Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 82-minute final session of a seven-week course on karma, Venerable Thubten Dondrub provides an exhaustive exploration of how to cultivate patience as the primary antidote to anger. He begins by establishing that patience is not suppression but rather a complete rewiring of how we think about ourselves, others, and situations, developed through repeated analytical meditation. He then systematically dismantles the logic of anger—showing how it destroys happiness both immediately and karmically, obscures the mind, and prevents spiritual practice—before presenting concrete methods for cultivating patience: reflecting on anger’s harmfulness to oneself, recognizing that enemies are suffering people controlled by delusion, and understanding that we ourselves created the cause to meet those who upset us. Dondrub draws extensively on Śāntideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life, particularly the famous analogy of leather shoe-soles versus covering the earth, and addresses the question of wrathful compassion in advanced practice. He concludes by encouraging students to view all phenomena—from personal relationships to global politics—as expressions of the law of cause and effect, and announces an upcoming retreat on Samsāra and Nirvāṇa. This talk is suited to practitioners with some Buddhist background seeking practical methods to work with one of the mind’s most destructive patterns.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2013 04 09 Week 7.mp3
UUID: 9aac1d82-a1c2-4e44-8489-71d35e1b85bf
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB All about Karma (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2013-04-09
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 82.2 minutes
Words: ~9,525
Pop up in our mind. We have the potential for it because we have the potential for every good, you know, state. We but, unfortunately, we have the potential for every negative one. And, unfortunately, because we’ve got ignorance and self-cherishing, we don’t no one has to learn how to be angry. Right?
There are no classes even in primary school or at university about how to get angry. No one knows how to be patient. Properly patient. One can repress one’s anger temporarily and smile. I don’t you know, like at the boss when he tells you off or fires you. And when you for when he fires you, you can get angry.
But if you want to hold your job and someone at work, you know, gives you a hard time, then you smile and, yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes. Yes. That’s not patience.
That’s just suppressed anger. That’s just the self-cherishing thought, you know, operating, fitting in. So and patience is so patience is something that has to be cultivated. And basically, like all the antidotes, it and all the good qualities too, it is cultivated by well, patience is basically cultivated by reflecting, meditating, doing analytical meditation over and over again because it just doing it one time, two, three times is not enough.
One has to keep going at it regularly, especially if one’s a very angry person. One has to work on these things a lot. One has to reflect on how harmful anger is To realize, to, you know, to really get in your guts the the understanding, not just an intellectual understanding, but this realization, this felt experience that anger is totally destructive. There isn’t anything good about anger. Psychiatrists or psychologists or whatever in the past argued that it was essential to express anger otherwise if you repressed it and didn’t express it then this would lead to all sorts of psychological problems.
But some recent experiments, scientific experiments have been done where people have been encouraged to express their anger. And guess what? They’ve they’ve discovered that people who’ve been encouraged to express their anger get angrier and angrier. The Buddha could have told the scientists that two and a half thousand years ago. It it just doesn’t help.
But but also in again, one has to understand that patience has nothing to do with repressing anger. It is quite the opposite. As I’ve I think I’ve anyway, anger when you study wisdom, this may the wisdom teachings about emptiness and dependent arising, this may make more sense, but some of you may have studied this already. But anger, like everything else, doesn’t truly exist. It isn’t a separate independent independent entity.
It is something that arises depending on many factors, such as just in a general way because we have a particular view of ourself and and particularly at a particular point of time in a particular situation and because of a relationship with someone else and one’s particular concept of that person and all sorts of other things, one’s attachment, one’s pride, jealousy, fears, worries, a whole lot of thoughts and perceptions and conceptions going on bubbling in the mind. Depending on all of that, you have anger. It’s not a separate thing. It is what is labeled on all of that stuff. And so if you have all of that stuff going on, you know, he he, that creep said that, that, that to me.
Me. I am the most important special person in the world. No one can say that to me, and he said it. He. He’s nobody.
He said that to me. You know? You think all of that, and that is anger. And what is interesting, you are not an angry person. There isn’t this nice person who suddenly got some anger on them.
You are a different person. You are a completely different person, Or maybe not completely different. But before the anger rose, you are this nice, peaceful person, charming, sweet, lovable. And then wham, you are someone else. Anyway, so while that is going on, there is anger, and then you can repress that.
You can hide it in various ways from other people. One can even hide the anger from oneself up to an extent, just to some extent, depending on how angry it is. Because you can say, oh, I’m not really angry. I’m just upset. I’m a little bothered.
Yeah. I’m a teensy bit annoyed. You know? One could you know? But, actually, one’s furious.
You know? So one can repress it. But if that’s all going on, you know, that just squashing it doesn’t stop any of that. It may actually make it more horrible. Right?
So this is what patience is not that. It’s it’s got nothing to do with that. Patience is basically one has to here’s anger. You know? You have all this group, a nexus.
Yeah? A what is it? A matrix. How about that? A matrix of rubbish thoughts, wrong thoughts going on which generate anger.
And what one has to do is cultivate a whole matrix of other ways of thinking about oneself, others, and everything else. And and on top of that way of thinking, that is patience. So then you have these two in your mind, but only one can be in your mind at the one time. So one has to win either the anger or the patience. So you have that.
So if the if you’ve got the anger and all these nice thoughts, correct thoughts come along and attack that, then no anger, patience. I hope you understood all that. That’s the general idea. So all of that, one has to cultivate that. One has to consciously do analytical meditation to generate.
It’s not enough just to simply say, oh, I’m angry or anger is bad. You know, that doesn’t work. It works maybe a teensy bit, but it doesn’t really work, especially if one’s really angry. One has to feel, you know, that it is. It’s not just saying it’s angry.
One has to know it’s angry. Oops. Sorry. One has to know that anger is destructive. And, again, know not just in, oh, you know, like, reading it.
You have to know it. You have to experience it. So the more one does cultivates that, then you have patience. And as I said, it basically comes from seeing all the faults. So One way of looking at patience is again in many ways, what it is or what it involves certainly is it is having compassion for oneself.
If you have compassion for yourself, you won’t get angry because compassion is the mind not wanting suffering. Alright? So if you really have that and you understand that my anger is actually destroying all my happiness, not only just now, but it’s gonna bring a lot more suffering sorry. It’s destroying all my happiness, and it’s gonna bring me a lot more suffering in the future. Then if one has, you know, that mixture of courage and compassion, one won’t get angry.
So this is a huge topic of how to cultivate patience. I’m just going to say a few points, something hopefully useful important ones. But one can cultivate compassion, sorry, patience from reflecting on how it’s harmful to from the point of view of oneself, particularly how harmful it is. But also one can cultivate patience from the point of view of the so called enemy. Maybe just go back a little bit.
In cultivating, there are three kinds of patience or more strictly speaking is only one state of there’s only one patience, but patience can have three general objects in it from a Buddhist point of view. One object of patience is sentient beings, being patient with difficult people, dogs, cats, Martians if they invade or something like that. So being patient with other sentient beings. Another kind of patient but it’s the same thing, but the object is different is being patient with one’s own failings, one’s own disturbing thoughts, you know, etcetera, etcetera. One’s own sickness, one’s own suffering, you know, inner suffering, one’s own weaknesses and, you know, that.
We need to be patient with all of that. And then the the ultimately, the most from a Dharma point of view, ultimately, the most important type of patience or object of patience is developing the patience to practice the Dharma because practicing the Dharma is difficult. And if we don’t have the patience to do it, we won’t. And if we don’t, we won’t end suffering. And especially, won’t be able to end the suffering of others.
That’s why I think I said this last week. I’m sure about that one of the amazing things my teacher once said is the difference between a Bodhisattva. And asked, what is the difference? He said a bodhisattva has incredible courage A bodhisattva has incredible courage to bear suffering but is very frightened to create the cause. Whereas we can’t bear suffering.
We have no courage, patience to bear suffering, but we’re we’re very brave in creating the causes for it. But a bodhisattva is someone who is willing to bear suffering and difficulties from people, from within themselves, and especially in the difficulties of practicing Dharma because they want to benefit others and they don’t want to harm them. So developing patience right now, we especially need patience develop it develop patience in relation to other people. But by training in that, it helps us be patient with our own difficulties and problems and weaknesses and so on. And that is training for the for being able to bear the difficulties of Dharma practice.
And, of course, the more we can be patient with our own failings, we can be patient with other people. If we’re hard on ourselves, we will be hard on other people. But also if we if we’re tolerant of a kind more kind, more patient with other people, we can learn to be kind to ourselves, which is incredibly important. Because in recognizing our faults, it’s not we in order to eliminate our faults, our delusions, we have to admit we’ve got them. But that doesn’t mean that doesn’t imply from a Buddhist point of view that we’re saying, I am a terrible person because I have these faults.
It’s just just it’s what it is. We we all have them. We’re all in saṃsāra, so we all have faults. And we will have the potential for every kind of negativity. And in one sense, that’s okay.
We don’t have to beat ourselves up about it. We don’t have to be happy about it, but we don’t have to beat ourselves up about it. We need to and we actually because of it, we need to be kind to ourselves and patient with ourselves. So what we have to do is firstly, I’ll just go through some points, see the the disadvantages of anger, all the faults. So even from a worldly point of view, there are many faults of anger.
Firstly, the obvious one is, you know, when we get angry, we lash out and harm others. Right? So there’s that point in why we should avoid anger. Maybe maybe I should say something else. When we’re angry, like all the delusions, every delusion like, the fundamental delusion is ignorance, which creates a false appearance of things as being inherently existent.
I’m not gonna explain that anymore tonight, but let just let leave it. It creates it puts a layer on things which is there not there. It creates the, you know, the realistic appearance that things exist inherently. So then what attachment does on top of that, it creates an appearance which is also false, which isn’t there, that this nice thing is nicer than it appears, more wonderful than it is. Whereas anger, when when when we’re looking when we’re experiencing things through anger, things look worse than they are.
We project onto something, a person, a situation, etcetera, or the Dharma Dharma practice, that it’s far worse, far more difficult, horrible, and black than it is. So one thing to try to understand is one of the really important psychological insights about anger is why we get angry. I’m just talking about how to practice patience with people. But, anyway, is that someone says boo to us, and because of our conception of ourselves and everything, you know, that shouldn’t happen, and we get we get upset. If we didn’t have that conception about who I am and how I should be treated, etcetera, etcetera, then someone saying boo to us wouldn’t bother us at all. But because we have a particular and it’s usually probably totally unconscious conception, not it’s not conscious.
In some cases, it can be, but it’s just, you know, an unconscious conception about who I am, how important I am, how I should be treated, what should happen to me, that the whole world exists for my benefit. Because we all go around having that, really. It’s very embarrassing to say, but we all live our life thinking that we are the center of the universe and the world mainly exists for us. No one else, me. It should fit what I want.
We all have that mind to some extent. Yes. We do. It’s easy to discover it when anything goes wrong because nothing should go wrong in our world. Right?
Nothing. That’s not you know, anyway, oh, no. I’m getting carried away. I haven’t even got I need to be patient. You need to be patient with me.
I have so much to say. So so I get unhappy because of what this person said, because it’s not what I want to hear. And then I blame that that person. This unpleasant feeling has an has arisen. And I blame you for that.
But, actually, you didn’t make me unhappy. The unhappiness is created by my mind by thinking, oh, these words are bad. You know? I’m just putting it in a very primitive way. Right?
If if if if someone said those words to someone else, especially someone I didn’t like, that behavior wouldn’t upset me. But it’s directed to me, and I get upset upset. So it’s actually the way I have interpreted all of interpreted the person, their behavior, the words, the whole thing. My mind interpreting that and interpreting me, who I am, etcetera, all of that makes me unhappy. But I say, you did that.
You somehow, we kind of feel that this person, the enemy, has implanted this pain in me, shot me with pain. And that that makes you really angry. But they didn’t do anything. They didn’t make us angry. We did.
There’s a famous story. I’ve already told it once here, probably not in this class. But, anyway, once upon a time, there was a a a monk, a Zen monk in Japan who was very handsome. And this lady fell in love with him, but he wasn’t because he was a good monk, wasn’t interested. Anyway oh, no.
Forget that. Before that, everyone praised him and he just said, yeah, how wonderful he was. And he said, uh-huh. He would just say, uh-huh. Wasn’t bothered one way or another.
Then this lady got pregnant, accused the monk of being the father. Everyone turned against him, stopped giving him food. And they said how terrible he was. And he just said, uh-huh. Then many, many years later, the woman developed great regret for all the suffering, the for lying and causing so much suffering to this good monk.
She confessed to all the people that he wasn’t the father of the baby, and they all went back to him and apologized and said, oh, what a wonderful monk you are. And he said, uh-huh. So all the insults didn’t up upset him because he didn’t have a particular concept. He wasn’t grasping at a particular concept that he should be treated in a particular way by people because he was a monk or this or that. So because he didn’t have those concepts, when people insulted him, didn’t bother him.
And when they praised him, didn’t bother him. It’s all dependent on our mind. So just just going back from a even from a worldly point of view, controlled by anger, we do all sorts of negative things that are harmful to others, but also they harm us because we get a bad reputation. And also we do things that we regret and feel guilt about and that can have repercussions for the rest of our life. And, of course, we may end up doing seriously harmful illegal things because of anger, and then all sorts of suffering come.
So even from a worldly point of view, anger is is a disaster. And, of course, someone supposedly harms us, so we retaliate. But that person has family and friends. So not only we’ve made one in a way, we’ve made many enemies. And, you know, that’s how wars and conflicts go on for generations and generations.
So even from a worldly point of view, anger is a disaster. It doesn’t solve any problem. It just creates more. And even if you think about it, what anger does, you know, it does that. It shakes the mind.
And when the mind is like anger is misperceiving the situation and and the anger agitating the mind makes the mind very unclear. So especially when one is in a really dangerous situation being threatened actually, really physically, one’s life being threatened by others, anger is the the worst response because it does that. Because if one is in really a life threatening situation, what one needs is to have a very calm, clear mind to work out how to get out of the situation safely. So anger doesn’t help in those situations. One one can be led to do do even more stupid, harmful things.
So even from a worldly point of view, it doesn’t have any benefit. I mean, of there seems to be one I have to admit, one worldly benefit that people say is that when you get angry about things, it gives you energy to do stuff, you know, to protest about injustice. But, actually, if you then look at the from a dharma point of view, anger is a total, total disaster. Because anger arises because of a wrong concept of oneself. It comes from ignorance and self-cherishing.
And and it’s it’s completely mis misperceived what is actually happening. As I said, the anger doesn’t come the pain that we feel, which is which is anger. Anger is painful. Right? If you check when you’re angry, just check the experience.
It is physically and mentally painful. You know, we turn red, sweaty. It’s all extremely uncomfortable. Of course, medical science is discovering that it creates lots of sickness, getting angry. The whole theory that it you know, there’s there’s a lot of relationship between with cancer or some kinds of cancer.
I don’t know how true all of that is, but definitely there seems to be some correlation between because it you know, when you get angry, your whole nervous system is shaking. Like, it’s just berserk. So this is not good for your health. Your meant your apart from your mental health, your physical health. But anger is a reflection of ignorance and and and self-cherishing.
So it is painful and so the result has to be of the same nature as the cause. If we do something out of anger, then the result can’t bring happiness. It’s just impossible according to the law of cause and effect. Know? Put putting this on a block of ice isn’t going to make this hot.
It’ll make it cold. That’s inescapable. So, you know, something motivated by anger will never bring any kind of happiness. It will never bring any kind of good result. You know, there are people who get upset about people wearing furs and animal skins and whatever.
So they go around screaming, getting very angry about it, or the live sheep trade. I’m also against all of these things, but there’s no point getting angry about it. You know? Screaming and yelling and throwing paint on on people who’ve wearing a fur coat. You know?
This is really you know? Or people getting angry about other people who have done negative things. Why did they do negative things? Because they were angry. So someone’s angry because someone’s angry.
You know? One anger is virtuous and the other one’s not. You know? It’s it’s in anyway. But the basic point is that anger is painful so the effect has to be painful.
And if one and we we the Buddha taught that because this is what he perceived that oh, I haven’t got anywhere in this topic. That the the when the karmic result ripens, the result is far far greater. Far far, you know, greater. In this case, the suffering is far far worse than the energy that went into it. So the algebra of anger is completely insane that we, you know, something unpleasant is happening and what we how we try and stop that is with anger, know, because anger does give us energy.
So that that’s why we think it’s good. It gives us an energy to protect ourselves and whatever. But there’s, you know, x amount of suffering coming towards us. We get angry to block it, to stop it. That generates a negative imprint, which if not purified, results in, like, ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million x’s of suffering.
We try to stop one x of suffering, and we create the cause for a hundred x’s of suffering. It’s just illogical. It’s like having a a small headache, so you stop it by know, getting a sledgehammer and hitting your head with ten times with a sledgehammer. Oh, I don’t have a headache anymore because I don’t have a head. I’m dead.
But it’s worse. I mean, that you you laugh because that sounds really stupid, but to get angry, to stop. This is what the Buddha is saying. To get angry I mean, we yes. To get angry, to stop some thing in this life is insane.
It’s totally illogical. It just doesn’t work. I mean, it may work in the sense that it stops the person doing the thing, but at the expense, once put this horrendous imprint in the mind, that’s gonna produce far more suffering in the future. And just to make, you know, the extreme case, and then I’ll stop temporarily. In the very worst situation, usually, get angry just because people, you know, bother us or say something rude or, you know, blah blah blah to us.
But there can be situations where someone is going to kill us, not just threatening to kill us, but they are actually we know they are going to kill us. So this looks like a situation where we’re justified in being angry, especially because we’re if we’re totally innocent, and we’re gonna be killed brutally by someone. But, actually, this is the time when we are least justified in getting angry because this person we are going to die. Our mind this person is going to separate our mind from our body. And that is exactly the time when the mind needs to be in a virtuous state to get a good rebirth.
So we do not wanna be angry when someone’s killing us or torturing us. We want to be calm and clear, full of light and love. Very difficult, but we we don’t wanna be angry. Of course, there’s a no. Just one more thing.
I’ll stop. To to put this in an even deeper context is, you know, on top of all of those things I’ve said, why we shouldn’t get angry with this person, you know, that there’s the worldly reasons, but also the the karmic reason that this is actually producing more suffering than we’re trying to stop. We have to ask ourselves, why why am I in this situation where there is a person who doesn’t like me and who’s saying, you know, either verbally threatening me, trying to give me a bad time, or actually wanting to harm me or even killing kill me. And the answer is, guess what? I created the cause.
I created the cause to have this person there in my life. Remember the quote or you have it. Some some people disagreed with it or one person at least did, but I think it’s terrific from that book by the English writer whose name’s gone, The Four Gated City where the BAM drops in your life. You can’t have a bomb dropping in your life and saying, this has got nothing to do with me. Doris Lessing.
Yes. If someone comes into your world who insults you and gives you a hard time, you can’t say, this has got nothing to do with me. Or for example, people who’ve been thrown in jail someone was just recently, yesterday or the day before, released from jail, having been in jail for forty two years for a murder they didn’t commit. He was completely innocent in this life. But, karmically, he must have created the cause to have such an experience.
So to meet the so called enemy, the enemy is anyone who upsets us even for five seconds. It can be your husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, anybody, mom or dad, or the conventional idea of the enemy, to have the enemy in one’s world, even for a short time, we created the cause. Couldn’t be any other way. Nothing just happens. Everything good and bad we experience is an effect that has a cause.
So I created the cause to have this person yell at me, so why get angry? Because I created the cause in the first place. Which doesn’t mean, of course I have to mention this before we break up. You know, get really angry with me. Many people think that practicing what one one what one is being told in practicing patience is one shouldn’t try and protect oneself from harm.
It doesn’t mean that. Of course, one should do worldly, ordinary things to avoid being harmed. But what the Buddha is saying is in avoiding harm, don’t do it out of anger. Because that’s not avoiding harm. It’s creating far more harm than one is trying to avoid.
And I’ll conclude with this point or I’ll conclude this part with this point. One of the things my teacher said once upon a time is that just take a very extreme example. If somehow someone or a group of people dropped every atomic bomb in the world on top of you, dropped every poisonous snake on the world on top of you, released every kind of poisonous gas on top of you in order to kill you, All they can do is kill you. That’s all they can do. They can kill you.
One will die. No matter what an enemy or every enemy in the universe does to you, they can’t put us in the lower realms. The only person who can put us in the lower realms of suffering is ourself, and the person who does that is the angry person. Only the angry me can put me in the lower realms. No enemy can do that no matter what they do.
No matter how much they torture you, they can’t put you in the lower realms. One’s mind puts us our own mind puts us there. And we don’t have to I mean, it’s extremely difficult not to, but we don’t have to get angry. There’s no obligation, especially when we start to realize there is an alternative of being patient. Just just what the a few years ago when I was in Sicily in yeah.
I had the good fortune to meet this monk. I’ve I’ve forgotten his name now, but he’s written a book about his life in a Chinese prison camp because he when he was eighteen years old, said freedom for he was a monk. He said stood up and said freedom to for Tibet. He was arrested and taken away to a concentration camp in Tibet or China and tortured for many years, you know, on and off. And he says he has no hatred whatsoever for any of the people who tortured him.
And he means it. He’s incredibly sweet, kind, loving man. Many people, of course, who have been tortured, you know, go completely crazy and totally understandable. But this man who’s not a lama, you know, highly realized being just an ordinary bloke, you know, completely calm, stable mind. So it is possible.
He, know, he had a cattle prod stuck in his mouth so that he said blood poured from all the orifices of his body, and he lost all sense of taste. That was done regularly to him apparently. But he didn’t get angry because he realized it was his karma. So patience is really a wonderful thing. More about it after the break.
The arise there’s some real wisdom energy in the mind to counteract it, to undermine that anger. And the more we cultivate patience, the more quickly that patience will arise, the stronger it will be. So anyway, another point to so one basic thing I I made many points, but they’re all about one basic point is that the the great harm of anger is that we use it to try and stop some suffering, but the suffering of getting anger the the karmic result of getting angry, that suffering is far greater than the suffering we’re trying to avoid. So that it’s illogical. It’s just crazy to to be angry, to use anger as the way to deal with suffering.
That’s one thing. Another thing is so anger is actually just creating the cause for more suffering. Another thing to understand and reflect on is that every time we get angry, we not only put these negative imprints in our mind that bring more suffering in the future, but our anger destroys the positive imprints in our mind which are the source of happiness. So that’s you know? So it destroys the positive imprints which result in worldly happiness while we’re in Samsāra.
But what’s even worse, the the positive imprints, the merit we’ve generated so with so much difficulty that could be the basis of gaining realizations that will help us achieve liberation, even enlightenment, that gets wiped out when we get angry. And the the more angry, the more more karmic imprints are wiped out. So that is a tote a a a disaster. And there’s something worse. And in in some ways, it’s the worst thing of all, especially from a dharma a Mahāyāna point of view, which is and I think I’ve mentioned this before, but is that the karmic imprint the negative karmic imprints before they ripen as great suffering, for example, throwing us into the lower realms, those karmic imprints right now are obscuring our mind.
And as I’ve said, with an obscured mind, it’s very difficult to meet the Dharma. And even if we meet it with an obscured mind, it’s difficult to understand it. Even if we understand it with an obscured mind, it’s difficult to practice it. And even if we practice it with an obscured mind, it’s difficult to gain any result for ourself, for others. So in many ways, that is the worst result that the even before the even before the karmic imprints ripen, they’re obscuring our mind.
And so and there’s two aspects to that. The obscured mind makes it difficult to engage in virtue of any kind. Oh, sorry. Yeah. So I mangled things up together.
The with the the obscured mind makes it very difficult to practice Dharma in general. But oh, yeah. No. That’s right. Yeah.
Sorry. Please be patient with me. The more obscured our mind is, the more difficult it is to to do anything virtuous or even want to do anything virtuous, let alone practice Dharma. And the more obscured our mind is, the more our mind goes in a negative direction so that we create the cause for even more suffering. The less obscured our mind is, the the more energy we have to do virtuous things.
And the the and our interest in doing and wanting to do negative things gets less and less. Because the nature of our mind wants happiness. It doesn’t want to engage in suffering. So if but the obscured mind does. So if if if the mind is less obscured, it it it naturally goes to some extent in a positive direction and isn’t interested in in, you know, meaningless stuff and negative things.
So anyway, these are some of the main things to think about over and over to cultivate patience from the point of view of oneself. The and another way or another aspect, another dimension of cultivating patience is from the point of view of the person who is supposedly making me angry. So as I said, one way is to as I’ve already explained, to realize actually the enemy isn’t making me angry. They’re the condition, what they what they’re saying or doing or even their appearance. You know, we can look at some people and get upset.
We we don’t like the way they look. You know? Really. So so they are the cause in the sense they are a secondary cause which is called a condition. They are the condition to make us angry, but the anger is actually the product of our own wrong, false way of thinking.
But, also, we can be we can develop patience by reflecting on the person who apparently is causing the harm, by starting to realize, to understand that no person who is experiencing peace and contentment and well-being knows person in that state of mind causes suffering to others. No. They they don’t go around, you know, I mean, in a something in a completely accidental way they may, but no person in a happy state of mind wants you know, will want to cause harm to another person. In other words, someone if someone is harming me, it’s because they’re unhappy. They are suffering.
It’s it’s it’s it’s proof that they are suffering. So when a friend is suffering, we feel compassion for them. When a stranger is suffering, we can feel compassion for them. If an enemy is suffering, we should be able to feel compassion for them. Because that’s the only valid response to suffering is compassion.
So what we have to allow ourselves to do is see, why we get angry and why the anger stays or even increases is because we focus on me. You know? This person, you know, this person said this to me, and now I am feeling this. And we focus on that, and it just increases the the discomfort and the can’t bear this. You know?
It becomes unbearable, and that’s what anger is. It’s where we can’t bear, we can’t support in our mind something. So by focusing on all that me, me, me, we just worsen it. Whereas if we can change the focus on I am upset to actually why I’m upset is because of what this person said, but what they said or did is because they’re suffering. And by engaging in a negative action towards me, they’ve created the cause for more suffering.
So if one can change the focus from me to the person, one can begin to be patient. Because that is patient because simply by thinking of that person and not in a in a, like, in a completely distant way, but really trying to, you know, see that this person is suffering. So once you’re seeing that and feeling that, allowing yourself, then one’s anger won’t persist. So it will it should reduce to some extent. And the more we can train ourselves to do that, the anger will dissipate.
When we can really see and feel that this person is really suffering and their negative behavior is causing them even more suffering. And there is a terrific verse in Śāntideva. If you want to really get into developing patience, there is chapter six. Is it chapter six or chapter five of Śāntideva’s book called The Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life. So that is the chapter on patience.
This is the ultimate chapter presentation of how to practice patience. But in there, there are about a hundred or so verses on how to practice patience, how to think, how to counteract all the arguments we give ourselves to justify being angry. Anyway, in there, at one point, he says if he says it very concisely. I’m gonna take a while as usual to explain it. He said he makes this wonderful point that if someone hits you on the head, you don’t get angry with a stick.
You get angry with the person. Why? Because even though it is actually the stick that is causing the pain, You don’t get angry with the stick, which is the direct cause of the pain. You get angry with the person because the stick has no intention to hurt you. What who has the intention is the person holding the stick.
So that’s why we get angry that the actual the person isn’t actually causing the harm. It’s the stick. But we get angry with the person because we know it’s the person holding the stick who has the intention. So Śāntideva says, well, if you’re smart enough to work that out, you should be smart enough to make another step and realize that you shouldn’t get angry with the person holding the stick because they had to, like the stick, have no control over their actions. They are being held by anger.
So if you’re gonna get angry with anything, get angry with that person’s anger, not the person. That is really terrific. Well, you don’t get angry with a stick. You get angry with a person, but you shouldn’t get angry with this person because they are being held by the anger just like the person holds the stick. They’re out of control.
Just like when we’re angry, we are out we’ve lost control. We are we we have no control over ourself when we’re angry. And the person who is harming us is under the control of anger or some other disturbing thought. So they’re suffering out of control and creating lots of more suffering for themselves in the future. So that’s really sad.
So there’s many, many, many more arguments, but these are some of the main ones to reflect on. Oh, yes. Another general one is oh, what? Why do we get angry in the first place? Yeah.
Śāntideva points out that the fuel the thing that fuels our anger well, actually, I’ve just explained it, is mental unhappiness. Why do do we ourselves get angry when when something goes wrong is because we’re already unhappy, just like I said with the enemy. When when we are dissatisfied, the more dissatisfied we are, the the less mental peace we have, the easier it is to get angry. So the best solution, actually, the general solution to to not getting angry is to be peaceful, to have basic contentment in the in one’s mind, in one’s life. And guess how you get that, folks?
Practice Buddhadharma. This teaching is is provided to you by the Buddhadharma. So here is the advertisement. If you want to be happy, if you want to have basic peace and contentment, practice the Dharma. And what is Dharma practice?
It comes down to basically taking care of your mind. If we if we generally take care of our mind, don’t let our negative thoughts and feelings run rampant, and we cultivate our good qualities rather than relying on external stuff, there will develop more and more basic peace and contentment in the mind. And then we won’t get so angry. Because if you check if you check your own experience, if you look back at every time you got angry with anyone or anything, including yourself, from the smallest kind of irritation to, like, full blown explosive anger, what underlies it is attachment. There is some attachment going on.
Right? Just a simple example. I always give the same boring simple examples because I have this if if you you’re you for example, you’ve just arrived home. You’re just at the door and the telephone rings, and you want to get in to answer the phone because you you maybe have an idea who’s ringing and it’s important call or something, and you don’t wanna miss this call. And you try to open, but you get speedy and rush, and you can’t get the key in the door, and it won’t open.
And you get angry, or you get annoyed because you can’t open the key to the door. And why are you angry? Because one is attached to opening the door quickly. Simple as that. And attached to answering the telephone call.
And attached to knowing what the telephone call is about. And attached to me, you know, me because I’m getting a telephone call, so I’m important. If we didn’t have those attachments, we wouldn’t have been upset. I don’t know. Maybe we do.
Simplicity. I don’t know. Is it? Maybe. But one can get attached to many, many things, but I’m just saying attachment is the basis of getting because frustrated attachment means anger.
Right? And attachment breeds discontent. Attachment is wanting stuff and holding on to it, desire and attachment. Whereas if we have this basic contentment then things won’t bother us so much. So that’s that’s that’s the main key to practicing patience.
But on top of that, when it arises, we need to counteract it with this quality of patience, is cultivated by reflecting on all the harm that comes to oneself and others now and in the future. And also in Śāntideva’s, probably many of you have heard this, he he makes this this wonderful I’ll just actually read the quote and explain it brief briefly. Śāntideva says, Unruly beings are as unlimited as space. They cannot possibly all be overcome. However, if I overcome thoughts of anger alone, this will be equivalent to vanquishing all foes.
Where would I possibly find enough leather with which to cover the surface of the earth? Yet wearing leather just on the soles of my shoes is equivalent to covering the earth with it. So the earth is covered with all sorts of sharp rocks, broken glass, brambles, thorny things, insects, spiky insects. So one solution would be to cover so you could walk all over the earth is to cover the whole earth with leather, but that’s impossible. But if you just put a little bit of leather on each sole of your shoe, foot, you can go anywhere.
Same way, the the world is full of difficult people, including myself. But if we have patience, then there aren’t any enemies. Because the very interesting thing is, you know, an enemy doesn’t inherently exist. Someone can be saying something unpleasant, doing something unpleasant, and you recognize this is unpleasant. But it’s you can bear it.
It’s okay. I don’t like it, but I can cope. But they keep doing it, and they keep doing it. And at some point, it becomes unbearable, and we we in our mentally, we label it unbearable, and we label that person the enemy. And as soon as we label the person an enemy and only when we label them an enemy is they become an enemy.
But when you have that leather on your mind, when you have patience, you don’t label them enemy so you don’t get angry. You see suffering person. You either you you you have the choice, enemy or suffering person. If you label them enemy, they become enemy, and there’s anger. If you label them suffering per you have to and you can’t just say the words.
You have labeling means you see them that way. You experience them as enemy or one experiences them as suffering person. Was there a question there? Oh, good. You think thought you thought I’d get angry if you asked that question?
Okay. Okay, that’s it. Questions? Disagreements? You can disagree.
Can I clarify something? Righteous indignation. I think that’s a Christian term, but what we have you know, wrath. Like because in the tantric you’re in tantric practice, you have the the peaceful deities and then you have wrathful deities like this gentleman here with the six arms and flames coming all out of him. Yeah.
So there is such a thing as, yeah, righteous anger or or wrath wrath as a virtuous state of mind which is tie a type of compassion. But this is something very, very advanced. And it’s just basically, you know, there is gentle compassion where much of the time we we need a little pat on the head and told that we’re nice and lovable and we’re doing okay. So we get that from the the Buddhas and the Gurus to encourage us practice, but sometimes we need a kick up the bum. But but it’s done with compassion.
It’s not done out of anger. It’s done out of compassion. I mean, the main the most famous example is for those people who may have some familiarity is Milarepa and his guru, Marpa. And Marpa treated Milarepa really from an ordinary point of view, if you were just to look, he treated him really badly. He beat him up.
You know? Did all you know, gave him a horrible hard time, But he did it out of incredible compassion because he saw that by doing that, this would force Milarepa to purify his mind. Because Milarepa never lost his devotion to his Guru even though his Guru did what looked like all these horrible things to him, but he always understood from his side that his Guru was doing it out of compassion and the Guru was. But sometimes just being nice to people doesn’t work, so you have to yell at them. But the trouble is most people when they yell at people, they are actually angry.
Even like moms with their kids and, you know, they they their little junior is doing something that is naughty or dangerous and mom doesn’t want them to do it. But so there’s some love and compassion there. But also, because mom’s a human being, she loses bit of them and gets angry as well. But there’s a possibility that you can scream and yell and even beat someone up in a state of perfect love. But we shouldn’t pretend that we can do that yet.
That’s the big danger. I mean, Lama Yeshe could get really scary. Though the many of you may have heard of Lama Yeshe, and he has the reputation of being this big, cuddly bear. But he also had you know, he was sometimes quite a grizzly bear. When when when he once you became a close student, then but this is the nature of gurus.
I think I’ve said this before that first they attract you by being extremely sweet and nice. And once they know that you have some trust in them, then they rip you to shreds. I’m exaggerating. But their job is to destroy the ego, so they do all sorts of things to to, you know, press your buttons. And if you have if you’ve got the wrong guru, it’s because they’re nasty they’re a nasty, creepy person.
But if you’ve got the right guru pushing your buttons, it’s because they’re showing you your faults. So that’s very kind. And it requires a lot of skill and compassion to do it properly. A lot of smarts. A lot of smarts.
It’s it it it it the student understanding the dharma for a start, think, which is a bit of a catch twenty two because in order to understand the Dharma properly, you need a guru or to some extent. But but the more a person has has really understood the Buddha’s teachings, then you’ve got the basis to be able to judge whether a teacher is the real thing or not. Because there are, unfortunately, in the Buddhist tradition traditions, you know, phonies, creepy crawly phonies, very dangerous, crawly phony ones, Some very famous and many students, but they really I wouldn’t touch them with a ten foot pole. Very dangerous for one’s long term well-being. Sorry to say that.
But oh, because they’re not they’re not teaching the right things and they’re not teaching with the right motivation. And that that’s, you know, really damaging to the students. And almost, you know, all sorts of things happen. I mean, is maybe it’s getting off the topic, but, I mean, when I lived in Taiwan oh, sorry. This may when I live I lived in Taiwan for three years.
So I had some friends. I didn’t speak Chinese. I tried to learn and picked up a little bit of taxi driver Chinese. But some of I had a couple of Western friends there who spoke who were Buddhist and were really into the the Buddhist culture there and and knew a lot, and they spoke fluent Chinese. And they were telling me about some famous master there who had many I don’t know. Some monasteries and temples.
He had a huge lay following. And he put an ad there were many Buddhist magazines in Taiwan. And so he put an ad an advertisement in one of these magazines for a teacher at one of his monasteries and some of you anyway. And the qualification was that the teacher had to be at least a third level bodhisattva. Now if if any of you here have some knowledge of the Buddhadharma, then no bodhisattva goes around saying that I am a bodhisattva for a start.
And a third level bodhisattva is someone who has real directly realized emptiness and and beyond is on the third level of having a direct you know, is it as, you know, unbelievably highly highly highly highly highly highly highly realized being. And so he was advertising for third level bodhisattva to teach in his monastery. This indicates either this famous, you know, monk, teacher, master had no understanding of the Dharma was or he was a complete because if if his lower teachers were third level bodhisattvas, what is that implying about him? So this is really sleazy, totally sleazy. But he was very famous, huge following.
But he was a phony, total phony. Creepy phony. No. You can’t. You can’t.
That’s one of the problems. You can’t do very much about this because have people have a devotion to them, and that’s very dangerous to destroy people’s devotion even if they’re devoted to someone they shouldn’t be. It it’s very people losing their devotion is a really awful, awful thing that has lots of ramifications. And anyway, if someone has devotion to someone and you tell them the person you are devoted to is a phony, they won’t believe you. Anyway, we’ve got off the topic altogether.
karma. But that’s all also karma. Because what you discover is that many phony teachers have huge followings, very devoted huge followings. And this is the karma of creating the cause of having wrong views in the past so then you follow phony teachers? Believing this, terrific.
Whereas one if one creates the cause of developing devotion to the act to true teachings and true teachers, you create the cause to meet valid teachers in the future and always be guided by perfectly qualified teachers. But the karma of, like, disparaging good teachers, etcetera, etcetera, creates the cause to to meet phony ones and to be devoted, you know, totally devoted to the phony ones. That’s why you have, you know, this guy, what was it many years ago? Oh, I didn’t want to mention him. No.
No. No. The guy — Jonestown, yes, a long time ago if you’ve heard of that guy. Anyway, in conclusion, I think it’s extremely helpful to try and sometimes, you know, people following the Buddhist path tend to deal with karma in a very isolated way. But it’s really helpful and useful and interesting and illuminating to try and think about how everything in this world is an expression of the law of cause and effect.
Everything. The political system we have, the politicians we have, this is our karma to have. Well, yeah, to have them. That we’re in this world of global warming. This is our karma.
We created the cause for this. To see everything from this perspective, Everything has causes. Everything has causes. Alright. Okay.
That’s it, I think, for for this course. The course has the causes for the course have run out, except there is the retreat. So I hope there are some people coming to the retreat. If you still haven’t booked, book now to avoid disappointment. And oh.
So that’ll be this this Sunday starting at nine o’clock. The usual there’s usually a meditation from nine to ten that is in corp cleverly, very, very cleverly incorporated into this retreat. So so seamlessly incorporated. So so it goes from nine o’clock until three thirty. And Please if you can bring some nice plate of veggie food to share with everyone, that’s also a very nice thing to do.
It’s a very good karma to offer food to dharma practitioners. That’s a great thing to do. It’s very, good karma. Oh, so the next course is called Samsāra and nirvana. So this talks about all the depressing aspects of Samsāra but points out that there is nirvana.
We can achieve nirvana. How to do that? But to achieve to seek nirvana, we have to really know about Samsāra, which is our mind. Our mind controlled by delusion is Samsāra. Our mind free of karma and delusion is nirvana.
Okay. Oh, and just so I never Sasha found on YouTube, there’s a whole series of explanations about the Vajrasattva practice given by nuns of Sravasti Abbey? Yeah. There’s a actually, the lady who the woman the nun who started that is a friend of mine.
Her name is Thubten Chodron. So she’s an American nun. She was a disciple of Lama Yeshe. So she started a monastic center in America called called something Sravasti Abbey? Is that what it’s called?
Anyway, she puts lots of teachings on there and there’s some some teachings of explaining the Vajrasattva practice. So if you were to Google or whatever you do with YouTube Vajrasattva practice and Thubten Chodron. I think you you there’s quite a whole lot of them, isn’t there? So if you’d like to go into more detail about the Vajrasattva practice, check it out. That because that that’s she is a reliable teacher, and her students who are teaching there are okay, it seems, I think.
Yeah. So you might like to do a bit more research that way. But we will be doing the Vajrasattva practice on Sunday, going through that at least one time to give some experience. So thank you very much. So we’ve now completed a whole karmic amount of merit and so we can dedicate that, this to protect these positive imprints.
But more than that, we can sort of dedicate them or that these positive imprints when they ripen don’t ripen in just an ordinary way bring a few bubbles of pleasure in saṃsāra, but or you can dedicate them that way if you want to win the lottery or get a nice car or meet the boy or girl of your dreams or something. But better to dedicate it to achieving enlightenment as what we really want. Okay? But your choice. So this this is on page twelve.
Maybe because it’s the end of the course, I burst into Tibetan and you can join in if you like just just to also to become familiar with the tune if you’d want to. And also the English can be charted according to the Tibetan tune as well for the second prayer, the bodhicitta prayer. May the precious bodhicitta not yet born arise and grow. May that born have no decline but increase forevermore.