| What
is anger?
Anger is one of the most common and destructive delusions,
and it afflicts our mind almost every day. To solve the problem
of anger we first need to recognize the anger within our mind,
acknowledge how it harms both ourselves and others, and appreciate
the benefits of being patient in the face of difficulties.
We then need to apply practical methods in our daily life
to reduce our anger and finally to prevent it from arising
at all.
Anger is a deluded mind that focuses on an animate or inanimate
object, feels it to be unattractive, exaggerates its bad qualities,
and wishes to harm it. For example, when we are angry with
our partner, at that moment he or she appears to us as unattractive
or unpleasant. We then exaggerate his bad qualities by focusing
only on those aspects that irritate us and ignoring all his
good qualities and kindness, until we have built up a mental
image of an intrinsically faulty person. We then wish to harm
him in some way, probably by criticizing or disparaging him.
Because it is based on an exaggeration, anger is an unrealistic
mind; the intrinsically faulty person or thing that it focuses
on does not in fact exist. Moreover, as we shall see, anger
is also an extremely destructive mind that serves no useful
purpose whatsoever. Having understood the nature and disadvantages
of anger, we then need to watch our mind carefully at all
times in order to recognize it whenever it begins to arise.
This explanation of how to overcome our anger through practicing
patience is based on Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life,
the famous poem by the great Buddhist Master Shantideva. Though
composed over a thousand years ago, this is one of the clearest
and most powerful explanations of the subject ever written,
and is just as relevant today as it was then.
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