Buddhist Influence on my Views of Anger

Harpboyak left a comment early this morning on my post suggesting my reaction to Aaron Selbig's righteous lack of compassion for Kohring was not the ideal path:

Gimme a break! Vic is a CRIMINAL who refuses to recognize the reality of his behavior. I agree that he needs rehabilitation, but it won't happen until he admits that what he did was WRONG.

Aaron, me, and everyone else is damned right to be angry and demand retribution from these criminals that violated the public trust and their oaths of office. They gave alway BILLIONS of our oil money to the oil companies!

I guess the three years I lived in Thailand rubbed off on me. Buddhists take a very different view of anger. They see it as weakness, as losing control of oneself. They get embarrassed for you if you lose your temper. I know this is hard for Americans to understand, but I found this story on a site on Buddhism that might help explain my view on this. The link goes to the site which has a lot more on the topic of anger.

A BAG OF NAILS

Once upon a time there was a little boy with a bad temper. His father gave him a bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, he should hammer a nail in the fence. The first day the boy had driven 37 nails into the fence. But gradually, the number of daily nails dwindled down. He discovered it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence.
Finally the first day came when the boy didn't lose his temper at all. He proudly told his father about it and the father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he was able to hold his temper. The days passed and the young boy was finally able to tell his father that all the nails were gone. The father took his son by the hand and led him to the fence.
"You have done well, my son, but look at the holes in the fence. The fence will never be the same. When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this one. You can put a knife in a man and draw it out, it won't matter how many times you say 'I'm sorry', the wound is still there."

But what about righteous anger? The site has something on that too (though probably not as powerful as the story.)

As His Holiness the Dalai Lama mentioned:

"When reason ends, then anger begins.
Therefore, anger is a sign of weakness."

Is anger or hatred ever justified? A direct answer from Allan Wallace in 'Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground up':

"'Righteous hatred' is in the same category as 'righteous cancer'or 'righteous tuberculosis'. All of them are absurd concepts.

This does not mean that one should never take action against aggression or injustice! Instead, one should try to develop an inner calmness and insight to deal with these situations in an appropriate way. We all know that anger and aggression give rise to anger and aggression. One could say that there are three ways to get rid of anger: kill the opponent, kill yourself or kill the anger - which one makes most sense to you?"

Buddhism doesn't have rules in the Western sense. Rather it has teachings that show people how to live a life that will, eventually, lead one to perfection that releases one from the cycle of rebirth, and to nirvana. It is up to the individual to adopt those teachings or not, because it is the individual's life that is affected.

In Aaron's case, the anger was multiplied by broadcasting it over the airwaves. I just was expressing my disappointment that this alternative radio station, in essence, wasn't so alternative. As the quote above says, "anger and aggression give rise to anger and aggression."
He's just doing what his opponents do with a different spin. But he continues the cycle.

Rev. Koun Franz of the Anchorage Zen Community

impressed me at the discussion after the reading of the War Prayer.

The comment that was most enlightening to me was from Rev Koun Franz in response to what a good Buddhist would do if he saw someone violently assaulting another. It would be ok to intervene, he said, if you did it for the right reason, which would be to help both people. If you intervened from moral superiority to punish the aggressor you would cause a short term benefit, but you would be perpetuating what the aggressor was doing. This helps me understand a story I heard the other day about a survivor of the Mi Lai massacre during the Vietnam war. Asked today what she thought about Americans coming to Mi Lai today, she said she was glad they came. What if it was one of the people who killed her family? That would be even better, because then I could forgive them.

Of course, it isn't this simple. We also get this advice

The late Tibetan teacher Chogyam Tryungpa Rinpoche often taught that five kleshas (in the Tibetan tradition, they are greed, hatred, delusion, pride, and jealousy) are in essence five wisdoms. The wisdom side of anger, for example, is discriminating awareness.

How can this be? Anger makes us sharp and quick to criticize, but anger also helps us see what's wrong. Our feelings and emotions are actually serving like intelligence agents, bringing in news from the field of our experience. We should not dismiss, ignore, or repress them.