Anger

by Thich Nhat Hanh

You have to do it tenderly, without violence. This is not an act of suppressing our anger. Mindfulness is you and anger is also you, so you shouldn’t transform yourself into a battlefield, one side fighting the other. You should not believe that mindfulness is good and correct, while anger is evil and wrong. You should not think like that. You only need to recognize that anger is a negative energy and that mindfulness is a positive one.

Both our negative feelings and positive feelings are organic and belong to the same reality.

Therefore, in the Buddhist tradition, meditation does not mean you transform yourself into a battlefield, with the good fighting the evil. This is very important. You may think that you have to combat evil and chase it out of your heart and mind. But this is wrong. The practice is to transform yourself.

You need the suffering, the afflictions in you. Since they are organic, you know that you can transform them and make good use of them.

Our method of practice should be non-violent. Non-violence can be born only from the insight of non-duality, of inter-being. This is the insight that everything is interconnected and nothing can exist by itself alone. Doing violence to others is doing violence to yourself.

once you have penetrated the reality of non-duality, you will smile at both the flower and garbage in you, you will embrace both.

When you have the insight of non-duality and inter-being, you take care of your body in the most non-violent way possible. You take care of your mental formations, including your anger, with non-violence. You take care of your brother, your sister, your father, your mother, your community, and your society, with utmost tenderness. No violence can be born from this kind of attitude. You won’t regard anyone as an enemy when you have penetrated the reality of inter-being.

Anger has roots in non-anger elements. It has roots in the way we live our daily life. If we take good care of everything in us, without discrimination, we prevent our negative energies from dominating. We reduce the strength of our negative seeds so that they won’t overwhelm us.

When anger manifests in us, we must recognize and accept that anger is there and that it needs to be tended to. At this moment we are advised not to say anything, not to do anything out of anger. We immediately return to ourselves and invite the energy of mindfulness to manifest also, in order to embrace, recognize, and take good care of our anger.

You may like to add something to your three sentences, to your peace note: “Let us sit down Friday evening and look deeply together.” Perhaps you say this on Monday or Tuesday, so you still have another three or four days to practice. During this time, both of you will have a chance to look back and understand better what caused the conflict.

Anger is in us in the form of a seed. The seeds of love and compassion are also there. In our consciousness, there are many negative seeds and also many positive seeds. The practice is to avoid watering the negative seeds, and to identify and water the positive seeds every day. This is the practice of love.

You say, “Darling, if you really care for me, if you really love me, please do not water the negative seeds in me every day. If you do, I’ll be very unhappy, and if I’m unhappy, I’ll make you unhappy. So please, please don’t water the seeds of anger, intolerance, irritation, or despair in me. And I promise not to water these seeds in you. I know that you also have negative seeds, and I’ll be very careful not to water these seeds in you, because I know if I do, you’ll be very unhappy. And then I will suffer also. I vow only to water the positive seeds in you—the seeds of love, compassion, and understanding.”

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.

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 person is only a secondary cause. The other person is not the main cause of our anger.

If we continue to look deeply, we see that the other person suffers a great deal. Someone who suffers a lot always makes the people around him or her suffer.

If we had practiced watering the positive seeds in him every day, he would not be the way he is today.

One hour of watering the flower in the other person can make him or her begin to bloom.

The dharma is in you, but it also needs to be watered, in order to manifest and become a reality. If you had really practiced watering the positive seeds in your beloved, then he or she would not cause you so much suffering today. So you are partly responsible for your suffering.

practice looking deeply in order to identify your part in the conflict. Don’t blame everything on the other person. Recognize first that the main cause of your suffering is the seed of anger in you, and that the other person is only a secondary cause.

The moment you are motivated by the desire to return to the other and help, you know that all the energy of anger has been transformed into the energy of compassion. Your practice has born fruit. The compost, the garbage, has been transformed back into a flower. It may take fifteen minutes, half an hour, or one hour. It depends on your level of concentration, your level of mindfulness. It depends on the amount of wisdom and insight you gain during your practice.

Most of the time, anger is born from a wrong perception. If, when looking into the cause of your suffering, you find out that your anger was born from a wrong perception, you have to tell the other person right away. He didn’t want to make you suffer, he didn’t want to destroy you, but somehow you believed he did.

We have to be very careful with our perceptions, otherwise we will suffer. It is very helpful to write on a piece of paper, “Are you sure?” and hang it up in your room.

When you are angry, and you suffer, please go back and inspect very deeply the content, the nature of your perceptions. If you are capable of removing the wrong perception, peace and happiness will be restored in you, and you will be able to love the other person again.

When the other person knows that you are doing your best, looking into the cause of your anger, she also is motivated to practice.

If neither of you has succeeded in the practice, then Friday is a time for you to practice deep listening and loving speech. The one who is angry has the right to tell the other what is in his heart. If it is your partner who is angry, you just listen, because you have made the promise to listen and not to react. You do your best to practice compassionate listening. You listen not for the purpose of judging, criticizing, or analyzing. You listen only to help the other person to express himself and find some relief from his suffering.

When you share your suffering, you have the right to say everything in your heart—it is your duty to do so, because the other person has the right to know everything. You have made a commitment to each other. You should tell him everything that is in your heart, with only one condition—you must use calm and loving speech. The moment irritation manifests, the moment you think that you are going to lose your calm, your serenity, please stop. “Darling, I cannot continue now, may we meet another time? I need to practice more mindful walking and breathing. I’m not at my best right now, so I do not think I can succeed in the practice of loving speech.”