7
Getting what I do not want,
And all that hinders my desire—
In discontent my anger finds its fuel.
From this it grows and beats me down.
In this verse, Shantideva begins to explain how aggression feeds on the “fuel” of “discontent.” In Tibetan, the third line of the stanza contains the phrase yi midewe ze. Yi means “mind” or “mental”; midewe means “upset” or “irritated”; and ze literally means “food.” When you eat healthy food, it nourishes your body and makes it strong. But yi midewe ze only nourishes your anger. The more you chew on this food (the more discontented you feel), the more you reject your experience and your world. Your anger keeps growing until it gets the best of you. On the other hand, if you starve yourself of this food, your discontented mind and its aggression will get weaker and weaker until they eventually die.
Shantideva breaks yi midewe ze into two broad categories: not getting what we want, which he phrases here as “all that hinders my desire,” and getting what we do not want. His commentators, however, break these categories down further into seventy-two. This list, known as The Seventy-Two Ways We Get Disturbed, is worth becoming familiar with. Since most of the verses in the rest of the Patience Chapter deal in some way with working with these seventy-two ways, I will describe them briefly now.
“All that hinders my desire” can be broken down into four traditional subcategories based on four types of desire. First, we want pleasure: physical, emotional, and mental. Basically, we want to feel good. Second, we want to gain wealth and material resources, which we assume will give us the means to find happiness. Third, we want to be praised. We want to hear nice things said about us, things that please us and show that we are liked. Finally, we want renown, a good reputation, a sign that we are a positive presence in the world. Whatever gets in the way of our achieving any of these four desires is yi midewe ze.
Getting what we do not want also has four subcategories based on the objects of our aversion. These are the mirror images of the first four desires. First, we don’t want any physical, emotional, or mental suffering to come to us. Second, we don’t want to lose our prosperity and means, which we see as protecting us from suffering. Third, we don’t want to hear harsh words, blame, or criticism—anything that shows people disapprove of or dislike us. Finally, we don’t want to be defamed or have a bad reputation in the world.
So far, we have eight ways of getting disturbed. The first four are based on hopes, the second four on fears. These are commonly known as the “eight worldly concerns” or the “eight worldly dharmas.” But when we think about how we’re affected by what happens to others—especially our loved ones and those we dislike—the list multiplies.
Just as we don’t want things for ourselves, we feel upset when those we care about endure pain, material loss, harsh words, or damage to their name. Instead, we want them to enjoy pleasure, material abundance, praise, and a good reputation, and anything that hinders them from achieving these things bothers us. This category includes not only our family and friends but also anyone or anything we identify with or consider to be on our side of the fence: our teachers, religion, country, sports team, and so on.
When it comes to those we dislike—those who threaten us, those we disapprove of, or even those we generally like but who arouse our jealousy and competitiveness—we are disturbed for the opposite reasons. To me, this is a great irony. We feel upset when they have any kind of joy, when they have material success, when they are praised, and when their reputations soar. We may even feel bothered when they avoid negativity: pain, loss, harsh speech, and harm to their reputations. So when we take all the reactions based on the eight worldly concerns and relate them to the three groups of ourselves, our loved ones, and our enemies or rivals, we come to twenty-four categories of things that can feed our aggression.
We get to seventy-two when we consider that any of these twenty-four disturbances can come at us from the past, the present, and the future. For example, you can get upset by remembering how someone criticized or spoke harshly to your child last week. You can also become disturbed or anxious when you see it happening in the present or imagine it happening in the future. Multiplying the twenty-four categories by the three times—past, present, and future—we arrive at seventy-two types of yi midewe ze.*
If you put a spoonful of food in your mouth and realize it’s poisonous, you will immediately spit it out and rinse your mouth thoroughly. But if you don’t realize it’s toxic, you’ll swallow it and end up getting sick. This is just a matter of ignorance. It’s not as though you want to poison yourself. In the same way, nobody really wants to experience the poison of aggression. Aggression is almost always an involuntary emotion that comes with its own force and occupies the mind. The only way we can control our aggression is by studying its causes and then not indulging in them. In other words, we have to educate ourselves about every type of yi midewe ze and then lose our appetite for them.
It’s a helpful exercise to go through each of the seventy-two ways we get disturbed, starting with the original eight worldly concerns, and come up with personal examples for how they lead to aggression. I have suggested to my students that they take their time and slowly go through the process of matching each of the seventy-two with their own experiences. We learn so much about ourselves when we start to notice how each way causes us pain and draws us into aggression.
At first it might seem unpleasant and even painful to examine your mind in this rigorous way and possibly discover many hidden and embarrassing neuroses. So you can think of this examination as similar to a medical exam such as an endoscopy. If you have disconcerting gastrointestinal symptoms, you need a doctor to look inside you to see if anything is endangering your health. People put up with all kinds of unpleasant procedures to find out what is happening inside their bodies. But if we are concerned with our mental health and want to work with our anger, the most destructive state of mind, we also have to find out what’s happening inside us. Unlike medical exams, however, once we get the hang of looking at our yi midewe ze, we will actually start to enjoy the process.
These contemplations illuminate our psychology. They uncover all the circumstances that nag our minds and eat up our peace. They lay out all the causes of our aggression, which can manifest in any form from subtle irritation to full-blown rage. When we are unconscious of the seventy-two ways, they tend to grow and spread like weeds in an untended field. But by discovering them, paying attention to them, and then applying the wisdom of the dharma, we can turn our mind into a beautiful, harmonious garden.
8
Therefore I will utterly destroy
The sustenance of this my enemy,
My foe who has no other purpose
But to hurt and injure me.
Anger comes in the guise of a friend or means of protection, but in reality, it is the worst enemy we can ever face. At times, it may seem like letting loose with anger is a great pleasure. Doesn’t it feel good to let it out and really go for it? But later you find that all your peace of mind and self-respect are gone, and you feel horrible. Not only that, you’ve made a big mess that you now have to clean up. You have to talk and talk to repair the relationship or situation—which you may well damage again with your next bout of anger.
Sometimes aggression makes people appear powerful. They may get their way and rise to a high position by shouting and intimidating others when their demands aren’t met. Many are attracted to that kind of power. But if you take a closer look, these angry people are always having to clean up their messes. They have to spend their energy making amends, giving gifts, mustering smiles, and so on. If this becomes a pattern, they find that all their mental and emotional space is being taken up by the heat of anger and its many repercussions. This makes it difficult for them to be productive and enjoy their leisure time. If they decide to keep using aggression as a tool of power and not bothering to clean up their messes, they become more and more alienated. This is incredibly painful because we are all social animals. So we should ask ourselves whether these people are indeed so strong.
Genuine strength and courage only come about by overcoming anger through destroying its “sustenance,” which is none other than yi midewe ze. Mahatma Gandhi, for example, was able to free India from British rule through his total commitment to nonviolence. “They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body, not my obedience.” These words, which are attributed to him, show a complete fearlessness based on his having conquered aggression on a deep level. Though threatened by his oppressors with physical harm, he had no reason to fear the much more dangerous enemy of his own anger.
9
So come what may, I’ll not upset
My cheerful happiness of mind.
Dejection never brings me what I want;
My virtue will be warped and marred by it.
According to our ordinary logic, we think that reacting with anger can prevent things from going wrong. We also think that if we overcome our aggression, everyone will step on us. We will be considered weak and treated with disrespect. Therefore, we need to fight to protect ourselves and get what we want in the world.
Shantideva has been refuting this way of thinking all along. He questions whether anyone has ever achieved anything positive through anger. On the contrary, hasn’t our anger only made it harder to attain our goals? And what has anger done to our virtue, merit, and peace? Have these increased because of our anger, or have they been destroyed?
The dharma never encourages us to be weak or passive. A bodhisattva is not a doormat. But what we hope to achieve through anger can always be better accomplished through nonviolence and communication. This requires genuine strength, not weakness. It is much more difficult to tolerate and work with our pain than to give in to it and let it get the better of us. Working with anger rather than submitting to it gives a sense of confidence and self-esteem. And it is highly practical to go against our habits and maintain our clarity of mind so we can respond effectively to the needs of whatever situation we are in.
In this verse, Shantideva presents a direct way of working with our aggression—by cultivating nonconceptual cheerfulness. In order to do this, we must first notice our feeling of being disturbed before it turns into full-blown anger. Then, upon noticing it, we need to realize we have a choice: to feed that feeling with thoughts, justifications, and storylines, or to interrupt the process.
When we are feeling a low level of disturbance, such as mild irritation or disappointment, we tend to get trapped in the small space of our heads and make things worse by going around in circles with unhelpful reasoning. At these times, our habitual thought process usually blames our uncomfortable feelings on external events. But these events in themselves can’t be the sole cause of our disturbance. Otherwise we would be just as bothered when things happened to strangers as when they happened to us. Therefore, these emotions must have another cause.
That cause is none other than our tendency to value ourselves more than we do others—in a word, our “self-importance.” We are in a contracted state of mind and heart, where all our love and care is focused on ourselves or just a few individuals. In this state, if we stay in our heads and let the habitual thinking mind do what it will, our thoughts will follow their natural rut, which supports our self-importance and inflames our low-grade disturbance into outright anger and aggression. Our self-importance and its ego-centered reasoning are what spoil our “cheerful happiness of mind.” I will touch more on the notion of self-importance throughout this book.
One way to get out of this rut is to do something physical that cuts through the thought process and relaxes the tension in our heart. We can try to pop out of our self-absorption simply by smiling, laughing, giggling, or taking a deep breath. We can regard cheerfulness as the gatekeeper that prevents aggression from entering the precious temple of the heart. The face of that gatekeeper is smiling or laughing.
There’s a saying that “laughter is the best medicine.” A doctor in India named Madan Kataria found that laughter does indeed benefit the physical heart. Since then, many laughing clubs have sprung up in India and other parts of the world. Kataria’s research showed that laughter that begins artificially is just as beneficial as spontaneously laughing at something funny. Forced laughter often turns into real laughter. You can even train yourself to smile or laugh when things happen that would usually trigger the opposite reaction. I’ve known great teachers who have used this method. The more irritated they feel, the more they smile, and the more they smile, the more they overcome their irritations and cleanse their minds. This is a conscious process.
10
If there’s a remedy when trouble strikes,
What reason is there for dejection?
And if there is no help for it,
What use is there in being glum?
Patrul Rinpoche, who taught The Way of the Bodhisattva frequently and extensively in nineteenth-century Tibet, liked to use the following example. If you drop your copper bowl and it gets dented, you know you can bend it back into shape. So there’s no reason to get upset. If you drop your glass and it shatters, there’s nothing you can do. So again, there’s no logical reason to get upset. This is especially true since, as we have seen in the previous verses, getting angry only makes things worse.
To some people, it may seem like this logic is too theoretical to be useful, especially when it comes to major provocations of anger. But if you have a deep longing to get over your self-destructive aggression, and if you let this simple logic take deep root in your mind, then it becomes incredibly helpful.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama has vast responsibilities as a leader, both for Tibetans and for the world in general. Every day, he has countless opportunities to be disturbed. He has also endured tremendous hatred, oppression, and injustice. So how does he stay so consistently cheerful and poised, with such exuberant tsewa manifesting toward all beings? How does he sleep so well at night? How does he maintain his peaceful heart? He does it by thinking in this accepting way. He does whatever he can, but if there’s no way for him to improve or remedy a situation, he’s able to let go and maintain a calm and tranquil mind. He doesn’t pretend he’s a god who can change things just because he wants to.
This approach also applies to handling suffering in general. We all have to endure a certain amount of suffering. This is the Buddha’s First Noble Truth; it is just how things are in samsara. Realizing there’s nothing we can do about this fact of life will make it easier for us not to get so upset when things don’t go the way we want.
If we look at it from another angle, however, there is something we can do about suffering. We can make excellent use of it to develop our tsewa and progress along the spiritual path. It can help us develop compassion for the infinite beings who are also experiencing suffering. It can inspire us to practice more so we become free from samsara and lead others to liberation. We can develop insight and wisdom by deeply investigating how and why we suffer in the first place. And as we become more tolerant of the various disturbances that arise in our lives, our patience and confidence will become stronger. Finally, having such a positive attitude toward suffering will also free us from the pain of rejecting unwanted circumstances, which is often more of a problem than the original pain itself.
11
Pain, humiliation, insults, or rebukes—
We do not want them
Either for ourselves or those we love.
For those we do not like, it’s the reverse!
Here Shantideva lays out the four things that we do not want for ourselves and our loved ones, but that we do want for our “enemies,” or those on the other side of the fence. This leads into the main section of the Patience Chapter, in which he gives antidotes for dealing with the seventy-two ways we get disturbed.
I’ve explained most of these terms in the commentary to verse 7. “Pain” refers to the first of the four categories: physical or mental suffering. “Insults” refers to the third category: harsh or critical words. Finally, “rebukes” covers anything that harms our reputation.
The second of the four categories usually refers to material loss, but here Shantideva uses a word that means “humiliation.” In The Nectar of Manjushri’s Speech, the most famous commentary on The Way of the Bodhisattva, Kunzang Pelden connects these ideas by speaking of “the disadvantages that come from such things as contemptuous discrimination.” For example, you’re on the verge of making a big business deal and earning a lot of money. Then the other party contemptuously decides that you aren’t trustworthy and the whole deal is off. Any way in which another person’s prejudiced or disrespectful attitude prevents you from having resources can fall under this category.