Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 31-minute talk, Diana Taylor examines the relationship between anger, compassion, and self-awareness from a Buddhist perspective. She begins by exploring the six perfections (morality, generosity, patience, effort, concentration, and wisdom) as foundational to developing a compassionate mind, then pivots to address anger directly. She distinguishes between anger rooted in self-grasping (wanting a piece of cake another person took) and protective anger that arises from compassion (intervening when a child is harmed). The core teaching is learning to recognize when anger stems from ego-driven attachment versus genuine care, and how to discharge angry energy without regenerating the emotion itself. She then extends the framework to attachment, ego, depression, and karma, showing how subtle self-grasping infiltrates even seemingly altruistic acts. Throughout, Taylor emphasizes meditation and self-awareness as tools for distinguishing compassionate motivation from self-interest, with practical examples drawn from driving, relationships, and daily life. The session concludes with Q&A exploring karma, parenting, and the nature of the self.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 Ret..mp3
UUID: 5b27b606-ef35-4e44-b834-10eabcc20c34
Teacher: Diana Taylor
Collection: Retreat (Diana Taylor)
Date: 1997 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 30.7 minutes
Words: ~4,081
The generosity comes also from the mind of compassion, but the act opens up the mind of compassion as well. It comes from patience. Patience means that ability not to flare up in anger when somebody has hurt you. It also is the patience of bearing with our own physical and emotional pains. So that we’re not building up a conflagration of emotion at those times when we’re in a lot of pain.
So patience is also that. In the process of developing patience towards ourselves, which is very hard to do, especially if this—well, whether it’s physical pain or emotional pain, it’s very hard to be patient with a toothache and say, well, it’s okay. I don’t mind that you’re there. But as soon as you try to do that for yourself, and then you think, well, what must it be like for other people with toothaches? So as we develop these things, we’re also developing a mind which is able to be compassionate.
So the first three of these are morality, generosity, and patience. And then the other three, one is effort, continuing on with it. Because sometimes it seems such an enormous task that it’s never ever going to end. That’s when we get burnt out, when that sort of thing happens. And that’s the fourth one.
The fifth one is concentration, the ability to hold our mind on a particular subject and not to get distracted from it. And that concentration has again, you can think of it in two ways. One is this quality of being able to keep the mind logically on a particular subject or holding it on a particular thought. But the other one is the not getting caught up in emotions, not being distracted by different things. And the last one is wisdom.
So as we develop our understanding, we develop the wisdom. So all these six perfections actually develop together. But as we understand these, as we receive the teachings from the lamas that open up our minds so we can see, right, there is this quality of wanting to help people. And it is this quality of wanting to help people also which gives meaning to my life. As we begin to understand that, then also we have the motivation to develop these other qualities and the interest in developing these other qualities.
And so the mind of compassion develops of its own accord. Dalai Lama says Buddhism is very simple. It’s a mind of compassion. My religion is very simple. It’s a mind of compassion.
What is meditation? Meditation is anything which calms and clears the mind. That again is the Dalai Lama speaking. So that all these things which calm and clear the mind also are things which develop compassion. The two are not separate or different.
And the mind of compassion, because it is calm and clear, and because it is not caught up in emotions which are wanting something other than things solely for one’s own benefit, but is caught up in the other person. Because the mind is calm and clear, then the compassionate act becomes much more potent and much more powerful. So that whether we’re talking about our relationships with the people who are close to us, they become more potent and more powerful. As therapists, we become more potent and more powerful. As people, just as ordinary people, whatever it is we’re doing, we become more potent and powerful in that particular sense.
So emotion is important, but it’s important in context. And the direction is also important. We can only understand this if there is a direction for us to move in. The direction we’re trying to move in is the direction of wisdom and compassion. To move in this direction, we need to understand more and more about what these two words mean.
So we need to go seeking for it. We need to go seeking teachers who teach us. We need to read the books which will help us. We need to talk to the people who’ve developed something along these lines. So in this way, with a compassionate mind, then our rationality becomes wisdom.
With a wise mind, our emotions become compassion. So that’s where I’m going to end up and leave it over for questions at this point. The expression of anger. There are two aspects to expressing anger. One is that when we’ve got a lot of anger pent up within us, then we’ve boosted up our adrenaline supplies.
And we need to get rid of that energy. We can get rid of that energy in lots of ways. But the wise solution to that is to get rid of the energy in a way which doesn’t generate more anger. So some of the techniques, sort of technique where you imagine the pillow as somebody that you’re really angry with and you start bashing on the pillow. That will get rid of the energy but it keeps on regenerating the mind of anger.
And consequently, you’re not doing anything to resolve the anger itself at that particular point. What you can do is to do something like press-ups which you don’t need a vast amount of space for or go for a run or dig in the garden or one of those sorts of things. That will burn up the energy. Then you need to look at the cause of the anger, and the cause of the anger is your own mind. There’s certainly there are things external to the mind which has generated anger, but anger is a mind reacting to something it doesn’t want.
So we need to see the way in which we react to the things that we don’t want by pushing them away in a way which is harmful to ourselves and harmful to other people. Now this is different from saying there are things which it is important not to have. So there is a pushing away which is the quality of the self-grasping. I’m angry with you because I wanted that piece of chocolate cake and you took it. That’s a clear case of self-grasping.
I want this and you took it, therefore I’m angry with you. As distinct from the anger which arises within you when you see somebody say who’s hurting a child, and you don’t want that to happen. That sort of anger is not a self-grasping anger. That’s something which arises in order to protect the child, and it arises from a mind of compassion for the child. Those sorts of feelings we need to act on to protect the child because they arise from a mind of compassion.
But where the anger is arising from something which we’re trying to grab for ourselves, then we need to try and let go that self-grasping mind and see how the self-grasping is there. There are a lot of situations where it’s very difficult to tell whether it’s a compassionate mind or a self-grasping mind which is acting. For example, if you’re in a relationship and you don’t like the way your partner cooks a meal, for example. Is this a compassionate mind because your guests are not going to be able to eat the meal? Or is it an angry mind because the guests are going to say how terrible you are because your partner hasn’t cooked a meal properly?
So the reality is that often we have this overlap. In that situation, we need to develop more self-awareness. There’s this difference between—we kid ourselves very often that we’re being altruistic whereas in fact a lot of the time we’re being self-grasping. So we need to develop that. But the anger which arises from self-grasping is something we need to cut the roots of.
Once the anger has been generated in our mind, and as I say, these things come up as a phobic response. We don’t set out to generate anger, but we find we’ve been angry. You’ve had a hard day, and you’ve been driving home, people have been cutting in front of you, you start fuming like this. And by the time you get home, you’re uptight and tense. That sort of anger has come from the frustration and from not being aware of the needs of the other driver, from seeing them as cutting in and all sorts of irrational responses have come in.
Those are the sort of things we need to stop and say, okay, well what was going on in my mind there? Why did I have to get angry at that particular point? As we do that, we can do this in meditation. Meditation is a very good time to do that. As we do that, then we start to calm down and our minds become clear.
We think, well, look, I didn’t need to get myself uptight while I was driving home. I didn’t achieve anything. So maybe I can just relax if somebody cuts in on me. What does it matter? And then I come home with a mind which is not angry.
The people I come home to are not going to be affected by this mind. I’m not going to be affected by the mind. Everybody’s happier. And you’re going to run less risk of having a car accident as well. So I’ve gone on at length.
Does that answer your question? I think that sort of conflict is inevitable while we’re living in Samsāra, basically. When I talk about Samsāra, what I mean is simply this world in which we live where we don’t have wisdom and we don’t have compassion, not fully developed. And consequently, we want to maintain ourselves, we want to maintain our security, we want to maintain our physical comfort, we want to maintain our reputation even at the expense of other people. And so there—and this is what Freud was talking about, precisely that.
So there’s this conflict between what we feel that we need for ourselves as distinct from what is best for the group as a whole, for the community as a whole, taking on a worldwide basis. And there’s this constant learning, constant development in people’s minds about how to develop that, how to integrate that. And sometimes one seems to predominate, sometimes another seems to predominate. The moment, what is exceptional is that communication is now on a worldwide basis, it’s getting rapid. I mean, I can use my email.
I can contact somebody in the States or in England in a fraction of a second, which to me is just incredible that we can do that. So we’re now aware of things on a global scale. We can’t anymore differentiate between them and us in a way which was seen to be valid before because our economies are so interwoven with each other. And the economic rationalism runs into problems because there’s a differentiation between them and us. You know, the people who are working and the others who are not working or the people who have shares and the people who don’t have shares.
The people in this nation as distinct from the people in that nation. So there’s that separation. Until we develop this understanding of wisdom and compassion, that is inevitably going to be there. Because inevitably, we try to maintain ourselves and those we consider within ourselves as being us, which may be our partner. If we have children, we’ll include our children.
It may include an extended family. So as our wisdom and compassion develops, this notion of them and us also starts to loosen, starts to spread out. There’s no longer just the family, but it becomes maybe the local neighborhood community. And then it’s no longer the local neighborhood community, it becomes maybe national and then international. But that happens as our wisdom and compassion develops.
Meanwhile, of course, you’ve got the active dynamics. You’ve got the cause and effect and dependent arising, which has triggered something else off. So I think it’s a constant battle. It seems worse at the moment because the nature of global interaction is so evident these days. But, I mean, I was rereading Grapes of Wrath.
And when was that written? The nineteen thirties, nineteen forties. The first time I read that, I thought, well, I’m glad this book was written because it means these sorts of things will never happen again. They do. Yeah?
Well, would you like to be a bit more specific? I can talk at length about it. Yep. The ego is definitely involved in depression. Depression, well, there are two aspects to depression.
One, again, is the physical aspect to it. A lot of cases of depression I classify more as mental burnout, if you like, or physical burnout, where the body is simply worn out because somebody’s been going and going and going. So I often see people within that category. The other quality of depression is where people’s hopes and expectations are not being fulfilled. The anger is not achieving anything.
So there’s a quality of hopelessness which happens there. That quality of hopelessness, again, is an indication that there’s some quality of wisdom and some quality—maybe not so much of compassion, but certainly the wisdom is missing. And one of the things which is missing often in that is an understanding of karma and dependent arising and how these have an effect on each other. Another one is feeling that what we’ve done has not ever had any effect, which is actually a misunderstanding of the nature of the mind and how the mind can work. When you see healing happening at a distance, for example, what is it that’s happening with some quality of mind which is functioning in that particular case?
When we feel that we’re not having any impact on a person, it can’t be true. We can’t not have an impact. But it may not be the impact that we want. And so then we get back to the expectations. And whether those expectations are based on compassion or whether they’re based on self-grasping.
So again, we get back again to saying, well, where’s the self-grasping in this? Where’s the compassion in this? Do you want to say more? The question—what’s a good method for dealing with anger which has been repressed for some time? Psychology is actually very good at doing that.
I don’t have a disagreement with Western psychology in that sense. So the techniques which are already around are very useful. And basically, you’re looking at self-awareness there. To help a person become aware of anger when it’s been repressed, first of all, you help that person become more aware of their own inner thoughts and to become aware of discrepancies within and ambiguities within their thinking and what they’re saying to you as a therapist. Or ambiguities in your own thoughts if you’re trying to do that.
Meditation is an excellent way to do it because there you can keep the mind and allow it to be calm and clear so there’s no sense of threat. And when there’s no threat, then sometimes these feelings can come up. So being aware of anger in that sense is very important. So being able to be in a situation where you can start to become aware of these negative emotions, where before you’ve been so frightened of them that you’ve pushed them out of your mind. That’s very, very important.
But it’s also important once you get to be aware of them to find out ways of discharging them which is not going to keep on regenerating that particular negative emotion. That’s where the problem can be. Because the danger is that in expressing the emotion, you’re actually regenerating it. So if the emotion is because your mother didn’t tie your shoelaces when you were five years old or something like this, and you become aware of this and you go into floods of tears over that. And then if you spend the rest of your life being upset because your mother didn’t tie your shoelaces, it’s ridiculous.
So right, let the emotion out. And then say, okay, that is part of what happened to me. That’s part of my mind. That is how my mind has been working. I can do it differently.
I don’t have to do it like that. You don’t have to go and accuse your mother of being unmotherly because she didn’t do something like that. There’s also a quality of forgiveness which is very important in relationships. Mhmm. Yep.
Yep. Right, the question’s about attachment and suffering. Did I say attachment was the basis of suffering? So therefore, do we need to detach ourselves? The answer is yes, but not in the sense of being calm and distant.
And we also need to know what it is that we’re detaching ourselves from. What we’re trying to detach ourselves from is this idea of the self-grasping. Attachment has to do with self-grasping. Self-grasping, in its grossest form is greed, plain simple ordinary greed. But there are also very subtle forms in which we are greedy.
So we want to wear nice clothes, for example. We want people to think that we are good. We want people to not criticize us. Things like that. These are the things that we want for ourselves so we can puff up our ego and say, I’m okay, I’m fine.
So attachment is that hanging on to anything which will do that. So somebody comes up and says, Diana, you’re a fantastic lecturer. My ego pops up and I say, gee, this person is terrific. I like this person because he or she has said, you’re a fantastic lecturer. Therefore, I’ve gotta have this person as my friend for the rest of my life.
Now, obviously, I’d be in trouble if I did that. But we do this in much more subtle ways. So somebody comes along and their views and ideas are similar to ours, and we’re so happy to see somebody who thinks in the same sort of a way. And then this is grasping onto this person because I found somebody who’s meeting my needs. We’re no longer looking at that person.
There’s no longer the compassionate mind which sees that person. What we’re seeing is this is somebody who can meet my needs. That’s the attachment. Right? We’re coming from the point of view of compassion.
What we’re seeing, here’s a person who thinks and feels like I do, and there’s great joy in that relationship. So being not attached actually means having great joy, having great love. Right? It doesn’t mean being cold and distant. And the ideal is to have that towards everybody, not just the people that like us.
Yep? Yeah. Well, you see, we keep on learning through developing self-awareness. We keep on learning how subtle this differentiation can be between self-grasping and altruism. Self-grasping and attachment too.
That in doing something for another person, you see somebody who is very upset and you go up to them and you give them a hug and you say, there there, it’s okay, and you know, tell me all about it and let them discharge all their emotions. And you think, I’m great, I’m being altruistic. And part of that motivation is that you want that person to say, I’m so grateful for you for doing that. We want that to happen.
It’s a nice thing to happen. That wanting is the attachment. And it is—if you think about it carefully, you’ll see that it’s actually different from that joy and delight in seeing that person come out of their suffering. So we have to keep on working with this. We have to keep on being mindful of this.
We have to keep on developing our understanding which means using our mind in a very logical clear way. Using it from that point of equanimity so when we’re with these people that are so precious to us, then we can take joy in them rather than wanting them to love us. It’s not easy, but it’s worth trying. Yep. Now the question for those of you who couldn’t hear was that some people grow up in an environment which is very loving and yet they’re self-grasping people.
Other people grow up in an environment which is very destructive for them and yet their altruism is very strong. So it doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t fit. The reason for that is because we don’t come into this world with a blank mind. We come into it with the karmic imprints which have come from previous lives.
So if in previous lives we have developed a mind where we have tried to open ourselves to compassion, we’ve tried to develop this compassionate mind, and we’ve worked on it—we put a lot of work into it in the previous lifetime—when we come into this lifetime, those imprints are there. So even if we’re born into a situation which is very difficult, then we still act from that altruistic mind. But if in the previous lifetime we’ve done the opposite, and everything has come easily to us and we’ve grabbed everything we’ve wanted and we haven’t worried about the effect on anybody else, then we’ve created those sorts of imprints in the previous lifetimes and when we come into this lifetime, even though our parents might be very loving parents, we set off with this mind which is self-grasping, is wanting to take even more from these loving parents. So when we give birth to our children, we don’t know what the karmic imprints are going to be which come through.
So the effect as parents that we have on our children can modify those karmic imprints. And they can also set up a situation where maybe some of those negative ones don’t ripen in this particular lifetime because the situation is not likely to arise. But we can’t undo the karmic imprints for our children. We can help them work with it if they express it, but we can’t undo those karmic imprints. We can make it easier for people, if they have a negative mind, to begin to step out of it.
That’s what compassion is. Ego. Definition of ego. Ego. The way I think of ego when I use the word—I’m trying to remember the proper Buddhist definition, but I can’t—is that quality of the mind which sees the self—I suppose this is a Buddhist definition—which sees the self as being something which is real and concrete and existing eternally.
And it’s also that part of the self, that part which functions in an ordinary day-to-day way. In fact, Jung used the word ego in that sense. That the ego is that part of the mind which functions in an ordinary day-to-day way. But from that functioning of the mind, we develop this concept of ourselves as being something solid and permanent and everlasting.
And this thing which is solid and permanent and everlasting is suffering and so we want to stop that suffering and therefore the self-grasping arises from that. I suppose when I use the word ego, I’m sort of a conglomeration of those things. But there are two aspects. One is this ability to function on a day-to-day basis. And the other one is the self-grasping aspect of the ego.
When we say somebody’s being egocentric, we usually mean it in that sense. You’ll be my friend for life. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
And this is the Buddhist search is trying to find the real me and realizing that it does just slip away. It’s not there. So keep on doing it for that reason only.