Post #8: Anger, Fear, and Sadness

4 May 2023

The Dhamma teaches acceptance of things as they are, not as we would like them to be (yatha-bhuta again), but that is not to say that every guest to our mental house is equally welcome, or that there is not a fair amount of avoidance, repression, and denial in meditative circles as well as any other.

Anger gets a particularly bad press, and one can easily see why. Not only is it exceedingly unpleasant for all parties involved, but as it shades over into the more violent forms of ill-will it is responsible, who would deny it, for some of the most egregious horrors that we are prone to as human beings. So it is hard to imagine anyone wishing that he were angrier (though she might already be a slightly different story).

I still remember more than a decade later a flare-up I had during the mingling period at the end of my one and only thirty-day retreat (starting on the Fourth of July in Texas, no less, spiders, herds of cows, blazing heat and all, though the air-con was correspondingly fierce. The spark that ignited my powder was struck by the manner in which rides to the airport were getting arranged, or rather not getting arranged. After my initial grumbles, one of my aggressively pacific co-meditators told me to let things be done the center’s way, whereupon I shot back that we could all see how well that was working… Doesn’t seem like a big deal in the greater scheme of things, but let’s say that it is not a way to make friends after a thirty-day course, nor to feel good about your progress as a meditator.

The other side of the story, however, was that I had already been left behind by my esteemed Dhamma brothers and sisters at the airport on the way to the center, saddling me with a pretty stiff taxi fare that I could ill afford. So I had some cause for not believing that all must go well that transpires at or around a meditation center, and an important interest in familiar patterns not repeating themselves, whether there had been any ill-will behind the earlier mishap or not. Granted, it was no great display of skillful means on my part, and the reaction was as one might have predicted, the more fragile types excusing themselves from an atmosphere that had become unbearable to their tender sensitivities, etc. But the question remains whether anger is really always so reprehensible, or whether it does not sometimes serve a useful purpose in protecting us from others, rather than always being a bad thing that puts us in direct touch with the fires of hell.

Whether as a parent or a teacher, or with a partner, or even at a meditation center, lines do sometimes need to be drawn and boundaries set, occasionally with a measure of vehemence. S.N. Goenka tells the story—never my favorite, admittedly—of how his teacher Sayagyi U B Khin, a famous (and infamous) disciplinarian, used to shout at wayward meditators who would not stick to the time table and failed to work seriously enough at his center, making the very ground tremble with his scoldings. Jesus too, though not a lead character in my narrative, had the temper of someone who had spent much of his youth at construction sites as a carpenter, judging from the Gospel evidence, and perhaps the archangel Michael had one too, and not just the renegade Lucifer.

Not to compare myself, heaven forbid, but I am reminded of a few other more mundane instances when flashes of anger, though hardly righteous or otherwise edifying, proved rather useful, especially here in Thailand where we foreigners have a reputation for making scenes. Standing in a queue at the service desk of a big local department store, for example, you might have to wait twenty minutes behind a customer with some complicated concern, while yours could be resolved in a minute or two, and while there are half a dozen employees milling about the desk doing nothing that meets the eyes. Rumble a little and you might be astounded at the remarkable efficiency with which one of these milling types is suddenly ready solve your problem with the utmost expeditiousness. Sure, the miraculous transformation might not work in places where hot tempers are more common and less frowned upon, but the principle still stands. Not that anger is an ideal solution, but that sometimes it helps set things straight in a minute when otherwise nothing would happen for half an hour or more.

Besides, even if outright rage does deserve its bad reputation, I’d still rather be a little edgy and angry than sad all the time, and often in life it may come down to that practical alternative, no matter how much one may wish for a better alternative to both. You don’t have to be a rabid beast frothing at the mouth to appreciate the advantages of having teeth, even if you don’t intend, or indeed need, to use them very often. Having a bit of bite matters: without it your ancestors—survivors all, going billions of years back to the very beginnings of life—would never have made it, and you would not exist today. But isn’t the Eightfold Path designed, you might object, to break these perennial patterns precisely because, if the timeless programming is not undone, we will be kept rotating in ever the same cycle for a few billion years more, or forever, if our universe itself is but a blip in time? Yes, the Teaching really is that radical, I agree, both in the everyday and in the literal sense of going all the way down to the roots; but the reminder also illustrates why it is so very challenging—and delicate—to live it out sensibly in the world as we know it, when the Teaching can seem as if it is everything that life is not, and vice versa. Not for nothing did the Awakened One speak, as he emerged from his great breakthrough under the bodhi tree, of “this abstruse Teaching that goes against the worldly stream” (Majjhima Nikaya 26:19). He wondered whether anyone would be able to grasp it properly, and he had every reason to be concerned.

Turning to fear next, the picture looks even clearer. Nobody likes to feel it, of course, but it’s so hideous in texture precisely because it’s there to put you on red alert and save your skin, and no one would be better off entirely without it. Of course the unrelentingly fearful mode (of which I know a thing or two) is not helpful, but without fears, not only would we fail to keep ourselves safe from hazards, we would have no occasion for showing courage either. It rather astounded me when I first heard it as a child, but it made a big impression that I’ve not forgotten for forty years: in a German quiz show the moderator spoke of how without fears there can be no bravery, and how being completely unafraid, rather than rising above your fears, is really not much of a virtue at all. Reliance on anxiety-reducing medication—which I do not want to knock across the board, but of which I am wary where it is not a demonstrably necessary emergency measure—may leave one feeling more calm, but it is notorious for the pile of essays that ends up not getting graded, or even the noose that no longer gets shrunk from. (Needless to say, this is not an adequate treatment of all the complex questions that SSRIs raise, only a thought about the utility of reasonable fear, which is no mere oxymoron.)

Sadness seems a lot trickier. One might even wonder why it should be necessary at all: if losing is as necessary as gaining, and dying merely the other side of being born, then why mourn? How does it make us any better off, and why did we evolve to be liable to sadness in the first place? Deep waters into which I barely dare to dip my toes. But is the sadness not a measure of our caring, and would we think more highly of someone who was left completely unaffected by the death of a loved one, say? Would we not rather suspect the depth of his or her love? Even the Buddha himself, when his friends Sariputta and Moggallana had just passed away, looked over the assembly of monks left before him and said that it seemed empty to him now. And when his own last days were at hand, he is said to have been saddened by seeing the beautiful city of Vesali for the last time (Samyutta Nikaya 47.14, Digha Nikaya 16.4.1). A Buddha’s pangs of melancholy cannot perhaps be compared to ours, but who does not feel sympathetic when he imagines Ananda weeping bitterly at the news that the great man would be departing soon, and indeed being so shaken by the prospect that he “felt as if his whole body had been drugged (Samyutta Nikaya 47.9)— even if such “reactiveness” marked him out as one of the less advanced meditators in the Buddha’s entourage. Do we not love him even more for his gentle perfections than for his saintliness?

Readings: Digha Nikaya 16 (The Buddha’s Last Days). I’m not ready to issue any ringing endorsements of Mark Manson’s prose—I still give a f*ck and old-fashioned stylistic graces matter to me—but credit where credit is due: Manson does a nice job on the crucial theme of how to relate sensibly to our negative feelings in chapter 2 of his Subtle Art. It’s not quite as subtle as the billing, but he seems to have the ear of a generation that is not easy to reach by writing, so hats off to him in that regard.