Free from Animosity

Ajaan Suwat liked to note a paradox in the Buddha’s teachings. On the one hand, there’s that passage we chant every day: Rūpaṁ anattā, Vedanā anattā, Saññā anattā, Saṅkhārā anattā, Viññāṇaṁ anattā. The five aggregates are not self—and those aggregates cover a lot of territory: our sense of the form of the body as we feel it from within, our feelings, our perceptions, our mental constructs—mental constructs are the stories we tell ourselves, the analyses, the comments, we make on things—and then finally consciousness at the senses.

These are the things with which we ordinarily assemble our sense of who we are and what’s ours. Yet here the Buddha’s saying they’re not self, because as he said, when we cling to these things we suffer.

On the other hand, he also says, kammassakomhi—which is something else we chant often—“I am the owner of my actions.”

The way to resolve this paradox is to note the fact that there’s a lot in the aggregates that’s a result of past kamma. You can’t change them, but there are some things you’re doing in the present moment, and you can have an impact on those. You can change them if you see that you’re doing something wrong. That’s where we have to focus our attention.

But first we have to understand, what does it mean to hold on to something, to cling to something? Because we also chant, *pañc’upādānakkhandā—*we’re suffering because of our clinging to those five aggregates.

As a psychologist once said, your strongest sense of self is when you feel you’ve been wronged, you’ve been treated unfairly. You can talk and talk and talk to yourself about that, get yourself worked up, and you end up doing a lot of unskillful things as a result. That’s what you have to watch out for. You keep thinking, “He did this, she did that and this, this, this and that,” and you can go over that again and again. The fact that you go over those stories again and again: That’s clinging.

The best way not to suffer is to note, “Okay, that happened,” and then just let it go. If you have the idea that you want to get back at that person, you want to see “justice” done, you have to remember that you don’t know the beginning of the story. None of us do. All we see is the part that’s in this lifetime. We don’t know what happened in previous lifetimes, who did what to whom.

There’s a story in the Commentary of a king’s major wife who doesn’t have any children, but there’s a minor wife who does have a son. The major wife realizes that the minor wife is now going to get in a position of power because her son is going to be the next king. So before that can happen, she arranges to have the son killed.

Well, the two wives die and they’re reborn as a fox and a chicken. The minor wife is the fox; the major wife is the chicken. The chicken lays eggs and the fox comes and eats up the eggs. This goes back and forth for many, many lifetimes.

Finally, it comes to the time of the Buddha, where a demoness is chasing a woman who has a child. And by this time, the story has gone back and forth so many times that you can’t remember who’s who. The woman with the child comes running in for the protection of the Buddha, who tells the two women the story of their many previous lifetimes when they killed each other’s children. He asks them, “Do you want to continue with this?” “Well, no.”

That’s how you let go of these things: realizing that the way out of a situation like that is not to see your idea of justice done, but just to decide, “Okay, I’m not going to look for any more revenge.” That’s how you can put an end to the back and forth. As the Buddha said, our animosities are not ended through more animosity, they’re ended through non-animosity.

Someone once dismissed this as just being a tautology, something too simple to even think about. But what the Buddha said is true: What’s been done up to now, and your stories about what’s been done up to now, are things you’re clinging to. And in clinging, you don’t just hold on to something, you keep on producing it again and again and again, and holding on again and again. And you’re suffering as a result.

Just remember the meaning of the word “clinging”: It also means to feed. You’re producing food for yourself, but it’s bad food. You eat more and more and more, and you get worse and worse. The best thing to tell yourself is, “Okay, I can stop producing this. I can stop thinking in these terms.” The other person may still have thoughts of revenge, based on his or her own ideas of what’s happened, but you can make sure that you don’t have any. That’s how your animosity is ended.

The word in Pali is vera. It’s hard to translate into English, because on the one hand, it’s the sense that you want to get revenge on somebody for some wrong they’ve done to you. But if you have vera, it means not only that you have thoughts about revenge concerning somebody else, but also that somebody else has thoughts like that concerning you. It’s as if you’re both tying each other down.

You’re holding on to the grudge and it’s weighing you down. The way out is not to try to figure out who did the most wrong so we can have the final punishment to settle the score. The way out is to say, “Okay, I’m just going to stop thinking thoughts of revenge.” That’s how these things are ended—through the kamma that you do have control over. You don’t have control over the stories of the past, but you don’t have to keep on telling them to yourself.

There’s a similar passage where Ven. Sāriputta is talking about how to make sure that you don’t get angry at other people’s words. Just tell yourself, “An unpleasant sound has made contact at the ear,” and when that contact ends, the whole issue should end.

We don’t ordinarily think in terms like that. Someone says something really nasty to us, or does something really bad, and we take it and we feed on it. We draw it into the mind, where it reverberates again and again and again. That’s the suffering. We feed on our suffering.

That’s what’s so ironic in the way that the Buddha sees suffering: The things that we feed on, the things that we like, the things we hold on to, are the things that are causing us to suffer. And the way we hold on, of course, is that we keep repeating them again and again.

We don’t have to repeat them. We can just stop and look into the part of the mind that wants to repeat them and stop identifying with it. That’s how you let go.

You want to see, “What’s the allure of these things?” And there is a very strange kind of allure to feelings of being wronged: You are the victim. You’re the one who is owed something. But if that leads you to do unskillful things, then the other person becomes someone to whom something is owed, and nothing’s ever really resolved.

See the drawbacks of this kind of thinking, that it leads to more and more bad kamma. When you can see that the drawbacks outweigh the allure, that’s when you can have some dispassion for the whole thing and decide you’ve had enough. That’s the mature thing to do, and that’s what dispassion is, a sense that you’ve grown up. There was a bad game you were playing, and now you realize you don’t have to play it anymore.

It’s because of this that the Buddha taught the story of the prince that we read for this week: the prince whose parents had been killed by a king and who vows revenge.

First he works his way into the king’s trust. He plays the lute for the elephants in the king’s stables. The king hears the sound of the lute, likes the sound, invites the young man in to play for him. Then he has him stay in the royal apartments to play the lute, and the young man makes himself useful in lots and lots of ways, to the point where the king really trusts him.

The young man finally has the king in a spot where he could kill him, but he remembers his father’s words, “Animosity is not ended through animosity. It’s ended through non-animosity.” So he decides not to kill the king. In the end, the two pledge that they won’t harm each other ever again.

The Buddha told this story to a group of monks who’d gotten into a battle over something really minor. We don’t know exactly what it was. The Commentary says that basically a monk on one side forgot to flush the toilet. Monks on the other side took offense. They went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, to the point where they weren’t talking to each other. They were ready to split the Sangha.

The Buddha’s pointing out that in the case of the prince, he’s able to forgive even someone who’s killed his parents, because he realizes that, one, his father had asked him to forgive the king before he passed away; and, two, that he would just weigh himself down with bad kamma, and who knows how many more people would die. Rather than looking for justice, he looked for peace. He looked for what was wise. This is called wisdom over justice.

When you can think in those terms, it’s a lot easier to forgive other people for their wrongs and, at the very least, not retaliate, not look for ways of getting back at them. If you hold a grudge, it’s as when you’re holding anything: Your hands get sweaty and tired. It’s a lot easier to let go.

That’s your first really big lesson in *anattā, *or not-self: letting go of your sense of the rights you have to get back at somebody.

As I said, the desire to get back at somebody for the wrongs they’ve done you: That’s where your sense of self is really the strongest—and you really are making yourself suffer. If you can let that go, then you find it a lot easier to let go of a lot of the other things that you’ve been holding on to.

So take this lesson to heart. All those stories of, “He did this,” or, “She did that”: The more you repeat them, the more you’re going to suffer. You think you’re justifying what you want to do, and that the more you repeat it, the more just your cause will seem. But it’s just making your heart heavier and heavier.

If you want to lighten the heart, just drop all that. After all, it’s gone. It’s done. You have the opportunity to start a bright future, a bright future where people are not abusing one another. And it starts by your not abusing other people.

That’s what the Buddha meant by saying that animosity is ended through non-animosity. And it’s an important principle. It gives you real insight into the Buddha’s teachings on how to stop suffering: insight into how you are causing your suffering and how you can stop suffering if you let it go.

The Buddha used the image of a fire. In those days, they believed that when the fire property was provoked, it would latch on to a piece of fuel. As long as it was holding on to the fuel, it would burn. But it was also trapped in the fuel because it was holding on. When it let go of the fuel, then it was freed.

In the same way, your mind is trapped by the things you hold on to. It’s when you let go that you can be free.