Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 34-minute teaching, Geshe Sonam Rinchen explores the third of the Six Perfect Qualities: patience, specifically as antidote to anger. He distinguishes three types of patience—not being upset by harm, voluntarily bearing hardship, and conviction in the teachings—and emphasises that the first is most crucial for spiritual progress. Anger destroys accumulated positive potential and clouds mental clarity like ripples on a lake surface. Geshe Sonam traces anger’s roots to clinging to self and what one considers one’s territory, and shows how unhappiness and depression precede anger’s arising. He offers practical methods: maintaining emotional serenity no matter what arises; distinguishing situations where action is possible from those it is not; and viewing a person who harms you as mentally afflicted, worthy of help rather than blame. He illustrates this with Āryadeva’s analogy of a doctor or mother responding to a maddened patient or child. The teaching concludes with dedication of merit.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 6PQ.mp3
UUID: 602a38bf-32a9-42f9-95c9-980ce78f6292
Teacher: Geshe Sonam Rinchen
Collection: The Six Perfect Qualities (Geshe Sonam Rinchen)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 34.4 minutes
Words: ~3,188
Even if we practiced ethics and created a lot of positive potential from that, unless we practice patience also, both of those, the positive energy accumulated from both of the former may easily be destroyed by our anger. So Geshe-la keeps feeling the pressure of time. He says there are three kinds of tolerance, which doesn’t make anything much of harm. It doesn’t make anything much of the harm that’s coming towards it. It doesn’t get upset.
patience which is not getting upset about harm. patience which voluntarily bears hardship. And patience which is conviction with respect to the teachings. So the most important of these is the first, the kind of patience which doesn’t make a big fuss about harm that is coming towards one. It’s a little hard to say in English, but it’s quite easy to understand.
It means not getting upset when things are going wrong. Right? When people are being nasty to you or when you find yourself in a bad situation. So that quality of not getting upset, getting in a flap when there is something negative coming at you. For anybody who wants to try and gain spiritual insights, the practice of patience, the cultivation of patience is of utmost importance because nothing hinders us more from gaining spiritual insights, from enhancing the insights and experiences that we already have, than anger.
In order to cultivate patience, one has to real ise the drawbacks of anger. One has to see how destructive anger is. One has to see the drawbacks and try to stop it. Try to stop anger arising. That’s what’s necessary for the cultivation of patience.
There are some drawbacks that we can see quite clearly, and some that are not so apparent to us. So in the Buddhist scriptures, in the Buddhist texts, all those commentaries and so on, there is a lot of talk about the ones that we can’t see, the ones that aren’t apparent to us because it says that anger destroys positive energy or potential that one accumulated. And that’s something which we can’t actually see for ourselves. But it’s maybe possible for us somehow to guess at the way that that would work. You know that anger would destroy positive energy.
And so it’s really important, first of all, not to allow yourself to get angry, and if you do get angry, to make sure you stop being angry quickly. So we know often that when we’re unhappy, then we feel angry and when there’s anger and unhappiness there is no possibility of experiencing pleasure at the same time. We can’t experience pleasure or happiness at such a time when we feel unhappy and angry. So our minds can’t experience any kind of pleasure or happiness at that time. And even our bodies are affected by our mental state.
If we’re If are feeling angry, our body can’t be comfortable. And all our mental stability is immediately damaged. There is no way that you can say when you are angry that your mind has stability at that time. As soon as the mind is ruffled in that way, as soon as the mind becomes disturbed by anger, it’s like lake which is full of ripples and waves and the moon can’t be reflected clearly in it because the surface of the water is disturbed. When we’re disturbed, when anger disturbs the mind or also when desire, when strong desire, attachment, desire, lust, when when any of these emotions disturb the mind, the mind is ruffled in exactly the same way, and it loses its clarity.
And under those circumstances, whatever action we to undertake, we are unable to see clearly, we are unable to apprehend things, we are unable to apprehend or perceive things clearly when the mind is disturbed by these emotions. We know this from our own personal experience. Each person has experienced how that works. Nāgārjuna says that when we are disturbed in this way, when we are disturbed by either of these strong negative emotions, he says there is no way that our physical and verbal actions are going to be harmonious. You’ll find if you are angry a lot of the time, you’ll find you make a lot of enemies.
Not only that, even your friends won’t want to stick around. It has so many effects. Its effects are far reaching because if you have a problem of that kind and your friends are not interested in being near you, then you also have a problem getting whatever it is that you need. You have a difficulty getting your living or getting whatever you need. And there are many many more things that we can see, the disadvantages or drawbacks of anger that we can see for ourselves and that we know from our own experience if we look a little objectively.
Thus, the most important thing for us is to try and preclude anger, to stop anger before it arises, to stop it arising. And in order to stop it arising, we have to see what its causes are. It’s undoubtedly this attachment to oneself, to people who are close to one. So it’s a very strong clinging and attachment to oneself, to oneself, oneself, to to oneself, oneself, to oneself, to creates this reaction of anger. So as soon as one suspects that somebody is harming somebody or something is harming oneself or anything that one includes in one’s own territory, one begins to feel this sense of anger and aggression.
Actually what one feels first is a feeling of unhappiness. As soon as one feels that one’s own territory is being trespassed on, that somebody is doing something which is going to harm oneself or what belongs to one in some way, then one begins to feel unhappy. And the unhappiness, that feeling of unhappiness, is very quickly followed by anger. Also, I mean, just you consider your own life, maybe one It’s easy to look back at one’s own life and see that one hasn’t actually managed to accomplish very much. When one looks back and sees that things haven’t really gone all that well, that one has reached a certain age and that still one doesn’t seem to have accomplished anything much.
It’s easy to feel depressed or unhappy. So happiness, that feeling of unhappiness that one has about one’s own life, about what one hasn’t achieved or hasn’t managed to do, produces a sense of bitterness and anger directed against oneself. Yeah. So and that’s what makes people commit suicide, kill themselves, maybe stab themselves, or jump off cliffs and bridges and things like that. So people do often commit suicide because of that, because of a kind of anger directed at themselves arising from a sense of unhappiness and depression with their own life.
So whether the anger is directed outwards at others or whether it’s directed inwards at oneself in the form of bitterness and so on, we can see that in both cases it’s often preceded by unhappiness, by depression, by a troubled mind, a depressed, unhappy state of mind. And so it’s very, very important for us to work at eradicating that unhappy state of mind. Like it’s a warning. As soon as there’s unhappiness, there’s something else going to come, something going to follow on. So we have to work at that unhappiness and try and get rid of it, try and get rid of the unhappiness and depression which precedes anger and frustration.
And how do you work with that? How do you work to try unhappiness and depression? So this is difficult. It demands courage. But the thing is you have to make a strong resolve, a strong resolve not to allow your mental serenity, your tranquility, to be troubled by any situation.
No matter what situation arises, you determine that you’re going to keep serene, that you’re going to keep your mind poised, balanced, that you’re not going to let the mind be ruffled and disturbed. So if we can maintain serenity, if one can maintain a serene state of mind, a tranquil state of mind, then there is no possibility for this disturbed, depressed, unhappy state of mind to arise. So therefore, we have to aim constantly at maintaining a serene and joyful state of mind. The most important thing to remember is that unhappiness and depression don’t actually remedy the situation you find yourself in. I mean, they’re quite ineffective to remedy, to alleviate the situation you find yourself in.
And what’s more, they rob you of any power you have to change the situation. They they paralyze you. When you’re depressed, when you’re unhappy, you’re paralyzed. You become ineffective, and so that you can’t actually do anything to remedy the situation you find yourself in. So you need to look at the situation that’s making you unhappy.
If you look at the situation and you see that there is something you can do about it, if there is something constructive that can be done to remedy that situation, then there’s absolutely no grounds for getting depressed because you can get on with doing it. And then if there is nothing you can do to remedy the situation, if it’s a situation where you can’t find any quick way out, maybe you are ill and you are going to respond to treatment eventually but maybe not quickly or maybe not. Whatever the situation is, if you can’t find, you can’t see your way out, getting depressed is not going to be useful either. Because in that case, you’re going to have two kinds of suffering. You’re going to have the suffering of the situation itself, and you’re going to have your mental depression on top of that.
So you’ll be suffering doubly. So it’s very, very important for us to stop this terrible rejection of any kind of difficulty and problem and suffering. I mean, feeling that we absolutely don’t want to cope at all. We don’t want to cope with any kind of difficulty and problem. It’s really important to overcome that.
To somehow relax into it more. So anyway, we come back to the question question of anger. We all know that anger is destructive. I am sure everybody has experienced the destructiveness of anger. If we want to get rid of anger, we have to get rid of its cause.
Cause springs from this state of mental unhappiness, this frustration and unhappiness and a really troubled troubled state of mind. So this troubled and unhappy state of mind is the ground from which anger arises. And so we have to work with that. We have to work with that. We have to try and somehow get rid of that and maintain a serene state of mind.
So if we look at where anger comes from, it really becomes interesting. There’s a lot we can do to investigate there. For sure, if you yourself experience a problem or suffering and the people you love experience suffering, for sure, you react with anger to that. And if they don’t get something that they want, right, if the people that you love or you yourself don’t get something which you or they want, then you feel angry about that too. If somebody disparages somebody that you’re fond of or somebody that you’re involved with, then you feel angry.
Yeah. I mean, if somebody disparages them to their face or if people talk if people talk about you and other people that you are are fond of or connected with, if they talk about them in a bad way behind your back also, then you also feel angry. And then if somebody you like does well or if somebody you don’t like does well and somebody you don’t like is praised and somebody you don’t like gets things that you you would have liked to have had and so on. You also feel angry. That also makes you feel upset.
It’s true that if you hear some else being praised quite close to you, you know there is something unbearable about it. So there are eight worldly concerns, and these eight worldly concerns, we very quickly get angry about them. So the problem is we fail to maintain a balance because if somebody praises us or somebody we like, we get excited very very quickly. And the more excited we get about that, the more likely it is that when some somebody criticizes or disparages, we’ll be really depressed and downcast about it. So we need to keep more of a balance.
So the more we get excited about this one, the more depressed we’re going to get about the other one. When you think about praise, praise actually, I mean it’s nice to it’s nice to hear words of praise, but they don’t do you any good at all. So compliments compliments can’t actually make you live longer, make you healthier, make you have more positive energy. A compliment can’t do anything like that for you. Quite likely, it will make you conceited.
And as soon as you’re conceited, you can’t see what you are doing wrong. And as soon as you are conceited and you don’t think that anything you do could possibly be wrong, then you do all sorts of things which people can’t bear. And when somebody criticizes you, although it’s not nice to listen to, don’t enjoy listening to it. Actually it can be useful because it points out some faults. There’s usually some basis for it.
And as soon as one is able to identify faults, it allows one the opportunity to get rid of them and to try and develop some qualities, some good qualities instead. So in that way criticism can actually be useful to us. So best is not to get excited at praise and disappointed or upset at blame, but to keep a nice balanced attitude. So in any case, we need to be much more aware of our emotions. We need to be aware of them as they arise, spot them early, and we need to look where they’re coming from, what’s causing it.
If we can be a little more rational and objective in our approach, then we can actually take effective measures. So imagine somebody hits you with a stick and it hurts. So the thing that actually hurt you is the stick, but then it wasn’t the stick didn’t brandish itself. The stick was brandished by the man behind it. But then you shouldn’t really feel angry with the man who was brandishing the stick because he is being manipulated by his negative emotions.
He is completely overwhelmed. He is in the grip of this strong anger. So he is being manipulated by that strong emotion. That strong emotion actually is to blame. And then why did one get hit in the first place?
Well, there must have been something wrong with the way one was behaving. Something one did was wrong because otherwise one wouldn’t have got hit in the first place. So that’s the immediate cause quite probably. Immediate cause quite probably is that there was something one was doing that was irritating the other person or whatever and so one got hit over the head. But the underlying cause for that, the underlying cause is that somewhere in the past one did something similar, one had done something similar.
So one created a negative action which is bearing this fruit of being hit, of experiencing being hit over the head with a stick. So then this is how you try to maintain patience under a bad circumstance of this kind. Then you should feel that it’s not justified to get angry. It’s not justified under these circumstances to get angry because one is simply experiencing the fruit of something one did oneself in the past. So it’s just a ripening.
Āryadeva, who is a great Indian pandit and practitioner, scholar and practitioner, says that if a child goes mad and hits its mother, or if a patient goes mad and hits the doctor, that neither the doctor nor the mother will turn on the child or the patient. In fact, they’ll do everything they possibly can to help. The doctor, if he’s a good doctor, will do everything in his power to cure his patient’s madness and won’t smash him because he got hit.
The mother, if she realizes that her child has flipped out, is going to try to do something to help the child. In the same way, the person who hits us is like a mad person because he is maddened by these passions which rage inside him. His anger has completely overwhelmed him. There is no point getting angry with him because he is actually out of control. He is not in control of what he is doing.
So what we need to do is to help him get over his anger. We need to help him to cope with his anger rather than punishing him for what he is doing. In any case, there are a thousand approaches for cultivating patience, but the most important point about it all is that we have to find some means of decreasing our anger. We all know how destructive anger is, how it robs us of happiness right now, and how it makes long term happiness impossible. And in every way, now and in future, it’s damaging.
So it’s something that we need to try to deal with. So when we talk about the practice of patience, it’s anger that we have to concern ourselves with and how we can get rid of anger, how we can stop it arising and deal with it when it does arise. And Geshe-la says he thinks he’ll stop now. He says, it’s difficult for us to talk about the six perfections in any extensive way during such a short period. But he wants to give something useful in relation to each perfection, something that we can actually apply in our daily lives.
So today, by Geshe-la, through Geshe-la explaining all these things and this humble translator translating them in trying to give the teachings in this way and through the effort that you’ve made to listen and concentrate on what was being said we’ve created a lot of positive potential positive energy. So we should dedicate that this energy may be a cause for us and others to gradually develop wisdom which grows from hearing, from listening and thinking and meditation and that we can all gradually attain insights which will help to free us from our suffering and problems. If from today you’re able to enhance your generosity and your ethical conduct and your practice of patience, then what we’ve done here has been meaningful. Yeah. So if each day we can see a little progress, if each day we can see something small that is getting better, then things are going really well.