Analyzing Anger
May 19, 2023

When the Buddha describes the steps for breath meditation, he words them in a way aimed at making you to be sensitive to three kinds of fabrication, or saṅkhāras, that you’re doing right now and that you’re doing all the time:

First is bodily fabrication – the in-and-out breath.

Second is verbal fabrication – the way you talk to yourself. In his terms, it’s directed thought and evaluation: You think of a topic and then you make comments and ask questions about it.

Third is mental fabrication – perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are labels: the images you hold in mind, the names you give to things, the meanings you give to things. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain.

It’s all very simple. But he wants you to see these things because, as he points out elsewhere, when we engage in these activities in ignorance, that sets the whole process of dependent co-arising into play. That’s what ultimately leads to suffering. When you breathe in ignorance and talk to yourself in ignorance and hold perceptions and feelings in the mind in ignorance, you’re going to suffer.

When we work with these things in breath meditation, we bring knowledge to them: seeing where they’re stressful, seeing where they’re not stressful; seeing where they’re helpful, skillful, where they’re not helpful, not skillful. Then we can translate that knowledge into the rest of our lives, because it’s not the case that we’re creating suffering for ourselves only when we sit here and meditate. It’s happening all the time.

You want these tools to help take apart the way you create suffering for yourself anytime and anywhere. A case in point is anger. When you’re angry, you tend to breathe in a certain way that’s not easeful. In fact, it’s often because of the way you breathe that you get sensations of tightness in the chest and the stomach, and you feel you’ve got to get the tightness of the anger out of your system. And of course, in getting it out of your system, you tend to do and say stupid things, things that are really not in your own best interest.

At the same time, you’re talking to yourself about how horrible it is, the situation you find yourself in or what somebody has done, and you magnify the aspects that would stoke the anger.

Then there are other perceptions you hold in mind. One of the worst ones, of course, is that, “This has been going on for a long, long time, and I just can’t stand it any longer.”

But there are other perceptions about the person who may be doing things that you think are unskillful – and why you’re right to be angry – all of which lead you to do, say, and think all kinds of unskillful things, things that are not in your best interest.

So when you have knowledge of the three fabrications, you can take this emotion apart. Seeing it in these terms is what allows you to get beyond it.

It’s not a matter of simply watching it come and saying, “While I’m angry, I’ll just watch the anger, and then when it goes, that’ll be the end of it,” because it’s not the end of it. When things simply die out on their own, it’s not that they go away for good. They’re just quiet for a while and then they come back again. The Buddha wants you to get beyond just watching things coming and going.

When he talks about cessation, as in the cessation of suffering, he really means what he says. It stops. Period. That’s the end of it. It can be ended only through discernment, and discernment sees things in terms of these fabrications.

But the Buddha also describes five steps by which you can get beyond any unskillful state, and they apply to these three fabrications, too.

The first, he says, is to see the origination of that state. What sparked the anger? And here he’s not talking about events outside, he’s talking about the origination from within the mind. How are you talking to yourself right now? What perceptions are you holding in mind? Usually it’s a perception that’s the troublemaker. Someone says something and an image appears in your mind and sets you on fire. Well, what was the image? That’s what you want to look for.

This is the Buddha’s whole approach. Things that we suffer from are not so much what other people do outside or situations outside, it’s how we approach them, how we process them. Things outside can be pretty bad. Other people can be pretty bad. We don’t deny that. And it can be, as the mind says, only natural that you respond with anger to certain situations. But we’re trying to get beyond what’s only natural. We want something better than natural.

Think of all the inspiring stories in the Canon, like the story of the young prince whose parents have been executed by another king and then he decides to get revenge. So he goes to work, first in the elephant stables of the king, where he plays the flute for the elephants. It’s a nice touch. The elephants are soothed by the flute music. Well, it turns out that the flute music doesn’t stay just in the elephant stables. It wafts into the chambers of the king. He likes the sound, so he has the young man called in, the young man plays the flute for him, and the king says, “Now you can stay as part of my retinue.”

So the young man, the young prince, works hard to be trustworthy. He finally gets the king in a situation where they’re just one on one, and he can kill him if he wants to. But then he remembers what his father said just before he was executed: “Don’t look too far, don’t look too close. Animosity is not ended through animosity, it’s ended through non-animosity.”

The basic message: Don’t try to get revenge. So he decides to follow his father’s advice.

The Buddha tells this story to a group of monks who’ve been arguing over some really minor affairs to the point where they’re going to have a split. As he says, “Noble warriors who live by the sword: Even they can display forbearance and forgiveness. Why can’t you?”

It would have been only natural for the prince to kill the king, but he wanted something better than natural, and this is what’s inspiring about the story.

We hear so few inspiring stories. We live in a world that seems very uninspiring, but you can behave in an inspiring way if you want to find true happiness. You can decide, “I’m not going to give in to this anger.”

So you turn around and say, “What is it in the mind that’s sparking the anger?”

It could be the way you breathe, it could be the way you talk to yourself, the images you hold in mind. That’s where you look. If you’ve been working with breath meditation, you have experience in looking there. This doesn’t mean that you don’t act in situations where things are unfair or oppressive, but if you act with anger, it’s not going to help. If you learn how to overcome the anger, then you can see more clearly what should be done and when it should be done, how it should be done.

So the part of the mind that says, “I have every right to be angry about this” is right. You have the right, but that right can be wrong and lead you to do wrong things. It’s wiser and more inspiring not to give in to the anger. So use that kind of thinking to counteract the origination. That’s the first step.

Then you notice how the anger passes away. It comes, then it goes, then it comes back again. The potential may be there, but the question is, “What sparks it? And when the spark dies out, how does it go away?”

You realize that it’s not as all-powerful or as long-lasting as you thought, which is a good lesson to learn. That’s the second step.

Then when it comes back again, and you go for it again, you have to ask yourself, “What’s attractive about that anger?”

There may be something in the anger itself that the mind finds attractive. There may be a sense of power, a sense of self-righteousness. Or the feeling that once you recognize that someone has done something really wrong, that gives you the right to do all kinds of things you otherwise wouldn’t feel you had the right to do. You have to look into: “What is the allure?” That’s the third step.

And then you look at the drawbacks: “If I actually acted on this anger, even if I just thought these thoughts of anger, where would they lead me? What would be the results?”

You have to rub your nose in all the stupid things you’ve done under the power of anger or you’ve seen other people do under the power of anger. Remind yourself that you really would prefer to be beyond the power of that thing. That’s the fourth step.

When you get to the point where the anger loses its allure, that’s when you can escape – you develop dispassion for it. The word dispassion is not an attractive one, especially in our culture, but it basically means that you grow up. Whatever flavor you got out of the anger loses its appeal. That’s the fifth step.

The Buddha often talks about how dispassion follows on disenchantment, and the word for disenchantment, nibbida, can also mean that sense of having had enough of a certain kind of food. You don’t want any more; you’re full to the point even of disgust with the idea of eating anymore. That’s the kind of attitude you want to develop—and that’s how you free yourself.

We don’t usually think of dispassion and freedom together. Dispassion sounds like gray oatmeal, but it is the way to open up as we grow up, become more mature inside. There’s a greater sense of freedom in the mind.

So this is how the breath meditation connects to learning to understand your mind, to understand the processes of fabrication, so that you can do something about your lust, your anger, your jealousy, and all the other qualities that seem to have so much flavor but are really bad for you.

You learn to appreciate the flavor that the Buddha is recommending, which is the taste of freedom. So as you’re focusing on the breath and it seems to be far away from the big issues of life, remember, you’re learning to take things apart so that you can see how a lot of the big issues in life come down at these little tiny building blocks. If you can see the building blocks and see that you don’t have to put them together in that way, that’s when your mind really grows.

Not just the mind, the heart as well. The word citta in Pali, which is used for mind, also means heart. You’re trying to develop both sides because they grow together.