Anger

by Thich Nhat Hanh

According to the Buddha’s teachings, the most basic condition for happiness is freedom. Here we do not mean political freedom, but freedom from the mental formations of anger, despair, jealousy, and delusion.

To understand and transform anger, we must learn the practice of compassionate listening and using loving speech.

Listen with only one purpose: to allow the other person to express himself and find relief from his suffering. Keep compassion alive during the whole time of listening.

When we eat well, we can eat less. We need only half the amount of food that we eat every day. To eat well, we should chew our food about fifty times before we swallow. When we eat very slowly, and make the food in our mouth into a kind of liquid, we will absorb much more nutrition through our intestines. If we eat well, and chew our food carefully, we get more nutrition than if

When you get angry, go back to yourself, and take very good care of your anger. And when someone makes you suffer, go back and take care of your suffering, your anger. Do not say or do anything. Whatever you say or do in a state of anger may cause more damage in your relationship.

If your house is on fire, the most urgent thing to do is to go back and try to put out the fire, not to run after the person you believe to be the arsonist.

may help you to discover how many steps you can make comfortably during an in-breath and how many during an out-breath. As you breathe in, you can say “in,” and as you breathe out, you can say “out.” Then

it is very helpful to see yourself in moments when you are angry. It is a bell of mindfulness. When you see yourself like that, you are motivated to do something to change it. You know what to do to look more beautiful. You don’t need any cosmetics. You need only to breathe peacefully, calmly, and smile mindfully. If you can do that one or two times, you will look much better. Just look in the mirror, breathing in calmly, breathing out smiling, and you will feel relief.

Anger is a mental, psychological phenomenon, yet it is closely linked to biological and biochemical elements. Anger makes you tense your muscles, but when you know how to smile, you begin to relax and your anger will decrease. Smiling allows the energy of mindfulness to be born in you, helping you to embrace your anger.

You can transform the garbage of anger into the flower of compassion. Many of us can do this in just fifteen minutes. The secret is to continue the practice of mindful breathing, the practice of mindful walking, generating the energy of mindfulness in order to embrace your anger.

Embrace your anger with a lot of tenderness. Your anger is not your enemy, your anger is your baby. It’s like your stomach or your lungs. Every time you have some trouble in your lungs or your stomach, you don’t think of throwing them away. The same is true with your anger. You accept your anger because you know you can take care of it; you

can transform it into posit...

So the practice has two phases. The first phase is embracing and recognizing: “My dear anger, I know you are there, I am taking good care of you.” The second phase is to look deeply into the nature of your anger to see how it has come about.

This is exactly what you have to learn to do when anger begins to surface. You have to abandon everything that you are doing, because your most important task is to go back to yourself and take care of your baby, your anger. Nothing is more urgent than taking good care of your baby.

But by looking deeply, you may realize that the seed of anger in you is the main cause of your suffering. Many other people, confronted with the same situation, would not get angry like you.

When you suffer, you make people around you suffer. That’s very natural. This is why we have to learn how to handle our suffering, so we won’t

spread it everywhere.

The boy was also able to see that his father was a victim of the transmission of anger as well. His father might not have wanted to treat him like that, but he had done so because the habit energy in him was too strong. The

This faithfulness will inspire respect and confidence in the other party. And lastly, “Darling, I need your help.” This is a very strong statement, because usually when you’re angry, you have the tendency to say, “I don’t need you.”

Your capacity for loving another person depends entirely on your capacity for loving yourself, for taking care of yourself.

“Breathing in, I go back to my wounded child; breathing out, I will take good care of my wounded child.”

Punishing the other person is self-punishment. That is true in every circumstance.

Our practice is based on the insight of non-duality. Both our negative feelings and positive feelings are organic and belong to the same reality.

Since they are organic, you know that you can transform them and make good use of them.

Anger has roots in non-anger elements. It has roots in the way we live our daily life.

Remember that you have to tell him or her within twenty-four hours. The

Buddha said that a monk has the right to be angry, but not for more than one night. It’s not healthy to keep your anger inside for too long.

In Plum Village, we call this the practice of selective watering. If you get angry very easily, it is because your seed of anger has been watered frequently over many years.

You have allowed it to be watered. You have not signed a contract with the people around you, agreeing to water only the good seeds. You have not practiced protecting yourself. If you don’t protect yourself, you don’t

protect those you love. When we embrace anger and take good care of our anger, we obtain relief. We can look deeply into it and gain many insights. The first insight may be that the seed of anger in us has grown a little too big, and it is the main cause of our misery. As we begin to see this fact, we realize that the other ...

you may be quite sure that you are seeing the sun as it is in that moment, but a scientist will tell you that the image of the sun that you see is the image of the sun from eight minutes ago. Sunlight takes eight minutes to reach the earth from such a long distance.

because compassion is the real antidote for anger.

If you want to help correct her wrong perception, you have to wait until the moment is right. While listening, your only aim is to give her a chance to speak out and share what is in her heart. You don’t say anything. This Friday evening is entirely for her to speak.

You just listen. Then, perhaps a few days later, when she feels much better, you try to give her the information that she needs to correct her perception. “Darling, the other day you said something, but that is not really what happened. What happened is . . .” Use loving speech when you correct her. If necessary, ask a friend who knows what really happened to help the other person understand the true situation so that she can be freed from her wrong perceptions.

Even if you have clear evidence to convince someone that his anger is entirely based on a wrong perception, please don’t interfere right away. Like craving, jealousy, and all afflictions, anger needs time to die down. This is the case even after the other person realizes that he or she misunderstood the situation.

Patience is the mark of true love. A father has to be patient in order to show his love for his son or daughter. A

You must also be patient with yourself. The practice of embracing your anger takes time. But just five minutes of mindful breathing, mindful walking, and embracing your anger can be effective. If five minutes is not enough, take ten minutes, and if ten minutes is not enough, take fifteen minutes.

Every mental formation—anger, jealousy, despair, etc.—is sensitive to mindfulness the way all vegetation is sensitive to sunshine.

You will be in touch only with suffering, and you won’t have the opportunity to be in touch with other, positive elements. This will destroy your balance. Therefore, in your daily life, you have to practice so that you can be in touch with elements that do not constantly express suffering: the sky, the birds, the trees, the flowers, children—whatever is refreshing, healing, and

You have to play the role of a Great Being, someone who has so much happiness that she is able to rescue people from their suffering.

To understand ourselves, we must learn and practice the way of non-duality. We should not fight our anger, because anger is our self, a part of our self. Anger is of an organic nature, like love. We have to take good care of anger. And because it is an organic entity, an organic phenomenon, it is possible to transform it into another organic entity.

So don’t despise your anger. Don’t fight your anger, and don’t suppress your anger. Learn the tender way of taking care of your anger, and transform it into the energy of understanding and compassion.

Meditation is not a stupid act. Meditation is not just blindly following whatever the person next to you does. To meditate you have to be skillful and make good use of your intelligence.

In Buddhism, the practice of meditation should be the practice of embracing and transforming, not of fighting.

When you practice mindful breathing and embracing your anger, you are under the protection of the Buddha.

We are also like a tree. Our head is like the top of the tree during a tempest of a strong emotion, so we have to bring our attention down to the level of our navel.

In Buddhist psychology there are fifty-one mental formations. There are negative mental formations, like anger, craving, and jealousy, and there are positive mental formations, like mindfulness and equanimity.

Your intelligence, your knowledge, does not help you change your habit energy. Only the practice of recognizing, embracing, and transforming can help. That is why the Buddha advised us to practice mindful breathing to recognize and take care of our habit energy as soon as it manifests. If you are capable of embracing your habit energy with the energy of mindfulness, then you are safe, you are not going to make the same mistake again.

But if we know what is most important to us, what we most deeply want for our life, the decision-making will become easier, and we won’t have to suffer a lot.

“Why don’t you write a book on yourself ? Why don’t you invest one hundred percent of yourself into the practice of making yourself and the people around you happy? That is more important than writing a book on Thomas Merton and myself. Many books have been written on Thomas Merton already.”