There is No Wise Anger

or How to Employ Anger as the Path

A subtle consciousness of terror and fear stirs
toward the appearance of external objects.
An accumulation of traces of aversion produce
the coarse beating and slaying of perceived enemies. 
When the result of hatred ripens, 
there is the suffering of hell, boiling and burning.

Through the aspiration of the Buddha, myself,
may all sentient beings of the six realms
in whom strong hatred arises,
leave it aside without accepting and rejecting,
and having mastered rig pa,
attain the pristine consciousness of clarity.

—From the Powerful Aspiration¹

These days it is all too common to see people who profess to be Buddhists justifying their anger about the state of the world, encouraging others to be angry.

I dissent.

As I have written elsewhere, anger is an afflictive emotion that arises from ignorance— not ignorance as a lack of knowledge of this or that subject, but ignorance of how to escape undesirable conditions, resulting in fear. In classical Buddhist texts, as above, the result of anger is birth in the eighteen hell realms.

Anger traps one in the dualism of self and other. Hostility and anger pyrrhically defeat themselves, being rash and short-sighted. The Buddha has said that a moment of anger destroys eons of merit.

We fuel our own anger; it never comes from outside, it is never foisted upon us by others. In response to the anger of others towards us, the best reply is “This is your anger; you own it; this is not mine.” Likewise, when we are in the throes of anger, that anger is not caused by some external force—it arises from our own afflictions. We own it; it is ours; it belongs to no one else. We must recognize and not allow ourselves to be trapped in our own emotions.

Anger is hard and unyielding. It gives no quarter and reflects everything around it. Its surface is shiny and bright, even glaring. Its nature is to destroy and separate. Anger is a distorted mirror, like those in a “funhouse.”

There is a force trapped in anger, however, called “the mirror-like pristine consciousness.” Mirror-like pristine consciousness too is unyielding, but it is not hard. It is unyielding, just as light never yields before the dark. It too is a mirror, but it is clear and does not distort reflections. If one wants to harness this force, one must look in the mirror and see oneself clearly. Only then will the force trapped in anger manifest its true nature, revealing rather than obscuring.

How does one harness the force of the mirror-like pristine consciousness? First, one must recognize anger, as it arises, as anger, and not allow one’s mind to remain focused on the object of anger. Second, to recognize anger as anger one must recognize that it is a product of ignorance. There is no such thing as “wise anger.” Anger always arises with its justification—I, me, and mine. I am being threatened, this is hurting me, my side is being harmed. One convinces oneself that one’s anger is justified. As long as one does not see through the illusions of self-grasping, one will never overcome subjection to the three poisons.

There is no need to transform anger into mirror-like pristine consciousness, anger’s nature is the mirror-like pristine consciousness. The mirror-like pristine consciousness manifests as anger when one does not see anger as anger, but instead allows anger to keep one distracted. But when we see the real nature of anger, we are confronted with a reflection of ourselves, not the “putative” enemy that we imagine fuels our anger.

When we correctly observe ourselves in a state of anger, at that moment we have an opportunity to free ourselves from anger, before we allow our anger to propel us into afflictive action, a.k.a karma. We have a moment right then and there to take this pure nature of anger—mirror-like pristine consciousness—and use it skillfully. Combined with compassion, we can employ this affliction as the path.

In these fraught times as we move deeper into the age of the five degenerations,² Buddhists must depend on the teachings of the Dharma, and not give into the modernist tendencies to reframe destructive emotions like anger as “healthy.” Just as there is no wise anger, there is also no healthy anger.

In this degenerate age, it is imperative that Buddhists express compassion and love even towards those who regard us as enemies and heretics, and not succumb to affliction, especially the affliction of anger.

ཨོཾ་མ་ཎི་པད་མེ་ཧཱུཾ་ཧྲཱི༔

1. Chapter 19 of the explanatory tantra of the Transcendent State of Samantabhadra.

2. The degeneration of lifespan, affliction, sentient beings, time, and views.