Kill Your Anger

The Buddha lists the roots of unskillful behavior. There are three—greed, aversion, delusion—but there are no clear lines among the three. In particular, greed and aversion owe an awful lot to delusion.

This is particularly true in the case of aversion or anger. We may see something very clearly when we’re angry, but we don’t see the whole picture. It’s like trying to look at a landscape through a little tube or a small telescope. You get some very sharp details for a few things, but there’s a lot of the picture that you’re missing. It’s hard to say that you have a little blind spot. There’s a whole blind horizon.

This is why we can do so much damage to ourselves when we’re angry—and why it’s so sad when you hear modern Dhamma teachers telling us that maybe it’s time for Buddhism to have a positive take on anger. Buddhism has done perfectly well without taking a positive take on anger for all these many centuries, thank you. And it’s not as if there are suddenly new situations in life, new injustices, that they didn’t have in the time of the Buddha.

The Buddha was once asked if there was any one thing that he would say should be killed, and he said, “Yes. Kill your anger.”

Now, when saying to kill your anger, he’s not saying to kill your desire to right wrongs or to create justice. He’s saying that the anger is what makes it difficult to do something skillful around what’s wrong. In other words, when you see that there’s something you’d like to correct but you’re angry about it, then you can do, say, and think things that can be very harmful and actually get in the way of solving the problem.

So the first step in dealing with anger is to realize: Yes, this is something based on delusion. There’s delusion around the allure, delusion around the drawbacks, delusion around where it comes from and how it passes away. All four of those beginning steps on how to deal skillfully with unskillful mind states get obscured. This is why you have to fight against the anger so resolutely and keep in mind the Buddha’s instructions that this is nothing you want to go with.

The first thing that disappears when anger is present is a sense of shame and a sense of compunction—the filters you place on your mind. Everything comes in so quickly.

The anger itself is quick, and can go from zero to outrage in just 1/60th of a second. And that’s a lot of its allure. There’s a rush of power, a rush of energy. But because our sense of shame and compunction have been impaired, we start saying things and doing things that, at the moment, seem like just the right thing to say or do, but later, when you reflect on it over time, you realize that “This was really dumb”—sometimes worse than dumb. Very harmful. You’ve done things you’re going to regret for long time.

So you need some brakes on the rush of your thoughts, just as the Buddha has you to think about using brakes on your speech before you speak. In other words: Is this true? Is this beneficial? Is this the right time and place for that?

You have to ask the same questions of your anger. This thing that you see as wrong: Is it really, truly wrong? Is it beneficial to get angry about it? As the Buddha says, there’s no benefit to anger at all. When there is a benefit to seeing what’s wrong, you’ve got to learn first to clear the anger away.

There are three things you can look: the object you’re angry about, the state of anger in the mind, and then the physical manifestation—the way it feels in the body when you’re angry, and how you feel you have to get it out of your system.

This is one of the reasons why we meditate so much on the breath, learning how to deal with tension in the breath, blockages in the breath. It gives us an alternative. All too often we see the only alternatives with anger is either you get it out of your system by saying something or doing something under the force of anger, or you bottle it up and create a lot of tension in the body. Most people, when they see those two options, go for the one of getting it out of their system.

But the Buddha says there’s a third alternative: Look at the way you breathe around the anger, and see if you can change it. Breathe in a way that’s more soothing; breathe in a way that allows the breath energies in the body to flow, so that when there’s a sense of tightness or tension in the stomach or in the chest, you can release it. It doesn’t have to be released through words or actions that are harmful, it can be released through allowing your energy to flow out.

Usually, that’s what we feel: We have to get the anger out of our system because it’s gotten into the body. So we have to find a skillful way to release it from the body. In Thailand, they talk about letting negative energies go out the palms of your hands the soles of your feet, so think of it flowing down in those directions.

Then, when the physical symptoms have been taken care of, you can look at the actual anger in your mind. You can look at the object of your anger, to see if the object is really worth all the anger, and look what the mind is telling itself.

This is where you go into the area of verbal fabrication and mental fabrication. How are you talking to yourself about the situation? Is what you’re saying really true? Is it really beneficial to talk about it that way?

You can think of something irritating that someone has done again and again and again and again. Just thinking about that—that it’s been done again and again—you’re piling up more and more tension, piling up more and more things that you find hard to endure. But who’s actually doing the piling up? The person who did the actions? Those actions are gone. Even if the results of those actions are still hanging around a bit, you’re the one who’s carrying them around, you’re the one who’s bringing them back.

Can you think instead of the good things that that person has done? That helps bring some balance. And if there’s nothing at all good about that person, you have to have a lot of compassion for him. He’s really digging himself into a hole.

That’s verbal fabrication.

As for mental fabrication, look at the images you hold in mind—the perceptions you hold in mind—that go together with the anger. Many of them focus on how outrageous something is. But is it really that outrageous? The Buddha has you remember that people do displeasing things, say displeasing things, and think displeasing things all over the world all the time. This doesn’t excuse those people from doing that, but it does mean that when you run across something that’s really bad, it’s not that unusual, it’s not out of the ordinary. This means that you don’t get extraordinary rights to say, do, and think things that would be harmful in response.

So look at how you talk to yourself, the images you hold in mind. Work through the patterns of tension and heaviness in the body, and you’ve taken care of the three fabrications that go into the anger.

Notice, when the Buddha analyzes something, first he analyzes it into its component parts, and then sees how those parts interact. Once you see the component parts, ask yourself, “Where are these things going?”

Sometimes you say, “When I’m angry, I get to do and say things that are effective, things I wouldn’t dare do, or wouldn’t have the energy to do, if I didn’t have the energy of the anger to move me.” Actually, though, the energy of anger wears you out, which is why angry people burn out so quickly.

If you want to bring peace and justice to the world, you have to be a peaceful person. We tend to think that peaceful people don’t do much, whereas the angry people are movers and shakers. Well, they move and shake things a lot, but it’s like that company whose slogan is: “Move fast and break things.” They’ve broken a lot of good things. All too often we break our friendships and break our possessions. For what purpose? What gets accomplished?

There are so many more skillful things and ways of dealing with the world. We should see that clearly when we solve a problem, we have to solve it in such a way that the solution stays solid. But if you come at it with your anger, there’s going to be a pushback. This is especially true if, as you’re angry, you think of clever, biting things to say. In the moment of your anger they seem clever, but then there can be a payback for years afterwards.

So always remember: When anger comes up, you’re deluded. You may not be deluded about the fact that something is wrong, but you are deluded about the fact that anger is going be an appropriate response. You have to place warning signs all around, because when the mind is angry, you can’t trust it. Your mind is lying to you.

So, if the storm is coming on very strong, hide out for a bit. When you learn to take the anger apart, you can look at the situation a lot more calmly. More of the mind is engaged. You’re not looking at things with tunnel vision. You’re taking a larger perspective and you get a better idea of what needs to be done and when things need to be done. Some things need to be done right away, while with other things you may have to wait. But if you just go for the rush without thinking, you know what happens when someone steps on the accelerator: The engine speeds up and can do a lot of damage both to the operator and to others.

So, keep in mind that when you’re angry, you’re deluded. You can’t trust what the mind is telling you. You’ve got to trust what the Buddha tells you. That Japanese saying that when you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha: This is one of the cases where we don’t want to kill the Buddha. Remember the Buddha was right: You have to kill your anger. Only then will you be safe.