Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A Tibetan saying quoted early — “a lover’s cup is never dirty” — anchors Ven Jampa Gendun’s central argument in this 83-minute opening session: afflictive emotions distort perception by exaggerating qualities that don’t hold up under investigation. After participant introductions at Buddha House, Jampa compares Western and Buddhist criteria for positive and negative emotions, drawing on a Dalai Lama quote distinguishing emotions “with reason” (compassion) from those without (hatred). He sharpens the definition of anger: assertiveness, setting limits, and protesting injustice are not anger in the Buddhist sense unless paired with intention to harm. Anger’s root is traced to distress and the wish to remove whatever frustrates desire. The session closes by previewing a key personal exercise — weighing anger’s advantages and disadvantages — as the necessary first step toward real change. No prior Buddhist background needed.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 Anger.mp3
UUID: a6dc470d-5b90-40d7-bed8-c9bee51d3c6b
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Weekend Workshop Anger (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 83.1 minutes
Words: ~10,145
So welcome to Buddha House. There’s a few new faces. My name is Jampa, and this is venerable Jamyang. We’re gonna be conducting the workshop over the weekend on anger. I maybe we can go over a little bit of the housekeeping.
The women’s toilet is you go out the door that you came in. You make a right, and immediately on your left in the hallway, there’s women’s toilet and the men’s toilet. It’s all the way down the hallway at the very end. We’ve got to walk so much farther. Yeah.
Like, discrimination, I think. Well, if you were if we had this on the other side of the building, it would be nearer. Let’s see what else. We’re going is this schedule posted? We have a Yes.
Just hang up. There’s a schedule posted. And And we will give everybody we will hand it out when we have the copies. Okay. We’re we’re having a bit of a mechanical problem.
Yeah. What else do we have to anything else in terms of Well say ten Yeah. Ten thirty will be And we’ll go to four today. Is that right? Yeah.
We thought we’d begin with just by way of introducing ourselves, and then maybe just a word or two why you came, what you might expect out of the day or the weekend. So my name is Jampa This is, I guess, preface. Like to, you know, many of you are, or some of you are familiar with the way I give talks. Usually, it’s quite didactic or, you know, just blah blah blah, and sometimes that gets kind of boring and so forth. And I like to be a little more interactive.
This is my goal. Part of my goal out of this weekend is to be a little more of a workshop atmosphere rather than giving talks on different subjects and so forth or whatever, in this case anger. So I hope you’ll be patient and help, and I hope you’ll assist me in this. Okay, Jiang Yang just left, so she’s not going to introduce herself. Can I ask you to introduce yourself and just a word or two about why you what you expect and why you came?
My name is Helen. I’m thirty eight, reaching forty, a bit confused with life. Mhmm. I’m trying to give up smoking and not dealing well with current situations that, you know, just flare me up. And I just want a resolve of how to deal with just things that fire through my face and just brush it off Yeah.
Rather than let it get into emotions of that just completely overfight me. Yeah. Thanks for that. Thank you. My name is Theresa, and don’t know what any one thing brought me here today, but it was probably quite a few things.
I recently did a meditation course, and I went and saw my dad’s Buddhist counselor, life counselor. And I guess a few things started kicking in my head and I know that I have some patience issues, so I was hoping to deal with them this weekend. Yeah. So I guess a whole range of things have led me to that. Thank you, Theresa.
I’m Maggie. I’m married with two children. We’ve been we’ve come from Israel. We’ve been here for two and a half years. And I need to deal with end and resentment.
Yeah. Thank you, Maggie. Jack? We’re just introducing ourselves. My name is Anita.
I was in meditation at Jamyang the other day just doing the hourly meditation and it was going really well. And right at the end I got really annoyed about I can’t remember what it was now but I was like, oh man, it really makes me angry’ and I was sort of learning the process of letting it go and then the bell went and then jumped in and jumped out and said oh and there’s an anger management workshop on the weekend’. And I’ve never considered thinking of doing one, you know, anger because I I wouldn’t think, you know, was thinking, oh, I’m not angry about anything really, but there must be more, you know, more details to it. You. I’m Betty.
I have I I have difficulty with other people’s anger, and if there’s something I have to deal with and I think they’re going to be angry with me then I’ve really struggled with that and I tend a bit like one of the other, I suppress my own so that sometimes when it does explode, which is rare but it happens, I realise that I’m not all in control of that. Yeah. So again, it’s like a couple of other people this email arrived and there it was. I had an incident with my family a month ago, which has ended very badly. And it was just like, yeah.
It was just there. And I thought, well, guess what I’m doing this weekend. So thank you. Thank you. I think I’m here for a range of reasons as well.
So it’s similar to lots of things I’ve heard during the day. I think the only thing I could really add to that would be I work with children. And sometimes children can push all of your buttons. All of your buttons. But you can’t get angry with the children, so or you can get angry, you know, but you’ve got to deal with that anyway.
So that’s probably the only thing I could add towards or anything instead. I think during this weekend is a good opportunity. You know, every time when when I’m saying something in front of the class, it gets me three times harder than when I listen to it. To look again more conscious at my own mind. Yeah.
And I always learned a lot from doing it. I always hear things that I thought, oh, I didn’t know that. I’ve heard this many times, but I didn’t realize, you know, what it really meant to have. I already introduced myself. So I’m going to I’m going to say a few words, and then we’re we’re going to discuss emotions in general and then look at anger in particular.
And then we’ll at ten thirty, we’ll take a break, and then Jamyang will be working with an exercise, and then we’ll do some meditation. But I want to you know, we’re looking at anger, from a Buddhist perspective, a particular point of view. And I think it’s good if we begin to hone in on what Buddhism actually means, from the point of view of Buddhism, what are the detriments, what are the disadvantages of anger, what do we mean by anger? As opposed to our general view in the West. So we can begin to make some kind of distinction around emotions in general, but then anger in particular.
So I haven’t done this before. Emotions, we’re checking up on our state of being. Pamela was talking about emotions last night. Pamela was giving a talk on what is called the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination. She’s giving a series of lectures on Friday night and part of her talk was on emotions last night.
It was interesting, she mentioned, you know, motions are quite difficult to define what we mean by that, the patterns of thinking by which we’re checking upon, Am I okay or am I not okay? What is the situation? Is it threatening? And how we react to that, if we see the situation as enhancing or threatening or neutral in some way. So I think what I like to do is see what are the criteria in terms of how we determine what is a positive emotion and a negative emotion.
Just in general in the West, not particularly, we’re not going to we’re going to come to Buddhism. But what is that criteria around what is a positive emotion, what is a negative emotion that we generally use? Because we will naturally make use of those ways of thinking, those patterns of which we see are advantageous to ourselves, which we see as positive. And we will shy away, will avoid those patterns of reacting which we see as disadvantageous to ourselves, aren’t in our best interest. So what we see as positive and negative is going to determine quite a lot upon our repertoire of emotions that we most naturally indulge in, react with.
So, you know, just in general. Okay, what are some emotions? Off the top of your head, what are some emotions? Fear. Fear emotion.
Okay. We don’t have to be technical. Happiness. Happiness. Love.
Love. Sadness. Sadness, Yeah. Jealousy. Jealousy.
Good one. Attachment, hatred, misery, and sameness. I think we could all list about thirty or forty emotions, I think. We what criteria do we use to differentiate between positive emotions and negative emotions? Feeling.
Feeling. So in terms of feeling? So a good feeling is a positive emotion. If it makes you feel good, is it positive emotion? Okay.
So good feelings. It makes you feel good. What about can we can we put on this side if it makes you feel bad? Yeah. Negative?
Yeah. Oneself or others. Is it include here? How about are are there times what makes other okay. Let’s okay.
Bad feeling. Self. Is are there times when when an emotion can make others feel better that but it makes us feel good? Or is it I think it’s revenge. Okay, so we have revenge.
I’m fine. Faster. I think it’s really temporary, revenge. Think you initially feel really good. And then later you feel really Yes.
Okay, so we have to wait short term and long term. It gets very complicated. Wow. Short term and long term. Are there any other criteria which we generally, just generally roughly, make use of in determining whether an emotion is positive or negative emotion?
In relation to your health, like in the sense of well-being and being healthy? So how it affects you physically? Physiology? How would we put that? Effect on health.
It has a positive effect on your Yes. Okay. Good effect on uplifting. Health. Okay.
Makes you healthy. Makes you healthy. Makes sick. Makes you sick. I think, okay, So we have, whether we’re aware of it or not, whether we clarified it for ourselves or not, some criteria that we’re making use of in distinguishing.
You know, we all have a repertoire of emotions from all the way from love and compassion down to I won’t say down to, but on this spectrum of some sort of anger, hatred and so forth, aggression, hostility, that we see we make distinction in terms of whether they make us in terms of positive and negative. And we will generally avail ourselves of those repertoire of those motions in our repertoire. I mean, we have all these potentials to act out, react various ways. We will tend to act out those types of emotions which we see as advantageous to ourselves, which there’s some kind of payoff we’ve learned along somewhere along the line. Maybe if we were to investigate we might be able to see at a deeper level they’re really going against our best interests.
But at some level we believe that they’re going to bring about our welfare. And we label those as positive. And those which we see as detrimental to our well-being, are going to harm us in some way, which aren’t working for ourselves, which we don’t get what we want, we call negative emotions. So, you know, quite naturally you want what you want, and what you don’t want you want to avoid. So we’ll make use of those types of emotions which are some kind of payoff, we call those positive.
So what are the criteria? Generally it’s what makes us feel better, makes us feel good about ourselves, our physical well-being. There’s some kind of payoff involved in terms of emotion. Generally, don’t, in terms of the immediate emotional reaction, we’re not analyzing in terms of its long term benefits or its short term payoffs or in terms of self and other. It’s an immediate effect on our sense of, ah, this feels good.
This feels bad. So I think would you agree with that? Just roughly speaking, that’s the general criteria that we’re using. And that’s we have a certain repertoire of emotions that we make use of. We will avail ourselves of those which we think there’s going to some immediate payoff.
They’re the most available to ourselves. And those which are some kind of negative, we won’t they’re at a lower threshold of reaction. They don’t come up as often. They’re not in our best interest. Okay, so what in terms of Buddhism, what are the criteria?
And maybe we have to talk about this. What are the criteria in terms of how we are determining you know, we’re going to in a way we’re re educating ourselves, recondition ourselves of what types of emotions we’re going to avail ourselves of in dealing with various situations, life situations that come up for ourselves. We have our particular set of criteria that we make up and use at present, and maybe there has to be some reeducation process in determine what is actually in my own best interest. What is actually going to be a payoff? And maybe we have to take a different point of view.
And there is another point of view, you know, from the point of view of Buddhism. So what are the criteria that we use Buddhism? Those those which bring about suffering. No. Those which bring about I’ll read you a quote from the Dalai Lama around making this distinction between positive and negative emotions.
Buddhists distinguish between two types of emotion. One type is without reason and just based upon prejudice. Hatred is one of these. This sort of emotion will rely on superficial reasons, of course, such as, This person hurt me terribly. But deep down, if you pursue that reasoning further, you find that it does not go very far.
Emotions without proper reason are what we call negative emotions. The other kind of emotion, which includes compassion, altruism, is emotion with reason because through deep investigation one can prove it is good, necessary, and useful. So good, necessary, and useful. You’re I would thought, wouldn’t every emotion have a reason? Yeah.
It it So what it Is that what you’re portraying? Is that what you’re Yeah. So you know here Buddhism is very I guess has a very pragmatic viewpoint. That is to say what is in the best our best interests, not necessarily what makes us feel good. So generally we want immediate gratification.
We will use as our criteria that which makes us feel good almost immediately, just like a child will. They’ll eat candy or a heroin addict will take heroin and so forth. It’s immediate gratification. But Buddhism will say, well, is it good, necessary, and useful? Is it in our best interest?
Sometimes and we can begin to see that sometimes emotions which don’t make us feel good might be in our best interests. And this requires some degree of maturity or perspective around what it is that going, how we’re going to react and relate with a particular situation. Does it, in terms of Buddhism, does it perpetuate my suffering? In terms of positive, does it serve as a means of liberating me from destructive self, you know, patterns of self destructive patterns, types of patterns of ways of thinking and which perpetuate my dissatisfaction, my frustration. So we have a different criteria.
Is it in terms of positive? Is it liberative? Is it liberating me from my problems? The problem of suffering, most basically. Then if those types of emotions are said to be positive, it may not feel good.
For example, to get Sadness. Okay. Yeah. Sadness, expressing grief, doesn’t feel very good. It doesn’t feel good?
But in the long run, it’s a useful emotion. It will liberate you from what? All sorts of things. Like anger, the sense of loss, the sense of being totally alone in you, but all the things that come with grief came tears are good because they let some of the pain out of it. Yeah.
So they make me feel good at the time. Okay. Any other any other so liberative and those would serve to perpetuate perpetuate suffering. So it has nothing to do with it makes us feel good, with whether the emotion itself feels good or not. It has does it serve a purpose?
Is it necessary and useful? If leads us to liberation from our problems, it is a positive emotion. If it perpetuates our problems, our suffering, it is a negative emotion. Emotion. So even if it doesn’t feel good at the immediate time.
What is it can you give me an example from the point of view of a positive emotion, something emotion that doesn’t feel good? So you gave you gave what? Any other like expressing grief. Any others? An emotion which doesn’t feel good at the time, but serves a purpose.
You know, sometimes no. Yeah. Go ahead. I was thinking about fear, and and it’s when you you fear something. Yeah.
And that’s your dominant emotion. But if you push through that and you deal with the issue or whatever it is that you’re fearful of, there’s a good outcome. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah.
More that if you rather than just living into the fear and and doing nothing and remaining on the negative side and being fearful, that you you feel the fear, but you go and deal with whatever it is, resolve it, and then you have the positive impact. So overcoming Probably. Yes. Yeah. Maybe, like, standing up for trying to think of something where you can a really quick like, maybe standing up for your child.
Yeah. Is that an emotion or a behavior? Or standing up. What what’s the what’s the emotion? The emotion.
Fear would be the emotion. Like, feels very uncomfortable to face something that’s really frightening. Like So courage? Yeah. Determination or courage would be the emotion, maybe.
Yeah. It’s uncomfortable. It’s scary. It’s it’s not nice. You would like to run away from it, but you stand and do it anyway.
Yeah. Courage is a good one because it’s it’s a temporary force. It’s something that exists for a limited time. Courage. Is courage to experience this sad, not a pleasant feeling?
I think it could be both. It could be both. About discussed with your own anger? Or get discussed with our perpetual cycles, what we call cyclic existence? Really getting fed up.
I’m fed up with this continual suffering. It doesn’t feel good, does it? But it takes you somewhere. Brings about change. Yeah?
It’s liberative. So self scrutiny, I think, comes under that one, that can be really uncomfortable. To take to take a look at yourself. Yeah. Yeah.
What about, from the point of view of Buddhism, a negative emotion, which feels good? Revenge. Revenge. So revenge feels good. Turn off your bloody yeah.
So revenge is Yeah. Revenge I mean, yeah. We’re gonna talk about it. I mean, just anger in general sometimes makes you feel powerful. Know?
But revenge? Ah, bastard. Got him. He got his just deserves. But it’s going to perpetuate your suffering in the long run.
And it’s not good. It’s not necessary. It’s not useful. So it’s a very pragmatic approach. And the criteria is not in terms of whether the present emotion feels good or doesn’t feel good.
That’s not the criteria, but it’s the general criteria that we make use of. And therefore having habituated ourselves to how we distinguish in terms of our reaction, we’re always going to be stuck with it. Unless we use our intelligence and begin to investigate the nature, know, this criteria work in my own self best interest in the long term? We’re always going to resort just like a child. You know, he’ll keep eating candy if it’s allowed and he’ll get sick or it’ll get tooth decay.
You know, we have to have perspective, you know, maybe have to have some, you know, ourselves to perhaps develop another set of criteria in which are in our own best interest, whether they lead to their liberative or whether they’re going to simply perpetuate our problems. Okay? So we’re looking at emotions from a little bit of a different point of view. We’re going to talk more about we’re talking about emotions in general. Another thing about emotions is, and in terms of positive and negative, and this is it’s interesting and this will come out when we talk about working with emotions is what we call negative emotions.
Generally, generally, in Buddhism, we use the term afflictive emotions. It’s one term we use. Afflictive emotions. Afflictive emotions has the idea of a particular type of emotion which afflicts the natural piece of the mind. And I think it’s useful to have the notion that within Buddhism there is what’s called natural nirvana, or natural beyond sorrow.
Our minds are by their very nature peaceful. We don’t have to create a state of peace. But it’s because of these, these particular patterns of thought, that the natural peace of our mind is disturbed. So, you know, when we talk about developing very calm states in meditation, it’s not as if we have to create that state of peace. It’s always there.
It’s always accessible if we can begin to calm or distill or pacify the afflictive emotions of our mind. By afflictive emotions I mean the ones we’ve been talking about here attachment, hatred, jealousy, pride, spite, and so forth. And it’s said to be eighty four thousand. Couldn’t some positive emotions also be afflictive emotions? How?
Well, you can get hooked on feeling high one way or another. One of them there could. Hooked on feeling high. Is that a positive emotion? Well, we’ve put it over in the good feeling If you’re talking about, Does it perpetuate my suffering?
Yeah, I can see it’s not. But if we’re still looking at this side, it seems to me that positive emotions aren’t necessarily liberating. Positive emotions aren’t necessarily liberating? Can you give me an example? Yeah, just what I said.
If there’s something I really like and that makes me feel good, if I’m doing that to the exclusion of good sense. Is that called attachment? Yeah. Is it is it is attachment a positive emotion? No.
Is it is that same. It’s on a scale, kind of being, not being positive What’s that? I’m sorry. What were you talking about? The attachment, and it’ll be a positive and a negative.
That’s a that’s a good point. Can we’re just thinking with desire. Okay? Can we say that I mean, generally, desire has a bad reputation in Buddhism. But then maybe that’s something of a misunderstanding.
Is it it desire. Okay. Depends upon the object. We can desire something very positive. We can desire to become a Buddha.
We can desire to help others. There’s lots of desire. So in itself in and of itself, we can’t say the desire Well, I suspect that nothing’s intrinsically good or bad. It’s what we do with it. It’s story, isn’t it?
Just think he makes it so. Nothing is good or bad. Think so. But in saying that, how it reacts to yourself or your being, whether it’s a good or a bad, some people think Does it that does it perpetuate suffering? Well, some people think of it, like, going through the same cycle as being bad, but what about if you feel it being good?
Would that not be a positive? So it’s relative to one’s own perspective. So that’s a good point. And I think we would really have to check up and to see. After investigating, thoroughly investigating, if you say, well, that’s in my best interest, then you are final authority.
I mean, there’s no we don’t have tablets which were handed down from the sky. That’s Yeah. That’s right. So it’s a matter of having a method of investigation following through with the proper investigation where this is in my best interest. Then I think you’d have to go with that.
So this idea about whether something like desire. Desire is an emotion. It is a movement toward an object, a pattern of reacting in which the object is seen as attractive, and there’s a movement to toward the object in order to possess it in some way. But in terms of we call them positive negative. There’s one criteria which Buddhism makes use of, and this is kind of a and we’ll talk about this when we come to anger and working with anger.
The object of all afflictive emotions do not exist. And that sounds kind of radical to say that. The object of your hatred, the object of your attachment, the object of your jealousy, the object of your spite or pride does not exist. And why, you know, I Take me ten steps back. Yeah, yeah.
What does that mean? So, the what happens when we for example, get angry? This is what we’re going into. Or on the other hand, when we become attached. Exaggeration.
That’s what’s called inappropriate attention. So all the afflictive emotions are preceded with what is called inappropriate attention. And what inappropriate attention does, it exaggerates, in the case of hatred, those types of attention which lead to hatred, it exaggerates the negative qualities of the object and filters out, overlooks any other positive, any positive qualities. So the object is being seen in an imbalanced way. It’s not being seen in terms of its actual nature.
The opposite is true of attachment. With regard to attachment, inappropriate attention sees only the positive qualities, moreover exaggerates those positive qualities, and overlooks any negative qualities. Know, what’s one of the most strongest attachments we have is when you fall in love, yeah, romantic love. You know, she can’t do anything wrong. And even there’s a Tibetan expression, a lover’s cup is never dirty.
You know, even the flaws are somehow seen as cute or clever or somehow, you know, we’re able to see them in a very everything is in a positive light no matter what she does or he does. It’s temporary in sanity. Nobody exists that way. There’s no such person. But that’s the way that attachment through it’s like we’re seeing it through rose colored glasses.
Right? We’re seeing an object in a way in which it really doesn’t exist. The object of so in terms of coming back to what you were talking about, those are those those objects as seen through the eyes of negative emotions or afflictive emotions simply don’t exist. But it’s not to say that when I look upon my lover that there isn’t a person there. But as she’s appearing to me with all her wonderful and fantastic qualities without any blemishes, you know, with perfection, you know, without that pimple there, you know, she doesn’t exist.
But I believe she does. A certain part of me is grasping to that appearance as being how she actually exists reality. And I want to make her mine. I want to possess her. And then the opposite is true for the enemy.
So one criteria of determining positive and negative emotions is, does the object exist the way it appears? For example, compassion. Compassion simply is the wish that others not suffer. Is that appropriate? No.
Is it appropriate? Is is there something wrong with that, in that way of relating, outreacting to somebody who’s undergoing some difficulty. Nobody wants to suffer. Everybody wants to be happy. Compassion is always appropriate.
That’s in the true nature of the object. Therefore, compassion is seen as a positive emotion. It’s not a not mistaken emotion and therefore it’s positive. So another way we can begin to clarify what we mean by positive and negative emotions is does the object exist the way it appears? And when we talk about anger later, we can begin to use that as a method to overcome our anger.
Am I actually judging the object in terms of its actual nature? Am I exaggerating? Am I filtering out its positive qualities? One way you can begin to overcome your anger is just concentrate, does this object have any positive qualities? The moment you see a positive quality your mind is brought back into balance.
So in all the negative emotions, especially anger, the mind is imbalanced. It’s temporary insanity in a way. We’re not seeing the object in its true nature, the way it exists in reality. We’re seeing it from a particular point of view and it begins with inappropriate attention. Okay.
Any comments about it? I guess the main thing to take from this is that we that from this therapeutic point of view in working with anger, and we’re going to have to talk about why we want to work with anger in order to begin to be motivated to actually develop an alternative criteria of what types of emotions we find most appropriate. Somewhere along the line we found that anger worked for ourselves and it became a habit. And maybe now that we’re mature and we’re adults, maybe it doesn’t work for ourselves. We find in many instances where it’s to our own detriment, short term and long term.
But still there’s this force of habit, and maybe we haven’t looked into the criteria of what were the payoffs when I was little and are those actual payoffs now. These habits, these ways of relating didn’t come from nowhere. They developed over time and there was some advantage at one point that we saw in this way of relating. And we may still see advantages so have to work. One of the first exercises we’re going to do is look at the advantages and disadvantages, if any, of anger.
You have to be clear by yourself. Otherwise if you don’t, you know, it’s merely wouldn’t it be nice not to be angry? That’s not quite enough to really motivate yourself to be open to change. You have to see the for ending your anger. If you harbor some notions that anger is in your own best interest, you won’t change.
Why should you? Might be an intellectual exercise, but not an emotional one. Okay. So I want to talk about anger. Okay.
So we make a distinction between the criteria from point of view of the West and Buddhism emotion, in terms of positive and negative. There’s a slightly different criteria, even emotions which don’t make us feel good. And sometimes even compassion doesn’t make us feel good. You know, sometimes it hurts to see someone suffer, doesn’t it? But it’s not to say that’s not our criteria.
It’s whether it’s good, useful, or necessary. It takes us somewhere. Whether it’s liberative, it’s going to serve a long term purpose both for ourselves and others. I want to Okay, now I want to begin to distinguish between the Western point of view of anger and how we see it in Buddhism. Okay.
Yes. Okay. Now if you’ll stand on your head. That makes at the time, it made perfect sense. I’m gonna turn it around.
At the time, it made perfect sense. So we’re we’re going to take a look at what we mean by we mean by anger, both from the Western point of view and from the Buddhist point of view. And we have to in Buddhism, there’s a very anger is defined very specifically. Buddhism is quite a thoroughgoing technology of mind. Defines all of these various emotions and so forth, all the qualities of the mind in exacting terms.
So we have to, you know, if we’re going to make use of some Buddhist methods, which I hopefully are just human methods, we have to make a distinction about what we’re talking about when we say anger from the Western point of view and from what we’re talking about in terms of Buddhism. And why we’re going to involve ourselves in this at all. These are some of the areas, and this list could probably be we could go on all day. I’m going to first talk about what we mean from the Western point of view. Possible areas?
The word anger in English usage covers a broad has a broad meaning. It can be roughly used in various types of circumstances. And we have to begin to refine our sense of what we mean by anger and where what we don’t mean by anger. And these are some of the areas that you might consider, and we can begin to distinguish these. Are these necessarily anger, or are we just using the term anger in a very loose sense?
Or sometimes this might be anger and sometimes it might not be. Okay, so these are some of the areas that areas that which we might use the term anger in in in a very general western sense. Okay. Yeah. Can I excuse myself?
I need a toilet. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. By all means. How’s everybody doing? This is just some ideas.
This is not exhaustive. Ways that we might use the term anger in the West. Outright intention to harm. An example? War.
War. Yeah. Okay. So I think that’s pretty standard use of the term. Strong.
For example, I’m so angry I could punch you. The war, he wanted to kill all the Jewish because he thought that was really good if that happened, because Germany would be liberated from this, however he named them. So that sounds like good intention to him. Yeah. Okay.
So we call that anger, but he, for himself, might have felt that he had a good intention. Is that anger or is that? To the intention to to liberate. He had the intention to liberate Germany from Yeah. Jewish people.
So does he does he have any intention to harm? He’s just talking about this one? Are are you talking about that example, war? Yeah. If you say war Oh, I see.
Okay. Have the attention to Yeah. Yeah. War might maybe But they have the the Jewish people to liberate other people. So the intention behind us is that it’s just directed in a specific place and the intention to liberate.
But he feels good with other people. Yeah. We don’t yet because he’s worried. How can he feel just to him? Yeah.
This is kind of protesting injustice, for example. How about intention? You’re a bastard. I’m so angry I could punch you. You know?
Okay. Strong reactive dislike. What’s an what example? Strong reactive dislike. I’m playing with the truck in the sandpit, and you just took it away from me.
Don’t you ever do that again. I don’t you ever do this again and I am going to punch you. Don’t do that again. I don’t like that. I don’t like it when you interrupt me.
Assertiveness. That’s a good one, I think. You want to give me another? Maybe just in relation to, like, like, food. If in in relation to what you think is good and healthy food.
And it’s more, again, I think, in the home or families and stuff and so on. Bring something out and and Yeah. That that’s a good that’s a good one there. That’s a good one. Don’t use my computer without asking me first.
Okay? I’m trying to keep this kind of neutral. Please, you can say, don’t use my computer without asking me first. You’re assertiveness. Is that assertiveness?
Proclaiming difference, your example. What was that one? You want to repeat that one? Just have, you know, what you think is good food and you’re cooking, but you’re having like a family meal, and then someone brings something out that you think, oh, wait. That’s not the kind of food I eat.
Yeah. Know. I’ve cooked a pizza for a vegetarian. Yeah. Yeah.
The next time you order pizza for both of us, ask me what I want. Creating independence. for teenagers. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, a good one.
for teenagers. Setting boundaries. That’s one. And assertiveness. Yeah.
How would you set boundaries without assertiveness? Maybe we could say that setting boundaries was a type of assertiveness. You know, like, don’t knock. Please knock on my door before you come in. It would be a positive thing.
That’s what going to talk about. Then finally, any injustice. You can’t put out a war. The the idea of war. No.
No? Did I? Did you say war for the first time? No. So these are possible areas which could be interpreted as negative, as angry.
You know, if you said quite often it’s just about how we go communicating them. He’s an angry young man. He’s an angry teenager just because he wants to create he wants to find his own way in life, find his own values, find himself creating independence from his parents and so forth. We quite often say, well, he’s angry. Assertiveness is quite often associated with anger, isn’t it?
That when depending on and quite often it’s not the actual assertiveness, it’s how it’s presented. The point is, in all of these, it’s a matter of in terms of Buddhism, is whether there’s an intention to harm. That would be the criteria. You could have a strong dislike. When I saw you hit that child, didn’t like it at all.
It’s quite possible there’s no intention to harm what whatsoever. That would not be anger. You say it very forcefully, I don’t like you hitting that child. You know, I’m not saying I want to hurt you or that you’re a bad person. I don’t want you hurt the child.
So you can have a strong dislike without it being anger. Assertive, you know, don’t use my computer without asking me, bastard. Then with that little extra something there might be an intention to harm. But simply asserting yourself is not necessarily anger, proclaiming the difference. I don’t like that kind of I don’t find that fruit healthy.
I’d rather not eat it if you don’t mind, know, proclaiming a difference. It doesn’t mean you’re angry. You don’t want to hurt anybody. It’s always coming back to whether there’s an intention or harm, craving independence. Sometimes I’d like to go for a walk by myself.
I have nothing against you. I just like sometimes to be in my own space. There’s no intention to harm. It’s always coming back to this setting boundaries. Don’t come into my room without knocking.
But I think it could be reasonable. One in your own space. There’s no intention to harm. Progressing, protesting injustice, except for, you know, I remember back in the sixties, they used to have these violent peace marches. That’s another story altogether.
But, you know I’m showing you age. There you go. What do you say? You know, I’m setting up a website, a protest against the Chinese occupation of Tibet. I don’t have anything against the Chinese.
I just don’t want I just think there’s an injustice occurring in Tibet. There’s no anger. So, know, so what we’re talking about when we talk about anger and throughout is this intention to harm. Don’t have to be a doormat if you give up anger. You don’t have to stop asserting yourself.
You don’t have to stop having dislikes and likes or proclaiming different things. You don’t have to do any of these. It’s just a matter of whether there’s behind it or it’s mixed with intention to harm. The Dalai Lama has said many times protesting injustice is quite justified. And in the case of, for example, even there’s a notion within Buddhism called wrathful compassion.
Like a mother who, you know, her child’s about to run off into traffic. She goes, Don’t you ever, ever run out in traffic like that again. It was a rather wrathful aspect. Most of our teachers would not say that’s not anger at all. That’s an expression of compassion.
So whether the motivating force behind these behaviors is mixed with the intention to harm. So I think that’s something to keep in mind, useful to keep in mind throughout all of our discussions. So we’re not trying to there’s a notion I guess it might be useful to talk about we use the word anger. There’s lots of different words we can use which more or less mean the same thing. There’s hostility, hatred, resentment, revenge.
You know, we can just there are nuances. We In Buddhism we talk about non hatred. The practice of non hatred, the development of the emotion of non-hatred doesn’t mean that we’re not engaged in life at all. Sometimes it can be mistaken for that. Some people aren’t able to assert themselves for one reason or another, or some people who aren’t able to set boundaries, or some people who aren’t able to proclaim difference, they might mistake that as non hatred.
Could I ask a question? Yeah, please. What about when you’re having a dispute with a family member? I’m having one of those moments where and maybe not in my family, it was, where you’re yelling and screaming at each other, but obviously they’re family so you’ve got no intention of punching them in the face. But I would think that that’s definitely an expression of anger, but no intention to harm.
Okay. Well then yeah, so I see a lot of those things as like I could have a strong attitude to dislike, but I don’t want to harm them. Yeah. So if there’s no intention to harm, we might in the Western point of view, we say, well, you’re really angry. But I don’t think we would from the Buddhist point of view.
Really? You’re just probably not communicating. See many Buddhists yelling and screaming like that. Well, I don’t think it’s it’s probably not a very skillful way of communicating. You know, it probably it’s probably not the most effective way to to bring about the kinds of ins that you want.
It’s just maybe a poor communication skill. Mom or physically harming my mom in any way, shape, or form. I don’t wanna physically hurt her. Yeah. Really wanna make her see my point of view.
I wanna make I wanna force her on some kind of do do gonna don’t know. Normally, my mom my mom’s voice gets more and more high pitched, and so you kind of have to yell in order to get a word in or to actually be heard, that sort of thing. So you know how I just stopped escalating them. Yeah. And I just I I think two of my I’ve got some friends that are Italian.
He and his sister live together in a place in town, and when they go out, oh my goodness. It’s just full on. But at the end of it, it’s like nothing happened. It’s just bizarre. It’s almost like it’s like a cultural expression.
You have to do it. But there’s nothing really behind it. That’s just the way that they do it. Yeah. Yeah.
And I don’t think either of them are offended at their raised voices or anything like that. It’s just that’s how they argue. Yeah. I don’t know. I just We switch into carry it with us sometimes, but we don’t get a resolution problem.
Yeah. And they wanna say, oh, you should like. I’m really sorry Yeah. If they just stay in their corner, you’re stuck in yours. Yeah.
And you’re really grumpy out there, like, really mad at them. Yeah. Take that away and get an upset stomach. Yeah. You know, you wear it physically.
That’s when you start wishing them. So wanting to make them feel bad because you feel bad. Yeah. That’s yeah. So No.
I think that’s that’s complex. Yeah. I mean, generally, it’s bottom line is I want I I can’t have. Something like that. And there’s one yeah, we’re going to talk about what are the conditions and the causes for becoming angry.
Pardon me? Expectation? Yeah. Things aren’t as what I want them to be. I want something to be a certain way, and you are obstructing that.
You identify some object which is frustrating your desire, A bit like the child with the sweet, isn’t it? You know, I’m not the sweet. You’ve got the sweet. And you won’t let me have it. Because it’ll often be.
Yeah. I think it’s interesting, you know, maybe. Do you have any ideas around this, John Young? I don’t know because sometimes, you know, you’re you’re in a situation where you feel that you get affected or something, and you wanna defend yourself or you wanna set your boundaries. Mhmm.
And then and then it might be perceived as anger. But if you really look, you do not have intention to harm. You’ll personally you don’t wanna have to face yourself. So I’m never sure if that’s qualified as anger or not. So yes.
It’s more of a a frustration, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So, especially with my sister, like, both have no intention of hurting each other, but, you know, if we have a disagreement, and I want her to see my point of view, or I just want her to have my point of view and she’s trying to see Yeah, she’s an obstacle. She’s obstructing you.
You can be yeah. We obstruct each other and Yeah. Yell. I wonder if I wonder if I wonder I mean, it doesn’t sound very nice, does it? I just wonder if I’m just, you know, I’m not saying that this is correct or just putting this idea about it.
There may be some intention to harm. Because at a very basic you are obstructing You’re frustrating my desire. I’m not getting what I want. You’re in the way. Stop it.
And, you know, it’s not as if you want to see them suffer, but you want them to stop what they’re doing. You want to remove them. You want to remove them as an obstacle. You want to remove them as an obstacle to getting what you want. In order to that, they may just have to change their behavior.
They may just have to say yes, and then they’re no longer an obstacle. It’s not like you’d want to hurt them per se. So there’s an intention to harm, to remove the object, the object which you see as frustrating your desire. And maybe just be a matter of them changing their mind or giving in. Wanting somebody else to change, isn’t that an echo?
Yeah, I mean, The anorexic? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But the other one, the argument, no matter what, you just you want your opinion to be be seen, and it’s to do with defending yourself no matter what, and you argue and argue and argue until you get your point across.
Yeah. But I guess yeah. It was. I mean, you’re unhappy. Wanting to be validated.
Validated. In some way, we’re unhappy. I mean, the the one of the main the main causes of anger is distress, unhappiness. And you identify an object which is you see as bringing about that unhappiness or that stress. And so the reaction is to remove that object.
So the intention of harm maybe has to be thought. And maybe not so much when you actually want to see them suffer, but the harm to remove the object, for it not to be there, this obstruction. Is it I’m not intending to harm the other person, I just need to defend myself. Is that putting, that’s like saying my needs, I need to defend myself, my needs, my stuff is more important right now. Like my stuff is here.
Yeah. But do you know, like, whereas whereas the other person’s stuff, they’re just gonna have to deal with their own stuff right now. I can’t think about their stuff because I have to do the same. Do you know what can do? This.
I think that’s getting more toward a step down. I mean, with attachment and anger and hatred and so forth would have as a root self centeredness, exaggerated self concern, you know, that you’re this kind of center of the universe approach to life. I’m one, and you’re obstructing my getting what I want and my needs are most important, and therefore not actively trying to harm you. I’m not. I’m not even thinking about you.
Think that the So in anger, you want to remove you actually you want them to stop, or they aren’t doing what you want what you need. And the idea of anger is that something needs to be destroyed, something needs to be removed. Jampa, where would you put things like irritability and annoyance and impatience then? I would count them on the spectrum of anger. But they may have no intention to harm anybody, but they’re fixed.
I think they’re the cause of anger. Gonna talk about the two conditions for anger and one main cause. The main cause is I use the word distress. So irritability and these terms that you just mentioned, I think probably would could come under that area of the main cause of distress. The mind is unhappy with the present state of affairs, and it’s going to do something.
The mind is a self correcting system, and always tries to as a tension reduction. There’s some kind of tension in the mind and always remove to remove it always move within its repertoire of methods toward tension reduction. How can I get rid of this tension, this irritability, this stress? One so I’m going to I have my toolkit, and one of those methods that I’ve learned somewhere along the line is anger. Remove the object.
Whether it works or not is beside the point. It’s a learned behavior. So if you deal with the irritability, you’re saying that isn’t actually anger. Yeah, think that’s a precursor. That comes before.
That’s a cause. Yeah. Happy people do not get angry. Happy people do not get irritable. Haven’t seen anyone?
What’s that? Anyone who doesn’t ever get irritable? No, I think so. I think so. So why are we dealing with anger?
From the point of view of Buddhism. I mean, it’d be interesting. We’re gonna you know, I mean, you you we we began the the morning with why am I here? You know? Where what your each of your unique points of view, you know, why why is anger a problem?
Think that’s really you know, we’re going talk about that’s going be a part of our exercise. Just if we make a general kind of general statement from the point of view of Buddhism. Because we have to have we won’t change unless it’s necessary, and the greater the necessity, the more open we will be to change. If it’s only speculation or curiosity or wouldn’t it be nice not to be angry ever again, that probably won’t bring about the change. Change is quite difficult.
You know, even people, you know, they smoke and they smoke and they can, you know, you look on sometimes they see these advertisements, the green teeth, you know, and the advertisement for smoking. And it looks pretty disgusting and they know it’s, you know, but it’s not they haven’t determined. It hasn’t become a necessity for them to stop smoking at some level. There’s still some payoff, and the payoff is more than disadvantages. So it’s a matter of weighing out the advantages and disadvantages very clearly to yourself.
But from the point of view of Buddhism, just very roughly in general, why Buddhism sees anger as detrimental, why it’s seen as a type of emotion which isn’t beneficial, and why we’re trying to diminish it and ultimately to remove it altogether, preventing harm to others, lessens any immediate mental discomfort, angry people or unhappy people, and avoid the future karmic negative consequences of our anger. We do stupid things. We do extremely harmful things when we’re angry. I mean, terrible. I mean, when I think about some people, lead really, you know, they’re good people.
In one moment of anger, they can do terrible things that they would regret the rest of their life. And there was a man who, you know, a new parent. It’s hard to be a new parent. And this guy just couldn’t his baby just kept screaming and screaming and screaming and screaming and screaming. He was so tired, you know.
And it killed his baby in just a fit of anger. Anyway, that’s an extreme case, but sometimes extreme can serve as good lessons. So not to harm others. I guess within Buddhism, the bottom line of Buddhism or I guess spirituality is ethics. Ethics is simply the way that we lead our lives.
You know, it’s not a particular set of rules. And the essential ethic is, Buddhism at least, is not to harm. You know, if you can’t help, at least don’t harm. Something like that. Way that we can help ourselves most basically is start to stop harming others as best we can or diminish, begin to understand how we are in fact harming each other, harming others, and begin to diminish it to whatever extent you can.
How can you focus on the harming when something that harming harming would not harm somebody else. So how is it? How do you Yeah. And what’s the spectrum of harming? What are we talking?
Physical? What would you think? How would you see it? I’m sorry? How would you see harm?
What criteria would you use? I would say physical. Physical. How about mental? If you shout at somebody and it hurts their feelings.
I’m not a shouter, so I’ve never been on the receiving end of being shouted at. Okay. You take someone’s possession that they want to keep, they want to hold on to. Maybe you’re a saint. I don’t know.
How yeah. No. I’m not getting the harming thing. Sorry. I think I’ve lost track.
I reckon it can be just down to the like, smallest I think it, like, where the irritation and annoyance comes into it. It doesn’t have to be, you know, it’s more specifically with family or close friends where it could just be the subtlest annoyance that you don’t express that completely reads that you’re annoyed with someone else and it hurts, like they pick up on it. Yeah. And it’s really subtle and you know you’ve done it, and you regret it, but it does affect someone else, you know, down to, like, they’ve brought security around and you know, oh, that’s lovely. And you just it’s just the smallest thing.
Yeah. It’s still harming harming someone else. Yeah. So the intention? So there’s a certain degree of intentionality involved.
Right. And we harm people without intention, involuntarily. You know, step on insects or but so anger, with intention, wanting to produce, well, as we said, wanting to get rid of the object to stop that. But the way that we harm others is bringing unhappiness, for example, to another person. Undermining someone’s self worth.
Undermining self worth. Lots of ways we harm others, isn’t it? Disapproval and putting them down, yeah. I’m wondering just on that first one, preventing or harming others and ourselves or all ourselves. Yeah.
This would be less than immediate mental discomfort. We hurt ourselves in the even as we experience the state of the emotion of anger, we are unhappy. Yeah. We’re burning with rage. Yeah.
That would be the extreme. And moreover, we’re creating a great deal of negative karma, which will predispose us to undergo suffering in the future. And it’s like, you know, the extreme of this is hell. Hell is it’s due to these predispositions in our mind. We interpret our reality in such a way that it’s seen as negative.
Know, even in everyday life, that frown, that person isn’t because they have a headache, it’s because I’m being disapproved of. You interpret your reality in such a way it brings you some suffering. And it may have nothing to do with the person just has a headache. It has nothing to do with you but it’s your interpretation. So hell is this extreme of this interpretation a particular reality in which our entire environment is seen as bringing us harm.
We experience a sense of paranoia. And it’s like, you know, there’s hatred. It’s consumed in the fires of hatred. It’s the Buddhist kind of metaphoric way of talking about hell. And we don’t even know what it is that our hatred is directed against anymore.
It’s like a crocodile that feeds on its tail. The more it eats, the more it’s nourished. The more it’s nourished, the more its tail grows and the more it eats. And we just keep recycling our hatred. You know, it’s like when you ruminate in your own mind.
And it’s really very unpleasant, isn’t it? That’s what gives you some measure of what hell might be like. Okay. Anyway, we’re going to after the break we’re going to do it with Jamyang. We’ll do an exercise and begin to look at in terms of your own experience, in terms of advantages and disadvantages.
This is extremely important, I think. There are many different attitudes that we’re going to be looking at and working with anger. And one of the primary ones, think, of the initial steps is to, we have to recalibrate our, and what I mean is, you know, we have, you know, when somebody says something, some situation arises, we have lots of possibilities of ways of reacting. There’s one which is most, which we resort to primarily or secondarily or depending upon the conditions, depending on what we can get away with, the repercussions, the context. And so we can if we begin to see that looking at the disadvantages of any particular afflictive emotion and the advantage, but we also have to look at the advantages because at some level we think there’s some payoff to anger or we wouldn’t have kept that as a habit, as part of our repertoire, as part of our toolkit at present.
We wouldn’t have left it out to it. We would have dropped it somewhere along the line. But why do we keep up picking it up? Because we haven’t examined it. We just assume.
Alan, what was your question on the sleep? The riding in memory, like if you believe you have dropped it off, why does it keep on coming? So I think, you know, it’s like it’s like a duck’s back, it doesn’t soak in unless we keep examining it. How many times do we keep trying to have the same expectations? It’s like this woman who went to every year she complained that her husband never bought her a Christmas present, and she got really upset every year.
It’s been going on for forty years. At a certain point Well, yeah, that’s a real possibility. But why does she keep putting herself through that, surely? At a certain point, she has to realize that her husband’s not going to buy her a present. And then if she accept that fact, then all of this suffering is self-inflicted.
So she’s not learning from her past experience, and we don’t learn very well sometimes unless we really examine, investigate. I don’t mean to take the ten steps back, but you’re saying that you drop that anger and then it keeps on coming back. It’s a habit. Just habit? Can it not lead into the positive?
Anger? Not as we’ve defined it. The intention of harm. Yeah? Yeah.
That is always detrimental to both oneself and to others. But you have to find that out for you. Have to see that for yourself. That’s like dogma at the moment. It doesn’t seep in.
Have to But it would also be that maybe you keep picking it up simply because you don’t have