line of reasoning. At one and the same time, Shantideva is asking us to view others as victims of their anger and yet he is also exhorting us to control our own anger. Why the asymmetry in how we view our own and others’ anger?

In the case of others, Shantideva emphasizes that due to certain extrinsic factors, they lacked the knowledge, strength, or resources to act other than they did. But in the case of ourselves, if, by virtue of our own set of extrinsic conditions, we have come to understand the futility and irrationality of anger, then we’re in a position to resist it. Thus, in the case of others, we are analyzing their anger and harmful actions from a forensic perspective; it is a pastward-looking etiological inquiry into something that has already come to fruition. Nevertheless, it follows from Shantideva’s line of reasoning that beating ourselves up for a past episode of anger would be no more rational than doing so to others. This etiological analysis might also be applied to ourselves as a means for developing self-compassion. But Shantideva’s emphasis in the case of ourselves is on attending to the future-directed task of determining the best course of action in response to a perceived wrong. And that best course of action, Shantideva argues, never includes anger.

Regardless of whether one accepts Shantideva’s hardline view of anger, most of us would at least agree that there are instances of anger that are destructive to a well-functioning society. And regardless of whether one accepts Buddhist metaphysics, Shantideva’s emphasis on the complexity of the causal factors influencing human actions has become only more salient against the backdrop of our contemporary scientific worldview, taking into account the agent’s genetics, brain chemistry, microbiome, and blood sugar levels, not to mention the content of their curated social media feeds, online news sources, and so on.

Shantideva’s non-transactional, non-punitive, and non-retributive approach to addressing perceived wrongs aims at minimizing suffering based on a holistic, nuanced, and empathetic understanding of individuals and their actions, an approach that promises to help us step outside the cycle of blame and retaliation and into a discourse that promotes reconciliation and constructive reformation. Indeed, despite the fact that there is not even a term in the Sanskrit Buddhist lexicon that precisely maps onto the contemporary Western notion of justice, Shantideva’s writing on anger may offer surprisingly apt advice for leaders of revolutionary justice movements, who, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, need to be “strange sorts of people, part Stoic and part creatures of love.”

♦

This article is adapted from “Shantideva on Causal Analysis as a Palliative for Anger,” a talk given at the 2021 Holberg Symposium in honor of the philosopher Martha Nussbaum.

The post What’s Wrong With Anger? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Sometimes the teachings come to us easily. The truth of impermanence, for instance, is something we can grasp with little effort, at least intellectually. Who can dispute that all things change? And at other times the teachings seem to defy common sense, to contradict the very logic of our experience: When I have been grievously wronged, who can say that I should not be angry? Or that anger cannot motivate me to take an action that is not only necessary but also just? Isn’t it fair to say that I am wired this way psychologically, even biologically, and that anger has its evolutionary purpose?

And yet according to Shantideva, the 8th-century Buddhist scholar and saint, this is precisely where we are wrong: Anger, he argues, is always and without exception rooted in ignorance and invariably harmful, to ourselves and others. Along with greed and delusion, it is one of the “three poisons” at the center of the bhavacakra, the wheel of samsara; and it is, as we discover in Allison Aitken’s “What’s Wrong with Anger?”, the very thing that keeps us from the peace we seek. “Shantideva would insist,” Aitken writes, “that whatever anger promises to do for us, compassion can do better.” In fact, she notes, for Shantideva, compassion is the antidote to anger.

I won’t pretend that anger is unfamiliar to me. Anyone who knows me would laugh at that idea. And I have to admit, I’m a bit torn here. From Aristotle to Hume, the western tradition has valorized our passions, as Aitken points out; and later theories of unconscious aggression and evolutionary biology would suggest that anger, like any of our unrulier passions, is hardwired. On the other hand, I can’t imagine that an 8th-century Indian, or for that matter, the original community that formed around the Buddha’s teachings, had any less attachment to anger or were any less afflicted by it. They dealt with what we deal with now, for our struggles with anger have less to do with our evolving theories about it than they do with the very fact of it. Who can be content who is angry? Shantideva, and here I find no difficulty agreeing with him, would have a simple answer: no one.

Buddhism is nothing if not practical. Whether our afflictions are adventitious or hardwired and merely to be dealt with is of little consequence when we find ourselves in their throes. Anger is its own hell, and what Buddhist practice offers is a way out. Questions about anger’s ontological truth are, in other words, useless to me when I have access to a practice that breaks my attachment to it and alleviates the grinding unhappiness it occasions.

This may seem a bit of a dodge, but it isn’t. I find nothing more tediously painful than the self-righteousness of anger; nothing more distracting, nothing more damaging. As Shantideva wrote, “Any virtuous actions we have created over thousands of eons can be destroyed in one moment of anger.” The good news is that there is an antidote, however you understand anger’s roots, whether you locate those roots in ignorance or in the evolutionary depths of human history.

The post Same Old Anger appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

There are a lot of reasons to be angry right now. It’s often said that if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. But according to scholar Allison Aitken, anger only leads to further harm, no matter how justified it may feel in the moment. As a professor of philosophy, Aitken believes that Buddhist texts offer valuable resources for working with our anger and healing contemporary divisions. Drawing from the work of the 8th-century Indian philosopher Shantideva, she positions compassion as a substitute attitude for anger and lays out methods for moving beyond righteous rage.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Aitken to talk about how anger distorts our perceptions and how we can transform our rage into compassion. Read the excerpts on anger from Aitken below and then listen to the whole episode.

Tribalism is nothing new

There’s a kind of temptation to say things like, “Society has never been so divided” and to blame it on the rhetoric of our current political leaders or viral misinformation campaigns or other byproducts of the internet age. But I also think it’s important to recognize that this kind of divisive tribalism is nothing new. 

We might have contemporary manifestations of it that are brought about by a unique concoction of our own set of conditions, but the outcome is a familiar set of human emotions. I think that the Buddhist text tradition has a lot to offer when it comes to understanding anger and coping with it in the most productive way.

The root of anger is ignorance

Anger is prompted by ignorance, and co-occurs with ignorance. Whenever we’re faced with some kind of slight or wrong, our first impulse is often to pin things down into categories of right and wrong, good and bad, friend and enemy. Within this oversimplified view of the world, anger has a very clear target, and we might zero in on a particular individual or structure as being single-handedly responsible for what is wrong, when in fact the situation is always far more complex. When everything is in a neat box, I know who’s good, I know who’s bad, and I can feel good because I’m on the good side. It’s much more uncomfortable to start to scratch the surface and see that there’s more to the story.

Anger is suffering

In his Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life, Shantideva provides strategies for defusing your anger toward another person by seeing them as a victim of their own ignorance and developing an empathetic understanding of their circumstances. In other words, part of what it is to be angry is itself to suffer. Anger is, by its nature, an unpleasant mental state that also prompts further unpleasant mental states. 

There’s a stronger foe against injustice

We often think about cycles of anger as this kind of payback that never ends, so we might think that anger is a more sustaining force against injustice. But I think that compassion is actually a more efficacious and enduring foe of suffering and harm. A lot of people might worry that an emotion like compassion is not going to be powerful enough to confront injustice and we need something like anger. But if we think about the extraordinary lengths that a parent will go in order to alleviate the suffering of their child, then we can see the incredible power of compassion. 

Patience cannot be underrated 

From the perspective of the textual tradition, one thing that is unique about Buddhist thought is its incredible optimism for the possibility of human transformation. From Shantideva’s perspective, it is realistic to aspire to reach a state where one could respond to any situation—even someone dismembering you—with compassion based on an empathetic understanding of what each individual being involved in the situation is undergoing. Of course, this path takes eons. The idea is to take a long-term perspective and not to expect that one would reach the results immediately or even in this lifetime.

The post Buddhist Wisdom for Handling Moral Outrage appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.